With an $85 million funded portfolio set aside for Guam, the CNMI, and the Federated States of Micronesia, a company based in Guam wants to invest that money in solar energy for homes in the CNMI.<\/p>\n
Jeffrey Voacolo, chief of operations for Micronesia Renewable Energy, Inc, told the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. that they want to start an \u201cindustry\u201d on Saipan.<\/p>\n
Sunnova, which is the mother company of Micronesia Renewable Energy, has already invested $7 million in Guam, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a way for the community to save a great amount of money without allocating any monies upfront and without risk. This program is working perfectly in Guam and I would like to invite anyone here\u2026to please come to Guam and see the 100-plus system that we have built to date,\u201d Voacolo said in his written testimony.<\/p>\n
Citing an \u201cintegration study\u201d from 2013, he said the transmission, distribution, and generation of solar energy could be \u201ceasily handled\u201d on Saipan.<\/p>\n
Voacola said that Sunnova\/MRE is a program that will place more disposable income in the pockets of ratepayers.<\/p>\n
It \u201cwill also help create an industry,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
He said their firm hires and trains local tradesmen who are paid above market rates. He pointed to the \u201cbuilding of a new industry that will grow over the years\u201d as the firm hires more for the installation of these systems.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis program is real,\u201d he said, adding they have been installing these systems in Guam for the last five months.<\/p>\n
If allowed to do so, the company would hook into the current net metering program, which allows solar generators like that in the Marianas Business Plaza to hook into CUC\u2019s power grid so surplus energy is transferred to the grid. This allows a customer to offset the cost of power drawn from the utility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With an $85 million funded portfolio set aside for Guam, the CNMI, and the Federated…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[26,51,2588,50],"class_list":["post-198810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-cnmi","tag-guam","tag-micronesia-renewable-energy","tag-power"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}