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It's Time to Join the Community Solar Conversation

1/25/2023

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By Jill Cliburn

At the Solar Value Project, we believe 2023 marks a shift in our industry and our work. Many utilities, including electric co-ops and public power, are embracing renewables, and some are accepting the challenges of advancing community solar, DERs and local grid orchestration. Utility relationships with wholesale suppliers and markets are still in flux, as are their relationships with business partners that are big and getting bigger. Yet the communities that these utilities serve are clear in their focus on local benefits. As the clean energy transition takes off, we see tension between the drive for speed and scale on the one hand and for local decision-making, resilience, and social equity on the other. There is a role and a reason for local utilities to join in the work of striking this delicate balance.


I came to this conclusion while attending the recent National Community Solar Summit, co-sponsored by the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA), as well as SEIA and SEPA. The event was co-located with a second summit, organized by the U.S. DOE-sponsored National Community Solar Partnership (NCSP). These tandem summits could easily have drawn stark contrasts between opposing visions—and each summit did hold a distinct perspective. But the meetings unfolded more as a game of Red Rover, where each side (one more motivated by business and one more motivated by social change) invited the other to “come over” and create a difficult, but necessary coalition.

What makes coalition-building necessary? By definition, community solar should bring community benefits, but speed and scale can be commanding forces. According to the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), more than 5.7 GW of community solar was installed nationwide by mid-year 2022. Twenty-two states, plus Washington, D.C., have sanctioned community solar policies and programs. Unique community solar programs, characterized as voluntary, also exist in 20 states. Community solar is likely to double over the next five years, but the DOE and community solar proponents would like to see the capacity in this sector soar even higher, to 30 GW or more by 2030.

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Source: CCSA
The technical innovations and growth strategies emerging are impressive. Yet some summit participants have argued that fast growth and competition among community solar businesses could undermine local economic benefits, resilience, and social equity. Some panelists derided trends toward big investment, big developers, and streamlined business processes, including use of low-touch platforms to identify, acquire and serve subscribers. They say authentic community solar requires community participation in decision-making and local investment, if not ownership. Bill savings for low- to moderate-income customers of 10 to 20 percent is not easy to achieve, but they say that in truth, that is not enough (1).

Fortunately, differences within the ranks of community solar proponents are not headed for a stalemate—or at least not yet. At this month’s tandem summit event, speakers from both the business side and (for shorthand) the social equity side laid out their concerns and their proposed solutions. To illustrate, DOE officials called out a total of 22 outstanding community solar projects from its first annual Sunny Awards competition, including five grand prize winners from across the U.S. that approach the elusive balance. (These projects merit greater coverage, so watch for details in a future Solar Value Project blog.) At the CCSA/SEIA/SEPA sponsored summit, fast-growing solar developers, asset managers and software providers joined policy leaders to critically examine how they could go bigger and better. And at the NCSP summit, national “Justice 40” policy leaders and community based organizations completed the same examination in reverse order. For example, could replacing the current two-bill system for community solar (one bill from the utility showing credits and one from the developer for the subscription cost) with consolidated utility billing increase subscriptions and customer satisfaction without eroding competing providers’ brands? And how might consolidated billing affect community-based organizations’ outreach and social impacts?

Notably, speakers at both summits called for more utility engagement in these discussions. By my estimate, less than 10 utility staff from across the U.S. attended. Most of them represented co-ops or public power utilities, including leaders that we’ve featured on this website. True, distribution utilities that are investor-owned tend to lay low until their regulators speak. But the solution to what CCSA has called “the democratization of energy” cannot be achieved until utilities join this coalition. The analogy must shift from opposing tensions on a wire to the worn but sturdy image of a three-legged stool, representing local advocates, distribution utilities and community solar providers.
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Source: Austin Energy
In the transition to decarbonize the whole electric sector, all proponents of local power, including local advocates, distribution utilities and community solar providers, will have to hold their place as transmission-scale solutions and centralized energy markets also come into play. According to a 2022 NREL study, the development of renewables must achieve a pace of 40 to 90 GW of solar annually by 2030, in order to meet the current national goal for decarbonizing the electricity sector. Forty GW is more than the total MW target for community solar by 2030, but deployed every year. Proponents of local power (in the broadest sense of the term) share a vision for optimizing local grids, even if they do not fully align yet on community issues. Given the speed and scale required for the overall national energy transition, local power proponents would be wise to show up united, bright (with lots of community solar GW) and early.

(1) A footnote: readers may enjoy hearing further discussion of community solar perspectives, on a webinar recently hosted by the Clean Energy States Alliance.

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Community Solar Solutions for Local Utilities Today

12/4/2020

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 by Jill Cliburn

This fall, I was fortunate to participate in a meeting for public power utilities launching new efforts with the National Community Solar Partnership. Dozens of utility program managers shared insights regarding the kinds of support they would find useful to move community solar forward in different markets and while facing a range of technical, financial and pricing challenges. It was a time to listen and learn—but later, I realized that this Web site could help in Shared Solar Solutions from the work of those who came before. Our Community Solar Value Project (CSVP), worked with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District and dozens of other public power utilities in 2015-18 on what we called utility-driven community solar. We look forward to the NCSP and its new resources, especially addressing needs and opportunities that have emerged in the past few years. But if you are working on a community solar project or program right now, we are sure you will find many of our CSVP Solutions useful right "out of the box."

Here is a page by page guide that highlights some of our most enduring and popular  resources under the Solutions tab:
 
The Process. The overview of the CSVP Process and lessons learned is still timely. I would suggest that other guidance documents, including the DOE-funded Solar in the Southeast Community Solar Implementation Guide (2018) might be useful, too, as well as other guides you can find on the NCSP website. In addition, the Process web page links to the rich and mostly relevant NRECA SUNDA project resources and to SEPA resources for utilities of all kinds.
 
Strategic Design. This page actually refers to both the project technical concept and the program delivery concept. Besides documents, this web page features presentations, such as an excellent webinar on the value-add for solar carports. As the cost of solar has dramatically fallen (even since our CSVP webinar) and as city land becomes more scarce, solar carports merit a second look.
 
Procurement. This was one of the CSVP's most popular topics and resource collections. The market landscape is obviously changed, but the Outsourcing Decision Key and Financing Models resources featured here are still timely. One of the most important early decisions for public power utilities is whether to acquire the solar resource or to work with a third party developer. If the former, the utility still faces financing decisions. CSVP explained pros and cons of options specifically relevant to consumer-owned utilities, including public power. Our financing guide was very popular. The posted webinar features outstanding work by public power utility leaders, including Erin Buchanan, formerly from Cedar Falls Utilities, Karen Poff from Austin Energy, and Ricardo Luna from CPS Energy (San Antonio). Also, we offered an RFP Library, including 11 examples. Watch for a new resource soon from our Solar-Plus for Electric Co-ops project, as we are adding new sample RFPs to help utilities procure solar plus battery storage projects.

Marketing. This is another set of timely resources—very popular with CSVP utility stakeholders. One reason it is timely is that our primary partner, SMUD, was far ahead of the game, regarding market segmentation. We took their work even farther, working with Grounded Research and Consulting to create a concise market research guide. Some utility-driven community solar programs have failed to achieve full subscription, so preparing program managers to include marketing in their plans is very important. It is frankly on our wish list to add newer resources on gearing community solar for low-income customers (NCSP has a treasure trove; also recommended would be CESA). CSVP ended before that market segment really took off.
 
In our section on Assessment the CSVP focused on showing how the municipal utility could incorporate benefits that are not included a typical solar-value model (from incorporating community or jobs-development goals to customer-retention).  "Hard-to-monetize values" have since become an active topic, and a focus of our new work on Solar-Plus (for which, YES, we will be releasing a modeling tool in 2020). If you Contact us, we can recommend several resources and models available today. For example, we suggest one that is widely available is through the Solar in the Southeast effort.

Another relevant resource our Solutions pages is the pricing matrix, which describes how a dozen utilities (mostly public power) priced their programs. Keep an eye on the NCSP for updates, but for any utility manager who is new to this game, reviewing the options listed on slightly older pricing matrix is still instructive. It takes a while for a program innovations to take hold; I added a blog recently (see below) that discusses how SMUD applied some of the thinking we discussed 3 to 5 years ago in new community solar and shared storage programs. I for one will be delighted to support the next round of community solar innovators—perhaps including you!


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Above: The CSVP asserted that utility program managers' real world experience called for a planning process that could respond to changing customer needs, policies, budgets and awareness of rising opportunities. There is an ideal order to the events we experience, but we come to value planning flexibility and creative responses to whatever challenges arise. This approach seems all the more relevant since Covid has come into our world!

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Utilities, Don't Run from Right-Sized Solar (and Storage)

10/26/2020

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 By Jill Cliburn

In light of wholesale PPAs in the U.S. averaging less than 3 cents per kWh, the utility solar market is booming with expansive solar possibilities. Today, there is even a strong case to be made for purposely over-building centralized solar resources and dispatching or curtailing them to ease the need for storage in a mostly-renewables world. Yet our work is still focused on local, community-scale solar—sometimes integrated with storage or load management.

Recently, someone asked me why I've been so dogged about solutions on the local grid. In response, I recalled how a few years ago, while our team was breaking new ground for community solar, I called our locally focused work "a market-based laboratory." That is still true and still exciting today. Work at the community scale provides specific solutions, replicable solutions and scaleable solutions—the benefits of which are just starting to unfold.

The headliner, 100+ MW solar projects are mostly new arrivals. California, Florida and a handful of other states led the trend toward big solar in 2019. Support for the solar industry nationwide still stands on a foundation built over decades on the appeals of local solar generation, such as energy-cost stability, resilience, environmental improvement, quality job creation, community education and recently, storage and clean electrification. Political support for solar remains strong in part because citizens can see community-scale projects nearby; solar is attainable by their own experience. Big solar follows in small solar's footsteps. I recall pushing for strategic utility PV beginning in 2005, when the U.S. had about 1 GW of grid-connected solar, despite a looming climate problem. Success then, as now, was solar at every scale. According to SEIA, utilities drive about 60 percent of the solar market today, but local solar, including residential, commercial and utility-partnership projects still make up a big share of U.S. total PV capacity—at 85 GW and rising.

Local solar, including residential, commercial
and utility-partnership projects still make up
a big share of US total PV capacity


Utility culture bends toward centralized solutions, but our world is changing. One indication is a new report from SEPA on integrated distribution utility planning, aimed at "multiple challenges with regards to visibility, tools and resources (e.g., skilled staff, investments) needed to manage a growing number of distributed energy resources (DERs)." The payoff comes for utilities, their communities and their customers if they can make the system work to optimize local value and control, while realizing the benefits of regional relationships, too. In the crucible of 2020, the public seems eager to strike the right balance between local resilience and upstream support for lots of things—including energy services. Local utilities, and especially the co-ops and munis that I have worked with, have investment and knowledge to apply to strategic solar and solar-plus. Non-utility developers and community stakeholders have key roles, too, but the best solutions will be collaborations.

A few examples might help. One emerges from our work with colleagues including DER leaders at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD). As early as 2015, SMUD explored options for expanding its landmark community solar program. We explored high-value solar opportunities, such as well-oriented carports at schools or transit centers and a solar-enhanced mixed-income redevelopment project. Already, the falling cost of centralized solar was hard to beat. The utility made a strong cse for a green tariff type approach, which could bring solar to more customers faster at a lower cost. That is an argument that still haunts community solar advocates nationwide, who sometimes relent, as they did for a massive 1.5 GW community solar program launched last spring in Florida by FP&L.

At SMUD, the question of scale crystalized when home builders sought to address a new California law requiring all new homes to have solar. The builders argued that in some cases, new homes could not accommodate solar roofs or they would cost more than moderate-income home buyers could afford. SMUD offered community solar, drawn from big, remote solar projects as a solution.

But in this case, neither the regulators nor the community wanted to settle for solar that was simply cheap. They wanted it local, with options for strategic siting and operations that could enhance local grid value. In February 2020, SMUD delivered, and a new Neighborhood Solar Shares program was born. This program does not replace rooftop solar, but it offers a tree-friendly and fairly affordable option for new home buyers. Home builders and equity advocates statewide have said that this strategy breaks ground for community solar statewide, especially for lower income and multi-family home buyers. Regulators have insisted that such programs in investor-owned utility territories will face scrutiny, following existing California community solar guidelines with non-utility developers playing a lead role.

Solar plus storage has shown up first at the
community scale and often with voluntary support
through community solar-plus programs


Solar plus storage remains a tough nut to crack, but it has shown up first at the community scale and often with voluntary support from customers through community solar-plus programs. In a future blog, we will explore how SMUD applied the lessons of high-value community solar to its commercial StorageShares program.

The generic community solar-plus model deserves more attention, too. Some state community solar programs promise long-term savings based on an outdated assumption that all solar kWh are equal, while others are designed for flexibility, incorporating storage and/or demand response, as well as innovative financing, to assure long-term benefits. In 2018, the Municipal Light Department of Sterling, MA, launched the first hybrid, community solar-plus project in the state. Today, the Massachusetts Municipal Wholesale Electric Company (MMWEC) manages two solar-plus projects for Sterling, plus similar projects in four more communities. Building off experience, developer Run Raise Investments launched a 7.1 MW non-utility community solar-plus project in Massachusetts last year. This fall, New York announced its first community solar-plus-storage project. More are planned, including work by CUNY to overcome commercial real estate barriers and tap grid-locational benefits.
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Austin Shines offers a wrap-around vision of local solar plus storage plus DERs.

We will share more examples in upcoming blogs, but it is worth checking in with Austin Energy for a wrap-around vision of community-scale solar and DERs. In 2016, the Austin, TX, municipal utility launched Austin Shines to demonstrate a new way to assess net solar LCOE, taking into account how solar and other DERs together operate on the grid. The initial solar projects taht helped to launch Shines included a community-solar program array. Shines accessed grant funding for a 1.5-MW/3 MWH battery, but a project ecosystem has grown quickly with the help of public and private partners, demonstrating increasingly cost-effective and replicable integrated DER solutions.

The verdict is still out on how robust and fully integrated tomorrow's community-scale solar will be. But that is exactly the reason why I am still excited to be working with local utilities today. These are the market-based laboratories, where the value of solar, storage and other DER strategies are becoming better understood as key pieces in puzzle that is the decarbonized 21st century grid.
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Cliburn and Associates launches SPECs Project, One of Eight Selected by the U.S. DOE Solar Energy Innovation Network

7/1/2020

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Solar-Plus for Electric Co-ops (SPECs) is a new project led by Cliburn and Associates, to help optimize the procurement and operations of battery storage projects for local electric cooperatives. The project was one of eight selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for the second round of the Solar Energy Innovation Network (SEIN). Cliburn and Associates in joined by a number of partners on this project, including Cobb Electric Membership Corp., Kit Carson Electric Cooperative, United Power, and North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.

SEIN  supports multi-stakeholder teams pursuing new applications of solar energy and other distributed energy resources in unique locations and contexts. The solutions developed by the teams are demonstrated and validated in real-world contexts, making them ready for replication and scale. With a virtual (Covid Era) kick-off meeting planned for mid-April, the Cliburn and Associates team is well-aware of the need for all kinds of planning that "expects the unexpected." Watch this space for details, coming soon.
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    About...

    Jill Cliburn President of Cliburn & Associates, is an industry veteran and innovator of strategies that achieve community sustainability and local renewable energy goals. This blog is independent of all funding sources; the opinions expressed are those of the author.

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