Community solar is a less well-known but increasingly important option for deploying solar energy, particularly in densely populated urban areas where rooftop space is often shared by multiple tenants. 

Community solar is consumer-owned power generation with a twist.  

Instead of being owned by a utility, corporation or government, the ownership of these systems is shared by subscribers. Each subscriber gets credit for the generation produced equal to their percentage of ownership in the project. Shares can range from a single solar panel to a majority of the installation, but usually the largest share is less than 50 percent of the total project.

Community solar allows customers to benefit from consumer-owned solar that wouldn’t otherwise have access to it, including renters, homes with shaded roofs, and residents who can’t or don’t want to put solar on their own roof.

With infrastructure the talk of the town in D.C., the Electricity Transmission Competition Coalition (ETCC) and other organizations are pushing Congress to support competition and oppose monopolies on new electric transmission projects. As transmission spending from investor-owned electric utilities rose dramatically over the last decade, the Coalition was crystal clear in its ask: “The legislation should ensure that electric transmission projects will be competitively bid, thereby reducing ratepayer cost increases that will result from increased transmission capital spending.”

The Energy Choice Coalition supports this call on Congress to not buckle to monopolies, and instead allow for competition that lowers consumer costs and increases cleaner and more reliable energy sources.

The Op-Ed, authored by Energy Choice Coalition Executive Director Robert Dillon, was published August 3, in Morning Consult.

The Biden administration’s ambitious goal of running America’s economy on 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035 is accelerating the shift to renewable energy and sparking a debate among policymakers over how best to encourage the clean energy transition without having costs fall entirely on consumers.

While the war of words between the fossil fuel and renewables camps has garnered the lion’s share of the attention, less has been paid to the importance of modernizing transmission infrastructure and the role of competition in incentivizing investment in a cleaner, more efficient and affordable power system.

Incentives matter when it comes to creating effective public policy, and a market model that encourages power generators and service providers to compete for customers is a far more efficient way to deliver the low-cost, clean energy and advanced technologies that consumers demand.