Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: July 1, 2025
State-level solar support!
Massachusetts has passed new incentives to provide consistent support for solar power.
Tell your state leaders to support smart solar power incentives!
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If you live in Massachusetts, feel free to just thank your state for the SMART incentives!
Reasons For Hope
Massachusetts has enacted a new, updated set of Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) incentives, paying solar panel owners for the clean energy they generate at a set rate per kilowatt. The new rules plan for readjusting the compensation and program size each year to adapt for a fast-changing market based on an annual state economic analysis.
On top of the regular pro-solar compensation, the SMART incentives also include “adder” financial bonuses for solar projects that provide additional public goods, like serving low-income communities, building solar canopies over parking lots or canals, or building atop a closed landfill.
Notably, the explicit goal of the new SMART incentives is to ensure consistent state support and keep Massachusetts solar power progressing despite the self-sabotaging federal-level attacks on clean energy deployment. The state will start accepting applications on October 15, 2025!
“Now we and other members of the industry can start to plan for the [SMART] incentives.
It gives us a much easier transition in case federal incentives are taken away.”
— Ben Underwood, Boston solar CEO.
Growing clean, abundant, locally generated solar power should be a priority for state governments across America. Solar deployment reduces reliance on imported fuel, reduces lung-choking air pollution, and gives families and communities more control over their own power supply.
The two biggest barriers to solar development - cost and intermittency - are less and less of a problem by the day. Solar panels keep getting cheaper and cheaper while rapidly improving battery technology means that solar is getting closer and closer to being able to provide 24 hours of electricity for 365 days per year!
Over 90% of all new electricity-generating capacity built across America in 2024 was from solar, wind, or batteries. As energy costs are set to rise due to federal turmoil, state governments helping to stabilize the market conditions for solar deployment is a key actionable step to provide more abundant electricity for their citizens. State leaders should enact SMART-style solar incentives as soon as possible!
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