
Entegrity of Little Rock is heading into the sunset of Arkansas’ golden age of net-metering with several solar array projects for the city of Fort Smith, including one that will bring lower power bills to low-income elderly and disabled Arkansans.
The energy services company is putting a nearly 1-megawatt solar array on 5 acres in Crawford County to provide electricity for 288-unit Nelson Hall Homes. The Fort Smith Housing Authority manages the development, using the U.S. Housing & Urban Development Department’s Section 8 voucher program to keep rents affordable in the duplex-style community of efficiency, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units.
Entegrity’s array, approved last year before the state’s net-metering policy changed to make solar arrays about half as economical, will provide cheaper electricity through a solar power purchase agreement.
“The project was approved before the Sept. 30 deadline last year, allowing it to be grandfathered under the legacy net-metering rate,” said Parker Higgs, Entegrity’s state director. “We were a little fortunate, because current and past policy forbids aggregating residential [electric] meters on the same array. But this complex is all behind a single meter, a commercial meter” of Oklahoma Gas & Electric.
And since the project gained approval before the Sept. 30 net-metering deadline, Entegrity is able to build the remote array. The Environmental Protection Agency also gets some credit.
“This really cool project is all being funded by a CPRG [Climate Pollution Reduction Grant] that the city of Fort Smith, Metroplan and the Northwest Arkansas Regional Council worked really hard to get.”
The grant for projects across the region totaled $100 million. “A small piece of that, a couple million dollars, is going toward this project in Fort Smith,” Higgs said.
Entegrity is also working on three other solar projects for Fort Smith: a large off-site array for the city’s power account with OG&E, another for its account with Arkansas Valley Electric Cooperative, and a smaller 300-kilowatt array downtown to generate additional power for the city and give shade to the farmers market on Garrison Avenue.
Entegrity will operate the larger arrays under power purchase agreements, but Fort Smith will pay about $1.5 million and own the downtown array.
Higgs expects Entegrity to continue solar projects in Arkansas and beyond, but not at the rate that they have under the old net-metering rules, which gave retail-value credit to systems for the excess power they provided to the grid. That power, after grandfathered systems are in, will be worth less than half of what it was before.
How will Entegrity adjust?
“It’s a great question,” Higgs said. “Obviously there’s a big change to our business in solar. Historically, it has been 30% or more of our business, and most of that has been in Arkansas. With the net-metering policy change, those projects aren’t going to exist anymore. We will still have some opportunities, and there’s a little bit more happening out of state, but it’s certainly not near to the degree that it has been in the past.”
The consolation is that Entegrity is a diverse company offering many different services, Higgs said.
“We do energy efficiency, LED lighting, and one opportunity is LED sports lighting for school and municipal playing fields,” he said. “This late spring, or early summer, we’ll be providing 25 electric school buses for the Little Rock School District. Then we’re going to be installing about 14 level 3 chargers. So that’s a very exciting project.”