Together for North Carolina

Dear friend,

With your help, North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association (NCSEA) had an incredible 2018. This has been a year of growth, opportunity, and collaboration for NCSEA and our clean energy community.

The progress that North Carolina’s clean energy community made in 2018 is worth celebrating. After the passage of House Bill 589 last year, our community spent countless hours ensuring that implementation of the first comprehensive, bipartisan energy legislation for our state in a decade was carried out successfully. This work resulted in some major wins, and some frustrating obstacles. For example, our state now has a Solar Rebates Program that will be opening for its second year of applications in just a few days. The program is imperfect, though, and is the result of many months of collaborative regulatory engagement and dialogue with key stakeholders. Similarly, HB589 expanded affordable options for accessing solar by establishing solar leasing and community solar in state law and utility regulation, but work remains if we are to realize solar’s potential to affordably meet our needs.

At the same time, NCSEA continues to reflect on what a clean, resilient, reliable, and affordable energy system for all North Carolina really means and what we need to do to get there. In this process we ramped up our equity, diversity, and inclusiveness commitment by launching the Women in Clean Energy project, building a reserve fund to ease the disproportionately high cost of energy in the most disadvantaged areas of our state, and engaging in important internal reflections on the ways in which the energy community is party to structural systems of inequality…and how to change it.

In keeping with North Carolina’s history of innovation, our electric vehicle (EV) working group sent a recommendation to Governor Cooper requesting that he designate all available funds from our share of the VW Environmental Mitigation Trust to advance EV infrastructure in the state. Similarly, our community’s work on energy storage has ensured that NC State University and the UNC Collaboratory completed the energy storage study on time, and the working group is continuing to dialogue on the urgent opportunity for energy storage before us.

Achieving our shared mission of clean, resilient, reliable, and affordable energy for all North Carolinians is an achievable goal, and it’s more important than ever that we work together.

NCSEA is moving into 2019 with ambitious goals; goals that we need your help to achieve. We want to work with our community—members, partners, and supporters alike—to develop a shared vision for North Carolina’s clean energy future. All while continuing to engage in the important work in the regulatory, policy, and education space that you have come to expect from us. Your continued participation and contribution to NCSEA are key to our future. For our annual giving campaign this year, we are asking our friends, champions and members like you to consider all that is possible when we work together by contributing to our Clean Energy Together campaign.

Both NCSEA’s programs and behind the scenes team need your support in 2019 to allow us the opportunity to continue advancing a resilient, reliable, and affordable clean energy future. We are committed to meeting people where they are while using the incredible experience of our partners and members to demonstrate how a clean energy economy can unleash growth, innovation, and opportunity for all.

Your tax-deductible contribution will enable NCSEA to:

• Ensure North Carolina stays #2 in installed solar and make 2019 a record year for rooftop solar
• Strengthen relationships and take actions to ensure that our clean energy economy is equitable, affordable, diverse, and inclusive
• Collaborate with a great diversity of consumers, advocates, leaders, and partners to develop a shared vision for North Carolina’s clean energy future
• Continue advocating for true grid modernization that revolutionizes our electric grid through more affordable clean energy solutions
• Unleash more than $20 million in energy savings solutions, primarily in rural counties, through NCSEA’s leading-edge data analytics and solutions work with utilities, low-income service providers, and industry
• Lead collaborative dialogue and advance solutions that will make North Carolina the Southeast leader in energy storage, electric vehicles, rooftop solar, and energy efficiency financing

Thank you, once again, for being an integral partner in our shared mission. On behalf of our great NCSEA team, I look forward to working with you to advance clean energy for all North Carolinians in 2019 and beyond.

Wishing you and yours a Happy Holiday!

With gratitude,
Ivan Urlaub, NCSEA Executive Director