Getting rooftop solar onto low- and middle-income housing
In this episode, Vero Bourg-Meyer of the Clean Energy States Alliance discusses the barriers that keep lower- and medium-income customers from installing rooftop solar, the types of efforts most likely to overcome these barriers, and how to keep momentum moving forward.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
For all its explosive growth in recent years, rooftop solar is far less frequently installed by low- and middle-income households than by wealthy ones. Though that disparity is diminishing somewhat over time, it remains large.
The barriers keeping lower-income consumers from solar go well beyond the financial (though financial barriers are substantial), ranging from credit histories to low-quality and poorly insulated buildings to lack of supportive policy.
State policymakers, foundations, and non-profit groups have been trying for years to overcome this problem. Finally, the pieces are beginning to fall in place and it is becoming clearer which kinds of interventions work and which kinds don’t.
No one knows more about the history, design, and successes of these programs than Vero Bourg-Meyer of the Clean Energy States Alliance. She has been analyzing and advocating for these policies for years (she just came out with a report on how foundations can help), so I was eager to talk to her about the rationale for low-income solar programs, the features that make them work, what's in the Inflation Reduction Act that can help, and what further policies are needed.
Okay, then, with no further ado, Vero Bourg-Meyer, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Vero Bourg-Meyer
Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.
David Roberts
Cool, so there's a lot to talk about here with this topic, which I've had sort of, like, in the corner of my eye for years and years now, these programs for low-income and mid-income solar, getting solar to low-income, mid-income people, I sort of had it on my periphery forever. And so I'm happy to jump in directly. My sense of the sort of state of play among the wonks is the best way to help poor people is to give them money. And if you have money to help them and you want to do something other than just give it to them, you need to sort of justify, like, why is this better than just giving them money?
Vero Bourg-Meyer
Yeah.
David Roberts
So I guess to start with, my first question is just why should we care about specifically getting solar on these households versus just helping them with money? So what is the sort of justification for this kind of whole area? Why do we want to get solar on low- and middle-income households?
Vero Bourg-Meyer
Well, so there are two questions in there, right? So one question is that there's a climate question. Obviously, we want solar not because we think it's great for savings and all that, but also because we have a climate crisis that's ongoing and we need to do something about this. So that's the reason why we want solar. But why LMI communities and I'll use LMI in a kind of loose way. LMI stands for low- and moderate-income. LMI sometimes is just low-income and that generally means kind of in this area, generally it means below 80% area median income.
Some people also define it as below 120%, but without going too much in the details, that's generally what it means. So the reason why you want to make sure people have access one of the reason you want to make sure those people have access to solar is they spend a much higher percentage of their income on their utility bills as the rest of us. About almost four times as much as you or me. And I'm lumping us in the same income br
