Campaigns

Community Solar

If we consider the example of Croton on Hudson, it has a solar farm that benefits Croton residents in many ways. The project has been fully subscribed.  This was a Community Solar Project initiated by the Village of Croton Sustainability Committee.  Croton’s Department of Public Works (DPW) rooftop has been leased to Ecogy Energy to own and operate a 301 kW dc system, that is estimated to produce 344,000 kWh of solar electricity. That is enough to power 40 to 50 local households.  Under this Community Solar program, residents (including renters who have their own utility account!) enrolled for free to have solar credits included in their Con Ed utility bill, that will provide a 10% discount.

The solar panel installation work was conducted by our local green business Croton Energy Group.  Notably, Leo Wiegman was a founding partner in Croton Energy Group and he is Croton100’s President.  Croton Energy Group helped to fuel this virtuous cycle by donating its portion of customer acquisition commissions from this Community Solar project to Croton100.  This extraordinary public-private collaboration benefits Croton taxpayers, utility customers who enroll, Croton100, and supports a local green business.  You can learn more about this project in our blogs here and here.    

We encourage all chapters of CURE100 to replicate this successful model!

Our Plan – Periodic online carbon tracker audit sessions for groups of up to 20 residents. Our goal is for each household to complete their carbon tracker and plan on immediate carbon reduction tactics. 

Volunteer Opportunities – Need volunteers to organize groups of participants. We encourage all CURE100 chapters to offer Office Hours to their communities.

See availability

Our Plan – Achieve carbon reductions from the comfort of home that require minimal effort and/or expense (some are free). 

Volunteer Opportunities – Need volunteers to spread the word about specific initiatives through individual contacts, social media, letters to the editor, and more.

Couch, Carbon Cutting page.

Leader – Patty L. Buchanan

Our Plan – We encourage chapters of CURE100 to emulate Croton100’s Electric Vehicle (EV) Campaign which includes a focus on a challenging campaign to persuade the Croton School District to transition its 45-vehicle fleet to electric vehicles as well as convincing residents to switch to EVs.

In Croton, after an advocacy campaign that lasted 18 months, the School District is well on its way to procuring its first electric school bus.

We encourage you to learn about Croton100’s Electric School Bus Campaign. To help you, we have prepared a comprehensive FAQ document for your education. We also have more information about electric school buses in our Resources Tab.  We have also written extensively about this campaign over many months on our blog. Finally, we have developed a framework called BEST (Bus Electrification for Student Transportation) that allows comparison of the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and carbon impact of fossil fuel buses vs. electric buses.

Volunteer Opportunities – Croton100’s Electric Vehicle Campaign is multi-faceted.  We welcome volunteers who would like to help with the electric school bus issue and develop other electric vehicle campaigns. We also sponsor EV shows periodically. Please click here to connect with us.

Our Plan – Drive carbon reductions in public spaces and services, including houses of worship; municipal operations; schools; train stations and train yards; retail establishments; banks and restaurants.

Volunteer Opportunities – Need individuals to work with us on each sector and chapters to begin Zip Code Overhead campaigns in each community.

Our Plan – Bring Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) with 100% renewable energy electric supply option to all residents by default (i.e., an “opt-out” program).

Volunteer Opportunities – Need to set up and lobby for CCA programs.  We can learn from many other communities, e.g., the Village of Croton-on-Hudson, who already have CCA, and also work with Sustainable Westchester to set up CCA programs.

Our Plan – Use data from NYSERDA and other sources to locate and analyze carbon reduction activities, such as solar panel installations, community solar enrollment, electric vehicle registrations in our communities to include in CURE100’s Carbon Tracker.

Our Plan – Convert large power users (commercial and industrial loads) in our communities to green electricity and possibly generate a revenue stream to CURE100 chapters.

Volunteer Opportunities –

• We need to pilot this program in a community where volunteers are willing to work with local commercial and industrial electricity customers to convince them to sign up for clean power.

Our Plan – The idea is to get groups of people involved, e.g., book groups (these are the “rows” of the matrix), in a campaign such as solar or EVs or heat pumps or diet modification (these are the “columns” of the matrix) and then interest the group in all the campaigns to get a multiplicative factor of carbon reduction.

Volunteer Opportunities – We need help to build collateral around individual campaigns such as EVs, Solarize, Community Solar, Heat Pumps and Airline Offsets, and to develop campaigns in conjunction with Sustainable Westchester.