How to resolve AdBlock issue? Temple Sinai in Saratoga is going to transition to community solar energy via the company Nexamp later this year. To inform people about the benefits of such a change, a Nexamp representative hosted a workshop at the Temple last Wednesday, June 19, that was open to the public.
In short, community solar companies work by selling portions of the electricity its farms make to the public. The electricity is put directly into the Grid. When it is time to pay their electrical bill, subscribers pay the company however much energy they use instead of paying National Grid.
The reason why this is beneficial, aside from the energy being created via a sustainable source, is because the company can offer incentives to join, like how Nexamp bases each subscriber’s allotted amount of the farm’s energy off of how much energy the subscriber used in the same span of time over the past few years, then offers a 10% discount on energy.
For example, if a person’s electricity bill would have been $200 normally, the bill is reduced to $180, although in practice the National Grid bill will still have minor charges due to taxes and metering.
President Michael Marx of the Temple said that they were switching to community solar for a few reasons. First, it may not be possible to install solar panels on the Temple’s roof due to a variety of reasons, including the religious and historical significance of the building and the cost of the panels themselves.
There is also the idea of Tikkun Olam, or “repairing the world,” which is the Jewish belief that the world is not perfect, so it is every person’s duty to try to make it better in some way. Marx said that as a result of Tikkun Olam, there has always been a strong thread of environmentalism in Judaism, even before it was called such.
Marx continued by saying that more people know about solar than other sustainable energy sources and that the farm the Temple was joining is being built in Troy, so more of the Temple’s congregation would know about both how and where the energy was being made.
According to Chelsea Fiori, the representative at the Nexamp informational meeting, the solar farm outside of Troy will be operational later this year, and at the time of the informational meeting had filled approximately two-thirds of its five-and-a-half megawatt capacity for subscribers.
