Community Solar Explained

TIME

Community solar projects are designed to provide clean energy to homeowners and renters who are unable to install their own solar panels on their rooftops.

Transcript

00:00 Power is a good thing. Power is needed. But that power has to be possible to be

00:05 made and transported and consumed without creating carbon footprints.

00:10 I see a future where people can breathe clean air, they can drink clean water, eat

00:15 healthy food, and I think community solar can play a key part of that.

00:21 [Music]

00:43 You know, you can think of three main types of solar. There's anything from

00:46 rooftop solar, so something that you might put on your own home's roof, to

00:51 what's called utility scale solar, which is your big electric utility company

00:55 invests in a huge solar farm spread out over hundreds and hundreds of acres of

01:01 land. Community solar is that sweet spot. So it's not that super big project at

01:07 the utility scale, it's not your super small project at the household scale,

01:11 it's renewable energy at the community scale. And there are many reasons why

01:16 community solar is very beneficial, in part because for a lot of households and

01:21 communities who might not be able to do the other two types of solar, this is

01:24 their best option, where they can still get the benefits of clean energy, they

01:28 can still reduce their bills, they can still breathe cleaner air, and they can

01:32 benefit the environment in the process. The utility is unlike us to build two

01:38 biggest solar system. They want one to be placed over here, one to be placed over

01:42 there, so that they're closer to the homes. So serving you know 600, 800, or a

01:47 thousand homes is probably the maximum that our systems are able to support.

01:53 Community solar projects, typically what they do is you have a bunch of

02:03 households in a community who have agreed to invest in this project. They

02:07 may be purchasing or paying a subscription fee, but then they get a

02:10 reduction in their energy bills. But fundamentally what it's doing is, we all

02:14 need energy. Now the question is, where is that energy coming from, and is it clean?

02:18 And in this case, community solar, by adding more renewable energy onto the

02:22 grid, means that in theory you're using less dirty forms of energy, like fossil

02:26 fuels. And it's displacing, if done right, community solar displaces that fossil

02:31 fuel generation, so that what remains is cleaner and healthier.

02:37 Right now community solar represents a small share of not only solar generation,

02:47 but of course entire energy generation in this country. Now there have of course

02:51 been barriers. A big one is policy. Three of the leading states in the country so

02:57 far in community solar have been Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts. And

03:01 they're not the states that are the biggest, they're not the states that have

03:04 the most land or have the most people. But take a state like Minnesota. A bigger

03:08 reason why it's historically been a leader is because they've had very smart

03:11 policy design that has really incentivized community solar, that has

03:15 made it equitable and has made it accessible, including for low and

03:20 moderate-income customers, and has really tried to build a market based on that. So

03:24 part of the challenge now is, how can we take those smart policies that also

03:28 advance equity and clean energy around community solar and take that and spread

03:33 it nationally.

03:36 [Music]

03:38 [Music]

03:40 [MUSIC PLAYING]

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