Transition

Solar growth has soared over the past few years. With new projects coming online this year, experts predict that U.S. solar power generation will grow 75% from 163 billion kilowatt hours in 2023 to 286 billion kWh in 2025. It has been an important part of the Biden Administration’s plan to eliminate fossil fuels as a form of energy generation by 2035. And on either end of the spectrum, both small-scale individual rooftop solar panels and large-scale utility solar arrays have benefited from incentives to increase solar, including tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But over a third of Americans rent, and over half of homeowners can’t use their individual rooftops to capture the sun’s energy. Until recently, this “missing middle ground” has largely been left out of the market and the clean energy transition. 

Now, community solar is stepping up to fill that gap, says Bruce Stewart, CEO and president of Perch Energy, one of the nation’s largest solar companies focused solely on community solar. “We’ve doubled our footprint of the markets we’re serving. We’ve doubled the number of customers we’re serving in the last couple of years. We’re seeing a nice, sharp growth in the number of community solar projects that are getting built,” he says.  

Other companies are also coming on board. Arcadia, a technology company that works to connect community solar projects to customers, has connected over 223 thousand subscribers to active or planned solar projects across 15 states and manages 2 gigawatts of community solar capacity. This is the equivalent to preventing more than 2 billion pounds of coal from being burned to power the grid each year. Meanwhile NautilusSolar, a pioneer in the development of community solar, has 100 projects spanning 10 different markets in the U.S.

Community solar customers are typically households or small businesses who subscribe to, or sometimes own, a portion of the energy generated by a solar array. Those arrays are often built in or surrounding the communities on top of buildings, carports, or on nearby land. Because of their smaller size—which averages less than 5 megawatts on anywhere up to to a few dozen acres—they can be built over otherwise unusable land like old landfills or on brownfields. The local utility pays the community solar provider for the energy generated, and each subscriber receives a portion of the dollar value generated by their community solar subscription as a credit. Typically, this credit is applied directly to a subscriber’s monthly electric bill, helping to reduce customers’ electricity costs.

“The product offering is now super simple.There are no term requirements, there are guaranteed savings,” says Jeff Cramer, president and CEO of the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA), a national coalition of around 130 businesses and nonprofits, including Perch, working to expand community solar. Currently in the U.S., there is around 6.5 gigawatts of installed capacity of community solar currently in use. That comes out to around 5.9 million metric tons of CO2 avoided thanks to the energy produced from community solar—equivalent to powering almost 1.2 million homes’ electricity for one year, or taking almost 1.5 million cars off the road. According to the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, in a scenario with favorable supply chain dynamics, retail rate changes, and state and federal policy updates, the combined amount of solar energy from all community solar could more than double to 14 gigawatts by 2028.

In addition to household savings, other benefits of community solar include resilience during blackouts or weather events, community wealth building, and local job creation, Cramer says. 

Despite its benefits, community solar traditionally has faced more barriers than rooftop solar or utility-scale solar. As opposed to behind-the-meter rooftop solar that reduces demand, community solar adds energy to the grid, requiring more coordination with utilities and distributors. Because the projects are larger, they also have to contend with zoning and other land use requirements. The Department of Energy set a goal of installing 20 gigawatts of community solar by 2025, but they are only around 7 gigawatts online today. 

But backlogs in connecting solar projects to the grid remains a problem. According to a report by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the amount of solar, wind, and storage in the queues today exceeds the amount needed to get to 90% of U.S. electricity from zero-carbon resources by 2035 but the timeline from the initial connection request to having a fully built and operational plant can be up to four years. For community solar, which depends on smaller operations, these wait times can be challenging. A report this year from the National Renewable Energy laboratory estimated that if all technically viable community solar is deployed, it could serve more than 53 million households and over 300,000 businesses in the U.S. that cannot access rooftop solar. 

Currently, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, less than half of all states have a community solar energy program, with the majority of it found in just four states: New York, Massachusetts, Florida, and Minnesota. But that is rapidly changing, says Cramer. Recent state and federal incentives for community solar, like the $7 billion Solar for All program that funnels investments to help low-income and disadvantaged communities deploy and benefit from distributed solar energy have increased demand for community solar. By last year’s deadline for applications, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency received requests for their Solar for All program totaling more than $38 billion, reflecting the robust community demand for renewable energy. And new requirements that electric utilities generate a specific percentage of their energy from renewable resources have also encouraged participation and investment. 

Getting states to incentivize solar development is the biggest challenge, according to Cramer. “Really the only barrier to the deployment of community solar is states creating programs to meet the growing customer demand,” he says. “Once you create these new markets and fix the ones that don’t work you are going to see a cascading effect of program openings and capacity expansions to create multiples of the current gigawatts of growth we see today.”

Some experts are wary that a new administration that is less focused on renewable energy could thwart some of solar’s growth by diminishing the IRA tax credits or imposing tariffs that could increase the cost of building solar panels. But many, like David Schieren, CEO of New York state distributed generation developer EmPower Solar, don’t believe the incoming administration will make much of an impact on the trajectory of community solar. 

Part of that is because so much of the progress on community solar depends on states, not the federal government. “What is relevant is that there are a lot of solar and energy policies that are set by the state including a robust program for community solar,” he says. The federal government incentivized a lot of solar investment through the IRA tax credits, but many of those projects that benefited are already in the pipeline. Dismantling them would be difficult and costly and, Schieren thinks, unlikely. Plus, solar energy has bipartisan support (although surveys indicate that support may be waning).

On the plus side, says Schieren, community solar is also increasingly attractive for real estate developers—an industry that’s expected to thrive under the incoming administration—who can build a community solar utility on top of new buildings and charge rent for it.

“The outlook for community solar remains robust because it solves this major challenge that was an initial hurdle,” he says. “You need to have an option for a building owner to participate and community solar allows for that.”