Upstate House

Clean Power Guide

Welcome to the 2026 Clean Power Guide. Sustainable Hudson Valley and Upstate House are thrilled to bring you the information you need to get your life off fossil fuels—because, frankly, we believe this is the best time ever to take that step.

True: In 2024 and 2025, the economics of moving to renewables were better than in years past thanks to Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. That policy brought out-of-pocket expenses to all-time lows for solar panels, heat pumps, insulation, and EVs. Today, with only New York State and utility incentives, the picture is not as great but still good. You can pay for your solar panels and have years of free electricity ahead after a payback period of as little as eight years. An EV still saves you dollars over its lifecycle because operation and maintenance costs are so low. And low-cost financing is getting easier to access since these technologies entered the mainstream.

Aside from the economics, we believe there is an even more compelling reason to take charge of your energy consumption today: values. Solar, wind, geothermal, and other renewable technologies are fundamentally different than gas, oil, and propane: Once you own them, you own them. Jobs installing small-scale renewable technology are local jobs and opportunities for local small businesses. If you have been watching the political drama, if you know in your bones that climate change is not a hoax, then voting with your consumer power is a pretty impactful thing to do, especially if you encourage your networks to do the same.

You can also be part of the most hopeful trend in play these days. As Bill McKibben writes in Here Comes the Sun: “Sometime in the early part of the 2020s, we crossed an invisible line where the cost of producing energy from the sun dropped below the cost of fossil fuel. Beginning about the middle of 2023, we entered the really steep part of this growth curve that could redefine our future, crossing another invisible line, this one marking the installation of a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels on this planet every day.”

With federal subsidies gone sooner than we’d expected, the price of solar is still coming down and the reason to go solar is to show the world where you stand. As we saw when Tesla drivers made their voices heard, consumer power matters. To build a powerful clean energy consumer movement, this year’s Clean Power Guide distribution will be more active than usual, in recognition of the importance of our collective action. In addition to the traditional launch party, on January 28 from 5–7 pm at the Fuller Building at 45 Pine Grove Avenue in Kingston, we’ll be throwing four Clean Power Expo events, two in the spring and two in the fall, and pop-up solar home tours, EV ride-and-drives and an educational campaign. Join us!

—Melissa Everett, PhD, Executive Director, Sustainable Hudson Valley