Community Solar Explained
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.
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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.
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