How You Can Green Your Electricity and Save Money

Did you know that Boston is ranked 19th in the country for rooftop solar installations? Wouldn’t it be great if we could move Boston up the list, with Roslindale leading the way?

GreeningRozzie is teaming up with EnergySage to help Roslindale residents – homeowners and renters alike – learn about and shop for solar options.

The EnergySage website allows homeowners to plug in an address and get quotes from pre-screened installers, including all the math on tax incentives and State Renewable Energy Credits (SRECs).

Homeowners with solar panels are paid through the SRECs market to produce energy, making solar panels on your roof an investment that eventually pays for itself. If you sign up through the EnergySage GreeningRozzie Solar Marketplace, there’s also a $250 cash back bonus for installing solar panels.

Even if your roof is not a great fit because of shade, property orientation, or because you are renting, you can still go solar! You can browse nearby community solar installations that you can join to support solar and at the same time save on your electricity bill. If you sign up through the EnergySage GreeningRozzie Community Solar Marketplace, there’s also a $100 cash back bonus for subscribing to community solar.

You can click the links and get started anytime, but if you want to explore the details first, join GreeningRozzie and Anna Hagedorn from EnergySage Monday, December 7 at 7:30 to learn how you can save money and at the same time take action on climate change by greening your electricity.

We’ll also hear from Roslindale residents who have been through the process and already have solar panels installed on their homes.



Anna will outline the options for homeowners and renters and explain how to use the EnergySage site to do the numbers for a solar installation or joining a community solar project.

We’ll also have time for questions from the Zoom chat.

Anna Hagedorn is an Energy Advisor at EnergySage, where she provides homeowners across the country with expert advice on their solar + storage and clean heating and cooling projects. Prior to EnergySage, Anna spent two years with the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center administering downstream incentive programs for renewable energy technologies. She holds degrees in Environmental Science and Geology from Northeastern.

Hope to see you there!

Here's the event info:

GreeningRozzie Webinar: Solar for Homeowners and Renters
Thinking about putting solar on your rooftop? Or do you rent or have a roof that’s not good for solar, but still want to get your electricity from the sun?
Join us to learn about

• The tax and Renewable Energy Credit incentives that give homeowners a return on investment in just a few years
• Community Solar, an option for renters or folks who don’t have roofs that work for solar

We’ll hear from EnergySage Energy Advisor Anna Hagadorn, who will show you how to use EnergySage tools to comparison-shop custom rooftop solar quotes and browse local community solar projects. We’ll also hear from some of your Roslindale neighbors who have been through the process.
When: Monday, December 7, 2020
Sign up now
More Info: info@greeningrozzie.com

The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center Turns 10

The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center has been in business for 10 years. The state economic development agency promotes the development and adoption of clean energy technologies. One of the center’s projects is Solarize Mass, which helps towns in the state run campaigns that boost the amount of residential rooftop solar in their communities.

We can also thank the center for its role in helping launch Energy Sage, a website that makes it easy for homeowners to get detailed quotes from solar installers. If you haven’t already, plug your address into their form and watch for the quotes to come in. They include costs, return on investment, carbon savings and a plot of your roof showing where the installer would put panels.

Here’s to 10 more years of Massachusetts boosting clean energy.

How Much Solar is in Roslindale?

By Amy Galblum 

GreeningRozzie is looking for ways to expand the number of homes and businesses in Roslindale with solar panels. 

Our first step toward that effort is to count and map the solar installations that already exist. To that end, members of GreeningRozzie and other Rozzidents have been walking the streets of our neighborhoods looking at the roofs and counting the number of solar panels that we see. 

You might think that the City of Boston would have this information available. They did start collecting data on home solar installations, but their data is unfortunately many years out of date. 

This is a great socially distanced activity and a way to familiarize yourself with your own area of Roslindale – and also areas that are not so familiar. We have a list of streets that have been tallied and more that need to be walked and counted. 

Contact us if you'd like to get involved in helping with the Roslindale solar count by walking the streets of Roslindale.

Green Living Through Living Green Things

Amid the coronavirus crisis it’s easy to forget about – or not want to deal with – the climate crisis.

One good way to deal with both crises is to surround yourself with green. Two local organizations that are doing a lot of that are Speak for the Trees and Boston Food Forest Coalition.

Speak for the Trees is working to increase the amount of tree cover in the city of Boston by encouraging care of existing trees and planting new trees.

Boston Food Forest Coalition is a non-profit community land trust that builds and supports food forests in city neighborhoods. Food forests mimic natural woodland ecosystems but with food-producing trees, shrubs and plants.

Help these two organizations help Boston grow greener – literally and figuratively.

Promoting Local Sustainability Even During a Pandemic

Feeling like it’s difficult to address climate change amid a pandemic?

Shoutouts to three local efforts that are continuing to address sustainability in spite of the times:

Although the pandemic has upended our bring-your-own-container effort at local restaurants – for the moment, anyway – there’s still a way you can help keep containers out of our landfills.

Cleenland is a locally owned bulk cleaning supply store that encourages folks to bring their own containers to refill with many types of soap – shampoo, laundry detergent, dish detergent etc.

The brick-and-mortar store is in Cambridge, but they also do delivery. They come to Roslindale on Tuesdays, hauling the large soap containers in the back of a truck so you can, keeping distance, safely fill your own containers. Cleenland also carries related items all chosen with sustainability in mind, including things like hair ties that are made from sustainable materials and designed to last a long time.

The Dorchester Food Co-op initiative is continuing to sign up members, and is starting design work on the new store. They're holding a series of Zoom community design planning sessions with their members – 835 and counting. Click “Select A Date” to sign up to attend a planning session. And if you’re not a member you can join now to help them reach their August member-owner signup goal!

Meanwhile, a Mothers Out Front chapter has formed this year in West Roxbury and is also welcoming Roslindale members. Mother’s Out Front is a national organization whose tagline is “mobilizing for a livable climate”. Although it’s Mothers Out Front, anyone who wants to create a livable climate for all children is welcome to join.

The local chapter is holding Zoom talks on sustainability, pressuring utilities to fix the hundreds of local gas leaks, organizing letter/tweet/email campaigns to influence decision-makers, and gearing up to organize sustainable living tours when it’s once again safe to do that.

There’s more information on the new chapter here: https://ma.mothersoutfront.org/west_roxbury

GreeningRozzie and the Rozzie Bound Bookstore

Wondering how to stay informed about climate change, sustainability and trees? Check out the GreeningRozzie shelf at the online portion of local bookstore Rozzie Bound. 

Before the coronavirus crisis, Rozzie Bound was a once-a-month popup at the Turtle Swamp Beer Hall at the substation. It recently launched an online presence through bookshop.org.

The store is also partnering with community groups to offer bookshelves around the theme that the community group promotes. Rozzie Bound is donating all its online bookshelf sales to community groups during the COVID-19 crisis. Currently the donations go to the Roslindale Cares mutual aid network.

Take a look at the GreeningRozzie shelf. It’s got something for you if you want to turn your attention to what you can do about climate change, and it’s also got something for you if you simply want to find solace in trees.

If you’d like to suggest a book about sustainability to add to the bookshelf let us know at info@greening.org. Please include a sentence about why you think people should read it. Hopeful and solutions-oriented suggestions are especially welcome!

The Rozzie Solar Challenge

What’s a good way to help Roslindale residents – homeowners and renters – install solar panels on their rooftops? How about some friendly competition?

GreeningRozzie is looking to make solar installation in Roslindale a community-wide initiative that’s fun, easy to participate in, and makes an impact on our carbon footprint. Organizing the initiative as a challenge should encourage wide participation, and could be a model for Boston as a whole.

Our first step is talking with Roslindale neighborhood associations about instigating a Solar Challenge. GreeningRozzie was invited to the Longfellow Area Neighborhood Association (LANA) January meeting where we presented the idea of a solar challenge. We collected a lot of good feedback. Next up is organizing a community meeting in late April or early May to share resources and tips on going solar and to move the Rozzie Solar Challenge forward.

Join us!

• Would you like to help plan, run or participate in the community meeting?
• If you have solar panels, would you come to the meeting to share your experience?
• Are you interested in planning the Solar Challenge?
• A first step in the Challenge is to get a count of buildings that already have solar. Would you be willing to walk a few streets and record what you see?
• Is there any other way you’d like to get involved?
• Do you have any ideas about what else we could do?

Let us know on our Contact us form or at info@greeningrozzie.org.