Community Solar Farms

BY ERICA L. BARTLETT

Community solar farms aren’t new to Maine, but until recent changes in solar law, they weren’t accessible to many Mainers. Thanks to legislation passed last year, however, an increasing number of people throughout the state will soon have the opportunity to benefit from solar power.

What are Community Solar Farms?

Most people know about the option of installing solar panels on-site for an individual home or business, but community solar farms (CSFs) are less familiar.

As the word “community” suggests, with a CSF solar production isn’t limited to an individual. Instead, a group of people take part in them. Members might be individuals, although other groups such as businesses, towns and nonprofits can also take part.

With CSFs, large arrays of solar panels are set up off-site, ideally in areas with unobstructed access to solar energy. These areas aren’t necessarily farms, even though they’re called solar farms. You can think about it in terms of what they grow, with a farm growing food and a CSF growing energy.

Once the arrays are set up, they’re configured to get the maximum output throughout the year.

Unlike panels on a house that benefit one household, the solar energy captured by a CSF array goes directly into the utility grid. This means the CSF members aren’t using the energy produced by “their” panels. Instead, the utility tracks the power generated and applies a credit each month to the member’s bill, even though the energy generated is used by someone else on the grid.

For example, if you had a 10% share in a CSF that generated 15,000 kilowatt-hours in a month, your share would come out to 1,500 kilowatt hours. You’d receive a credit for that on your electricity bill.

Another important difference from traditional solar is that community solar farms don’t support customers who want to go off the grid. Instead, CSFs are for people who are unable to purchase their own solar panels or those who don’t want to install the equipment themselves. This includes condo owners, renters, lower-income households, and homeowners with too much shade.

What changed and why it matters

Before the summer of 2019, CSFs were limited in a couple of ways. One was having a cap of ten meters on solar farms, which meant that after the meter for the CSF itself, only nine subscribers could participate in an individual farm.

Additionally, solar in general had faced a setback in 2016 with the practice of gross metering. With this process, if solar panels generated more energy than the household used, the excess energy was given a lower value by the utility company.

In 2019, though, all that changed.

On April 2, 2019, LD 91 (“An Act to Eliminate Gross Metering”) went into effect. This returned Maine to the practice of net metering, where excess energy is given a one-to-one credit.

The most significant changes came when LD 1711 (“An Act to Promote Solar Energy Projects and Distributed Generation Resources in Maine”) was signed into law on June 26, 2019.

Thanks to this bill, solar farms are no longer restricted by the ten-meter cap, which often limited farms to 250-400 panels. Instead, CSFs are now limited by the size of the system instead of restricting members, and the systems can go up to 5MW, which is roughly 20,000 panels.

This increase allows more participation, but it also supports economies of scale. The price of creating and maintaining a CSF can be spread across larger projects, which brings down the cost per unit.

Other changes in the bill promote more residential access. This includes creating a new subscription service option for solar farms and adding a requirement that 10% of larger-scale CSFs need to serve low- to moderate income households.

LD 1711 also supports Commercial and Institutional (C&I) customers with a new type of net metering program. Unlike the standard net-meter approach, which has a one-to-one compensation ratio for offsetting kilowatt-hours generated, C&I customers will now receive their credits in dollars instead of kilowatt hours. This is expected to improve the economics of commercial projects.

Additionally, the Maine Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is directed to have long-term contracts for large C&I and community projects, which starts with holding a competitive auction in early- to mid-2020. During the auction, developers of renewable energy who meet the PUC’s criteria will submit bids for the lowest price they could accept for development. This allows the PUC to select the lowest rates possible, which will then be locked in for up to twenty years, protecting the large projects from rate increases.

Community Solar Farm models

As a result of the changes in legislation, customers who want to participate in CSFs now have two options: direct ownership or subscription service.

DIRECT OWNERSHIP

The direct ownership, or member owned, option for CSFs is what was used for the existing solar farms in the state.

In many ways, this approach is similar to putting solar panels directly on a house. The members who make up the farm invest up-front in buying the panels and installing the array. They’re also responsible for maintaining the panels as part of ownership.

The benefit is that members own their share of the array. If you move to another location that’s served by the same utility company, your share moves with you, so you retain the benefits of the CSF. If you move outside the utility’s area, you can sell your share to someone else.

Another benefit is that owners have the same incentives and finance options as someone who puts solar panels directly on their house. Once you’ve paid off the initial investment, you’ll see significant savings over the life of the solar farm.

For those who can afford the upfront cost or get financing, this is a good way to go. But for those who can’t, now there’s another option.

SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE

As the name suggests, the subscription option for a CSF allows customers to pay a monthly fee to participate in the farm. In these cases, the solar farm is built and maintained by another company, not the customers.

As a subscriber, you don’t own shares, so you don’t save as much money in the long run. You still have savings, though, since the company running the farm typically offers a discount (often around 10%) or incentive to have you get your energy from them.

The real benefit here is that a subscription service doesn’t require any initial investment or long-term commitment. If you sign up, you’re not waiting for years to make your money back. Depending on the service, you might need to commit to a year or face a termination fee, but it will differ by program.

In addition, subscribers don’t have to worry about managing or maintaining the solar array. This reduces the level of effort needed to participate in a CSF.

The subscription option isn’t available yet, but by 2021, people throughout the state will start having opportunities to join, including those who don’t have the financial resources for traditional solar.

Opportunities for Maine

Until now, ReVision Energy was the only company in Maine that had worked on CSFs, having built solar farms from Hollis to Brunswick to Southwest Harbor and beyond. Due to the restrictions on CSFs, though, only fourteen were set up before ReVision had to put additional projects on hold.

Now that the laws have changed, ReVision is planning to return to CSFs, and they’re looking forward to it. As Fortunat Mueller, a co-founder of ReVision, said, “Community solar is critical to effective solar penetration in Maine.”

They’re not the only ones looking, either. Companies both in and out of Maine are eager to participate. Chuck Piper, co-owner of Sundog Solar in Searsport, is already looking at projects and is interested in both residential and commercial options. On the residential side, Piper pointed out that these changes will require some education, since “most people don’t know how [community solar] will affect them.”

While the companies in-state are getting started on this, out of state companies bring some experience with the new subscription model. One example is BlueWave Solar of Massachusetts.

BlueWave was one of the first in the country to work on the subscription approach for CSFs when Massachusetts changed its laws in 2014. According to Elizabeth Glynn, Managing Director of BlueWave, working on this type of approach came with a learning curve. BlueWave had to develop a way to handle the subscriptions and credits, but it worked so well that other companies now use their platform instead of starting from scratch.

All this interest brings two additional opportunities to Maine.

The first is significant job growth. Maine will see hundreds of new jobs for solar work, all over the state. Once companies find the land, they can start preparing to build, and they’ll need plenty of extra workers.

The other opportunity is for Maine to lower its greenhouse gas emissions and move toward a future of clean energy. As Steve Weems, Executive Director of the Solar Energy Association of Maine, noted, these changes are “essential for [addressing] climate change.”

Even though customers who participate in a CSF aren’t directly getting clean energy, they put solar power into the grid, which reduces the state’s dependence on other sources of energy.

By making solar available to all, Maine is moving one step closer to meeting its renewable energy goals, and that will help everyone in the state.

This article first appeared in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of Green & Healthy Maine HOMES magazine. Subscribe today!