Peter Walks for Democracy

Tomorrow night, the State College Area School District will be the first of Centre County’s local governments to vote on whether we enter into a 15-year solar power purchase agreement (SPPA). As the project’s instigator, a member of the working group over its five years, and its first and last Chair, I am excited to take the vote.

As readers of this blog know, the project will provide affordable, carbon-free, Pennsylvania solar electricity for ten (maybe eleven) of central Pennsylvania’s local governments. It came from a simple idea: if we pool local governments’ electricity demand, we can achieve an affordable rate that would match or beat the fossil-heavy grid. Through an open and heavily negotiated process, we formed a multi-party intergovernmental working group. Through the cooperation of our project management team, GreenSky’s Gregg Shively, Chris Berendt at Faegre Drinker, and local solicitor Betsy Dupuis, we have gathered and answered hundreds of questions while keeping our eyes on the prize: fiscal sense and environmental progress.

The project will avoid $4.3 million of electricity costs, assuring central Pennsylvania taxpayers that we are safeguarding their money. The State College School District will save $136,000 in year one. Thereafter, we predict average annual savings to be $190,000, totaling about $2.8 million over fifteen years.. These savings protect salaries and benefits for teachers, paraprofessionals, and other staff who serve our children.

The power purchase agreement provides our local governments with a tangible way to meet stated emissions and renewable energy goals. The SPPA continues central Pennsylvania’s climate and solar leadership coupled to cooperative governance. It is a way for Ferguson Township, State Collegs Borough, Harris Township, and the Centre Region Council of Governments (COG) to achieve their stated carbon goals. It also implements the renewable energy goals articulated in the COG’s intergovernmental climate action and adaptation plan. The SPPA provides them the path to decarbonizing their electricity purchase, avoiding about 15,000 tons of carbon dioxide or over 3,000 homes’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions.. While it is not a capital project of our own, it adds solar power to the grid, pushing on fossil sources.

As readers know, the project has faced challenges. Some of them involve just understanding terms and educating officials. Others have necessitated extensive energy legal consultancy, resulting in bills that were higher than we had anticipated. We’ve had a stubborn official refuse to accept an answer to the same question. Meanwhile, we’ve had bad-faith attention-seeking “inactivists” try to undermine the project on talk radio. But as State College Borough Council member Matt Herndon has said again and again, the economics are too good to turn down.

As I’ll say tomorrow, there are a lot of people to thank, especially the Project Management Team: Randy Brown and Keith Dingwall on the Finance staff of the State College Area School District, Pam Adams the COG’s Sustainability Planner, Larry Pegher the Finance Director for Patton Township, John Franek the Executive Director for Centre County, Gretchen Brandt, my fellow Board member at SCASD, and Jason Grottini who works in renewable energy and served on the State College Borough Water Authority’s Board. Mr. Brown and Ms. Adams deserve the most thanks. They have done incredible work, spending heaven-knows-how-many hours with Gregg Shively and the solicitors to make sure the SPPA working group had the information it needed.

Fingers crossed.