Three years ago, the San Antonio City Council approved a five-year extension of CPS Energy’s Sustainable Tomorrow Energy Plan (STEP), originally initiated in 2009. A vital program, STEP intended to save residents money on their CPS bills and reduce energy demand. Through STEP, customers could take advantage of rebates for purchasing Wi-Fi thermostats, new air conditioning units, pool pumps, and window units. Along with these rebates, customers could also save money on their bills with new, more efficient appliances and sign up for Casa Verde, an income-based program that provides weatherization upgrades to make homes more energy efficient.
STEP had an original energy savings goal of 771 megawatts by 2020, enough energy to power more than 154,000 homes for a year, according to state estimates. STEP exceeded this goal and helped CPS Energy avoid building another polluting fracked-gas plant that would contribute to the climate crisis and smoggier skies.
Yet when CPS launched the current STEP phase, it set a much less ambitious goal of curbing demand by 410 megawatts (roughly the energy used by more than 82,000 homes) by 2027. Some of its original offerings, such as residential rooftop solar rebates, were excluded, despite multiple cost-benefit analyses showing that rooftop solar was one of the most cost-effective of STEP’s programs.
CPS Energy’s leadership committed to provide “non-traditional” solar options like community solar under this new STEP program—or other solar programs structured to benefit low- to medium-income residents. Community solar is an opportunity for residents to enjoy the benefits of solar energy without needing to buy and install solar panels on their roofs. Subscription-style community solar programs, as opposed to the traditional ownership model, make solar power more economically accessible by eliminating upfront costs.
But CPS hasn’t followed through. To fulfill its commitment to the city’s most vulnerable residents, especially at a time when the prices of essential goods and services weigh heavily on families and extreme heat and cold continue to intensify, CPS Energy must restart the residential solar program it abandoned three years ago.
Making sure this much-needed program is restored should be a top priority for new San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, the newest member of CPS Energy’s Board of Trustees.
Solar innovation is not new territory for CPS Energy. In 2015 the utility introduced its Solar Host program, which allows customers to host solar photovoltaic (PV) systems on their rooftops in exchange for bill credits. The program was extremely popular, quickly reaching the 5-megawatt limit. However, CPS failed to build on this success and hasn’t conducted a second phase of Solar Host or any similar initiative since. Ten years later, CPS Energy should accelerate toward a program similar to Solar Host.
This is especially important given that we’ve felt the impacts of the climate crisis globally and locally. Even before this year’s summer started, triple-digit heat hit most of Texas, driving energy demand upward as people tried to stay cool and stressing the state’s electric grid. In recent years, the state and CPS Energy’s response to this increased demand has been to fund the buildout of more fracked gas plants, which in turn drive more global warming. They have tended to focus on the supply side of the supply-demand equation when we know it is easier and cheaper to lower demand through programs like Solar Host.
Eliminating the residential solar rebate was shortsighted given the benefits the residential solar PV rebate has shown, according to CPS’s own third-party evaluator, Frontier Energy, in its 2024 analysis of STEP.
Every year, Frontier Energy assesses the ratio of costs and benefits for each STEP program, calculating its energy savings to CPS. A ratio greater than 1 indicates that a program offered the utility more benefits than costs.
According to Frontier’s 2024 analysis, the Bring Your Own Thermostat (BYOT) program (with a score of 7.27) and the Residential Solar PV program (6.65) were the second and third most cost-effective programs in CPS Energy’s STEP portfolio, following only the Retail Lighting Discounts (9.23).
As such, the Residential Solar PV Rebates should be reinstated and offered to all customers, with an additional rebate for low-to-moderate-income customers (those earning 80 percent or less of the area median family income), who are enduring the worst impacts of the climate crisis, including increased pollution and inefficient homes that can’t withstand extreme temperatures. Because the Residential Solar program also yielded the greatest reduction in greenhouse gas emissions among STEP’s offerings (174,458 tons per year), reinstating it will also help CPS Energy do more to reduce its carbon pollution and address the climate crisis.
We have real-world examples of what solar and energy efficiency can do for members of our community.
Related: ‘San Antonio’s Five Most ‘Energy Burdened’ Neighborhoods‘
In 2015, District 7 resident Elena Guajardo read a news article about Big Sun Community Solar and called the utility to inquire about it. She answered a few questions to determine her eligibility, including the square footage and age of her house.
In this program, which CPS also failed to expand, the customer would purchase the solar panels, but instead of installing them on their roof, CPS would install them instead on parking lots across San Antonio. The customer then received a credit on their bill from the power generated by the panels. This allowed the program to be available to more households across the city, even those without the space to install solar panels on their roofs. Big Sun Solar partnered with businesses that wanted to install carports to provide covered and shaded parking for employees and customers. These businesses paid a fee to have Big Sun Solar build the carports and install the panels. Big Sun Solar then used the revenue from this fee to lower the financial entry for customers into the program.
The community solar program was perfect for Guajardo. She did have to secure a home equity loan to purchase the panels, but she estimated that, 10 years later, she continues to save at least 50 percent or more on her energy bill every month.
Not all customers can secure a loan to purchase panels and participate in this type of program. But other options are available and make financial sense, both for residents and for CPS Energy. For this reason, CPS should urgently finalize a new community solar offering for customers who care about the environment and want to save on their energy bills, but are unable to make an upfront purchase for panels. Doing so will provide benefits to them, to CPS Energy, and all San Antonio residents.
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