SEIA announced it is adding divisions to focus more aggressively on solar-plus-storage and solar manufacturing.
The new divisions are part of SEIA’s broader governance plan to enter the 2020s as America’s leading source of new electricity generation. SEIA also is launching committees on energy storage and community solar and establishing a working group to reduce the soft costs of going solar.
“These changes in our structure emphasize the massive overhaul the electricity system is undergoing,” said Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and CEO. “Adding board seats for storage companies and manufacturers and creating policy committees to advance solar-plus-storage and community solar will help us build toward the Solar+ Decade and achieve our ambitious goals.”
SEIA has designated the next decade as the Solar+ Decade and set a target for solar to hit 20% of all electricity generation by 2030, up from 2.5% today. In order to do that, the trade group is building depth across the entire electricity value chain and collaborating with partners that will help it get there.
At the policy level, the board created an Energy Storage Committee and Community Solar Committee which will serve as policy development incubators in coordination with SEIA’s Federal and State Policy Committees. Regarding energy storage, the board concluded that both a division and committee, focused on policy development, were appropriate.
The new divisions will focus on member education and information exchange. They will also have a representative on SEIA’s Board of Directors who will be elected from a slate of diverse candidates. This will build in a greater level of input into SEIA’s strategy and direction for both storage and manufacturing companies.
The board also approved the creation of a DG Permitting Working Group that will lead SEIA’s work on the Solar Automated Permit Processing (SolarAPP) initiative. The working group will coordinate industry efforts to improve the process of permitting, inspecting and interconnecting customer-sited PV. Working group members will engage with external stakeholders, including code officials, policymakers and other advocacy organizations to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying DG PV systems.
News item from SEIA
Solarman says
It has been interesting to watch the SEIA become a very large lobbyist organization over just the last 10 years. Now it seems like they want to become Ombudsmen for those who want to adopt alternative energy and now energy storage. It has bee said there are about 110,000,000 buildings in the U.S. that could use solar PV for local energy generation. A 6kW peak system on these roofs, although from North to South the amount of harvested daily power differs, one could see an average 2.64 TW of energy each day. Store a portion of this each day and one has a distributed average 110 GWh virtual power plant across the U.S.A.. The trickle of rain creates a stream, the merging of streams creates the river and all the rivers want to run to the sea.
Thomas Edison had this vision of a D.C. powered society. Now it is becoming true, when one uses the D.C. from their solar PV array to invert directly to A.C. for the home’s energy requirements and can store excess energy till later in the day, when peak demand starts to take hold within the 3PM to 9PM after school and work hours of the day.