Melynda Metheney: Breaking down barriers to access

After spearheading a six-year grassroots effort to bring city water to her unincorporated town of West Goshen, CA, Melynda pivoted to enabling access to clean energy and energy cost savings within her community, helping enroll 135 households for community solar projects in Central Valley, CA.

“We’re helping low-income families in disadvantaged communities have access to solar programs and solar funding that they may not normally have had access to.

Disadvantaged communities don’t often have access to resources and information on how to move forward with this clean climate process. So we help these families get introduced to solar affordability and solar access options through this program.

I live in a mobile home, so my home can’t get solar panels. A lot of the folks in my community have that particular barrier, and there’s a lot of barriers.

Utility costs have gone up here in the Central Valley especially. A lot of folks are really hurting from that and they’re looking for any relief that they can get, and this is one that goes directly to their energy bill.

I think the biggest savings and the biggest impact that those savings and bill credits have are just in everyday living with the cost of food and everything else going up.

It gives a little bit more of a breathing room at the end of the month and at the end of the year you can really see the savings stack up.

The number one reason people want to subscribe and enroll in this project has been that rebate, that 20% stackable discount that they can see directly reflected on their energy bill. It’s not something that they have to come back to later or do it and then transfer it from one account to another. It’s directly on there so they don’t have to think about it.

I’m actually a customer in that project in the San Joaquin Valley pilot project. I was luckily one of the community members from West Goshen who went and helped advocate for this project.

This project has brought access for us, not just in the bill savings, but we can learn how we as a community can come together to make an impact instead of trying to figure things out individually.

For myself personally and my family, we were able to participate. We’re actually seeing the benefits of that 20% discount on top of any other rebates, and we’re telling our neighbors.

For our family, the savings allows us to access extracurricular activities for our kids or summer activities – like this summer it’s been really hot and our lakes are shut down because it’s not safe so we have to take our kids to other areas. We were able to pick up on a Friday and say we’re going to go to the beach.

We’re going on family trips and finding opportunities for us to come together that we would normally be stretching and saving and planning further out for. That’s how we’re seeing the impact of those savings, which is really great.

It’s exciting to watch all the challenges and learn how to overcome them so these programs can expand to more disadvantaged communities because the state is full of them, and we only have 11 communities participating at the moment. We’re definitely hoping this expands across the state.”

Melynda Metheney

Central Valley, California