Contractor splits four projects into seven to meet community solar rules in Maryland

Summit Ridge Energy (SRE), a commercial solar contractor from Arlington, Virginia, will soon complete construction of a 17-MW community solar portfolio of seven projects — at least, they’re considered that by interconnection standards — built across four different rooftops in Maryland.

All four sites are commercial buildings owned by industrial real estate operator LBA Logistics. Working with Black Bear Energy, an agency that represents institutional property owners wishing to build on-site renewables, LBA started the process of adding solar PV to its buildings in 2019.

“It, candidly, took them a long time to find an asset where all the pieces lined up,” said Victoria Stulgis, SVP of client operations at Black Bear Energy. “Everything from the roof age makes sense, it’s in a good solar market, there’s no [joint venture] partners or lenders that don’t want solar, they’re planning to hold the asset long enough, they have roof rights. That’s one of the reasons why I’ve loved working on these Maryland solar projects. It is rare to have four assets in one market with one party where you can get to the scale of 17 MW.”

The projects are split between the cities of Rosedale and Belcamp. The first to be completed was a 4.8-MWDC array atop an industrial building on Quad Avenue in Rosedale, which had a ribbon-cutting ceremony back in August 2023. Then in Belcamp, there is a 2.8-MWDC array on Mercedes Drive, and 2.3-MWDC and 7.55-MWDC projects on neighboring buildings on Appliance Drive.

While built as single units, two of these projects technically have multiple interconnection points. The 4.8-MW array on Quad Avenue and 7.55-MW project on Appliance Drive have two and three interconnection points, respectively. This is because Maryland’s Community Solar Pilot Program had a rule that community solar projects could not exceed 2 MWAC capacity, so SRE worked around that by planning multiple interconnection points at these sites.

While waiting in interconnection queues isn’t a quick process, SRE finds working on industrial rooftops faster than on the ground, because there are fewer regulatory processes to complete. The company has never worked on a single portfolio of projects as large as LBA’s, but at any given time, SRE is constructing multiple commercial projects. Nate Greenberg, VP of business development at SRE, admits that it’s more expensive to build on roofs, but not needing to pull special use permits, conduct wetland studies or other testing found on ground-mount projects makes up for it.

The company uses a standard set of components on each array, including this community solar portfolio. SRE installs Qcells solar modules, SolarEdge inverters and one of two sets of racking depending on the style of roof, either PanelClaw or Opsun.

“I think that’s the biggest thing I’ve learned in the last five or six years of doing this. The actual construction on the roof is the easiest part,” Greenberg said. “It’s the coordination on the ground that a lot of developers don’t really think about until they get into it.”

The Quad Avenue and second Appliance Drive projects have tenants that are active retail suppliers, with product shipments moving in and out of the buildings constantly. The arrays were being built through the holiday season, and SRE had to coordinate its own deliveries while truckloads of liquor, wine and cosmetics were frequently shipping out from warehouses below.

Untapped community solar potential on industrial properties

In 2022, global investment firm Morgan Stanley published a report on the benefits of installing solar on industrial properties titled “Buildings & Parking Lots: Ready for a Recharge?” The report claims that commercial properties in the United States alone have the potential to host 328-GWDC of solar.

But this segment of the market is still in its early days, Stulgis said. Black Bear Energy maintains leaderboards ranking real estate investors based on how much on-site solar they’ve installed. Once LBA’s 17-MW portfolio of projects is fully energized, the company will rank among the Top 20 companies on that list.

There are common roadblocks to developing solar on industrial roofs, like roof rights and the terms of tenant leases, but Stulgis said community solar is a means for property owners like LBA to scale solar growth. A community solar array on a commercial roof sells energy back to the utility and people subscribed to the project, and not directly to tenants.

“Typically, by the nature of being on an industrial roof, the solar is actually getting delivered in areas where there’s a larger electricity demand and there’s a much better value to the customer of a utility if solar projects are being generated close to load vs. in the middle of nowhere and having to pay to transport that electricity and having losses over the line,” Stulgis said.

Greenberg said that despite being an underserved market, community solar has unlocked commercial rooftop projects. He expects this segment of community solar to continue growing where these projects can be built. And after five years of development, LBA’s community solar portfolio of four solar sites composed of seven different projects will soon produce power and add to that growth.

“The cool thing about these rooftop projects is you’re building them in communities that we’re serving. You look around and you see there’s not only other buildings, but houses and businesses and restaurants,” Greenberg said. “It’s up on an existing roof, and we’re able to benefit the people of that community economically and environmentally. It goes back to why we started Summit Ridge Energy.”