Dive Brief:
- A report recommends that New Jersey look at a range of options for re-accelerating its solar power market -- from doing nothing to establishing a "green bank" to help finance new solar installations to promoting more competitive procurement of long-term contracts.
- Once No. 2 in the country for solar installations, the state has slipped to No. 5, partly because its extremely favorable "solar credits" program created a rush of deployments that in turn led to a credit-price crash, and less deployment.
- Credit prices have rebounded to some extent and solar installations are coming back. The concern is that a boom-bust cycle pattern will continue. The federal investment tax credit for solar is scheduled to drop from 30% to 10% in 2016, which could mean a deployment rush before that time.
Dive Insight:
There's no consensus among solar advocates yet about what should be done to revive the market, or even whether anything at all should be done. The matter of boom-bust cycles in solar credit prices may be inescapable unless a new regulatory intervention in that construct can be devised. The federal investment tax credit issue is out of New Jersey's hands. Some interests in Congress want to change the 2016 drop from 30% to 10%, but the effort won't be taken up until lawmakers address comprehensive tax reform, and its fate at that time is unreadable.