by Becca Shaw Glaser June 15, 2021, The Free Press

In our June 1 column, I (Becca) was feeling pretty positive about the idea of participating in a community solar farm (CSF) in Maine. But as I’ve continued to look into them, the model doesn’t seem as good for the environment as I had hoped. In a future Notes from Lime City column, we hope to do a more thorough assessment of CSFs and federal/state solar policies in general, but I wanted to mention my concerns now so it didn’t seem that I had given CSFs a full-throated endorsement. It turns out that in many CSFs, including the one at ReVision Energy I was considering, the renewable energy credits (RECs) (which come with many solar projects) are given to the big money investor/s, rather than to the little-guy participants like myself. It’s hard for me to understand all the details without finally finishing my PhD in astrophysicsolarbrainsurgeongreenwashingbusinessschool, but basically RECs can be sold as a commodity in, essentially, a carbon-trading market. This means that if the big money investor of a CSF cashes their RECS in, they would be bought by a non-renewable-energy company, therefore giving that company the opportunity to keep polluting. Since these non-renewable energy companies are required by government policies to purchase RECS, it is the only way they can continue operating. So I now see the big investor CSF model as being complicit in the climate catastrophe, rather than being the solar dance party I was dreaming of. A corporate-government “solution” to the climate crisis via a capitalist marketplace is no solution at all. Nate, a believer in so-called “sustainable” capitalism, sees the carbon-trade markets differently than me and Greta Thunberg, but we will hopefully get into that in the future.