California’s New Renewable Sharing Program

According to Sustainablebusiness.com, the California state legislature recently passed SB No. 43, to create a new Green Tariff Shared Renewables Program.  (Governor Brown signed the bill into law on September 28th.) The new law will allow people to buy shares in a renewable energy project and then get credits on their electricity bill for their share of the electricity generated by the project.  The program will be open to customers of the state’s biggest utility companies.  Generation under the program is capped at 600 megawatts (MW), and at least 100MW must be available to residential customers, and 100MW must be built in disadvantaged communities.  The electric companies must contract with energy developers for the power and manage their participating customers’ accounts, for which they can charge an administrative fee.