Non-Profits and Municipalities Have New Solar Incentives
The Inflation Reduction Act has changed the solar incentive landscape for non-profits and municipalities. Because the incentives were tax-based, entities that did not pay tax missed out. Now the IRA has changed that and non-profits are posed to make bold moves into solar. Southern Vermont Solar recently completed one of its largest such installations with St. Michael School in Brattleboro. The excerpt below is from the Green Energy Times, and the link to the full article is below.
“St. Michael Catholic School in Brattleboro has been in operation since it was founded as Vermont’s first Catholic school in 1874. Now, nearly to its sesquicentennial, it has taken on something new, with the help of Southern Vermont Solar. It is getting to the point of generating its own power from the sun.
The array consists of 100 Hanwha Q.Cells, each 480 watts, giving it a total of 48 kilowatts (kW) DC. These have been placed on the school’s roof. Because of the construction of the building, they are quite out of sight from any place nearby. The system is on a flat roof, so it is ballasted, using an Ironridge BX racking system.The St. Michael School system has five SolarEdge 7600-Watt inverters, which produce 38kW of AC power. Also, the 100 solar panels get 100 SolarEdge optimizers.
Victoria Roberts of Southern Vermont Solar told us that the timing of this project could not have been better, because the Inflation Reduction Act provides direct payments from the federal government to non-profits and such similar organizations as municipalities, which were never able to get direct incentives in the past, because the incentives used to be tax reductions. This meant that it was frequent that when churches and schools had solar put up, the installation was paid for by a person or organization that contracted for the energy and could use a tax exemption to get the incentive benefit. Now, with direct payment of the incentive to the church or school, the entire process is much easier.”