Santa Fe Community College has just unveiled a solar array that, it says, will save the college at least $200,000 a year on its utility bills.
But the array, funded by taxpayers in a 2010 bond election, will cost $5 million.
You don’t have to be a math major at the college to figure out it would take 25 years of $200,000 cost savings per year to reach the $5 million mark for the project to just break even.
So is the solar array a good deal?
SFCC interim president Randy Grissom thinks so.
First off, Grissom told New Mexico Watchdog the college expects to save more than $200,000 a year on utility bills.
“We took a really conservative approach in doing our analysis,” Grissom said. “We anticipate it will be between $200,000 to $300,000 (a year in savings).”
...But given some of the solar industry’s problems in recent years, taxpayers have reason to be skeptical.
For example, in summer 2012, after getting $16 million in grants from the state, Schott Solar shut down its manufacturing plant in south Albuquerque and laid off 250 workers. New Mexico taxpayers had to eat more than $12 million because the administration of then-Gov. Bill Richardson did not include any clawback provisions in the deal with Schott.
Taxpayers also got stuck losing millions in 2009, when Advent Solar went belly-up, despite receiving nearly $17 million through the State Investment Council and its private equity arm.
1 comment:
Solar is the future. Also what makes this project particularly important to students is its sophisticated monitoring equipment that will allow students, faculty and staff to study and monitor the system in real time. This article is so short-sighted and anti-solar.
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