Tech Outlook with Kevin Cray: All about community solar

What is community solar? How does it work? What’s going on with it in New Mexico?

Episode 10 of Tech Outlook answers these questions and more.

Kevin Cray is the Mountain West senior director for the Coalition for Community Solar access, a national trade association that represents more than 100 community solar companies, businesses and nonprofits. He came on the podcast to dive into community solar, a new program starting in New Mexico.

Here’s a snippet of the conversation in the episode, which comes out on Monday afternoon and can be found on YouTube, SoundCloud, iTunes and Spotify.

What exactly is community solar?

“Community solar is typically a mid-scale distributed generation solar array. They’re commonly 1 to 5 megawatts in size, and for maybe a better perspective, looking at land use, that’s about 5 to 25 acres of land that the project would take up.

Those projects inject energy directly into the distribution system to the local or host utility. The host utility can then resell that power to local residents that live nearby at the full retail rate. And then on the back side, they provide monetary build credits to the subscribing customers.

And that’s really what sets community solar apart from other mid-scale (distributed generation) is that it allows for a variety of residents, businesses within the community to subscribe to the project, who otherwise wouldn’t have the ability to host an array on their own premise and receive those monetary bill credits — so that they get to directly participate in the energy transition, get the financial benefits of doing so, even if they’re not well positioned to hosting an array of their own.”

And we’re seeing this come to life with the new Community Solar Act, which lawmakers passed and the governor signed in 2021. Can you tell me about that law?

“So it was a long time coming. I think the first community solar legislation was introduced in New Mexico back in 2013, if I recall correctly, which is far before my time working here. But since then, the coalition continued to build and become more and more robust.

I think there were pretty consistent attempts to enact community solar starting in 2019-ish. In 2020, we had an opportunity to pass the Senate memorial, which created a working group and allowed for a variety of stakeholders to share their thoughts and opinions on what would be the best community solar legislation for New Mexico.

That ultimately led into a successful legislative push in the 2021 legislative session to enact the Community Solar Act.”

Where are we at in New Mexico in the process of setting a community solar program up?

“Although the Community Solar Act has been on the books for three years now, we’re still really much on the upswing of the life cycle, I’d call it, of community solar.

So a typical life cycle is to pass the enabling legislation, to go through a rulemaking process with the (Public Regulation) Commission, which took place over the calendar year 2021 into 2022, and then get the initial program launch, which InClime did through the issuing of the RFP in late 2022 and into 2023, the awarding of projects.

And so now, we have the full suite of projects awarded. Those projects are working through the interconnection process to ensure that they can be safely and reliably interconnected to the grid. And that will allow them to come online and start providing benefits to customers.

So I think we’re right at a very exciting moment in time where we’re starting to see projects really become real. We’re starting to see the subscription drives kick off and starting to see a lot more engagement across the customer classes throughout New Mexico.

I think there’s also a great opportunity ahead of us to continue to expand the program. The Commission recently opened a new rulemaking to intake customer or stakeholder input on potential rule changes, potential legislative changes and then potential evolutions to the program as they continue to look further out.

I’m really excited to see that continuation of the industry so that we see it just continue to blossom, continue to provide opportunities for in-demand jobs, customer savings and direct participation.”

Solar scams, like rooftop solar, can be an issue. So why should the Mexicans trust community solar? What kind of safeguards are there around it?

“I’d say the biggest differentiating factor between a rooftop solar array and a community solar subscription is the existence of assets on the customer’s premise. So if you have a rooftop solar array, whether it’s your own owned asset or a leased asset from a lease provider such as Sunrun or Tesla or Sunnova, somebody like that, then they have a potential to lien on the property if the customer for whatever reason is unable to make their payments.

Community solar, on the other hand, is really more of a virtual transaction. So to the extent that a customer no longer wants to participate or can’t participate or moves, they’re able to cancel their subscription, typically with a 30-day notice, no cancellation fees. So it’s really a bit more flexible product, in my opinion, to really meet customers where they’re at and provide them the opportunity to kind of step in or step out of a subscription as it makes sense for them in their current life situation.

So I just think that there’s less overall exposure to customers participating in the community solar subscription model, just because they can cancel, whereas if they were to cancel with the rooftop solar provider, there’d need to be things removed from the roof, they’d probably patch the roof from some of the holes that might be up there. And so it’s just a little bit more involved.

And I think that, in particular, for income-qualified communities, where they might not have the sophistication to really think through the long-term implications of some of those contracts, this provides just a lot more consumer protections to be flexible.

And it can move with them as well. So if they want to move across town, they can take their subscription with them, whereas obviously, moving a rooftop solar array is significantly more involved.”