How are community solar subscriptions managed?

Community solar projects have, perhaps, the most active lifecycle of any PV project post-construction because they are interacting with groups of subscribers instead of a single system owner. Management services have established procedures to connect subscribers to community solar systems and support them once enrolled.

Part of that support comes from working and integrating services with utilities. Community solar projects generate energy credits that apply to a subscriber’s utility bill that reduces their energy costs. To initiate those energy credits, community solar managers must acquire individual subscriber billing and meter data and integrate that with the utility’s billing system. System managers must contact utilities to confirm each subscription to a community solar project.

“When you’re integrating with these utilities, they don’t pave the road for you,” said Nate Owen, CEO and founder of Ampion, a community solar management service founded in 2014. “You have got to do whatever you can to get hold of the data you’re ultimately going to use to bill your customer.”

Some community solar contractors handle subscriber management themselves while others turn to third-party services like Ampion. The company primarily serves states in the Northeast with a growing presence out west. Ampion’s service, like other managers, connects subscribers in eligible states and regions to community solar projects, allotting a share of its output based on a utility customer’s energy consumption.

Subscribers pay the management service a fee, and the energy generated by their share of the community solar project applies to their utility bill.

“As the energy world becomes more distributed, and more third parties are contracting with consumers … you need an enterprise-wide software that’s fully secure and capable of managing the complexities of utility integrations, to manage customer relationships and to manage the revenue and the financials of these projects,” Owen said.

Community solar is growing in the United States, however, it isn’t universally known, so managers produce marketing and educational campaigns, especially in communities new to the concept.

“Community solar is oftentimes a headscratcher for a customer,” said Erik Molinaro, SVP of customer experience and operations at Nexamp. “For us, there’s no fee to sign up. There’s no fees whatsoever. People feel like it could be too good to be true. You don’t have to pay me anything, you don’t have to do anything, but you’re going to get a discount.”

Nexamp both builds and manages community solar projects. PV arrays have operating lifecycles up to 30 years, so management companies will be serving subscribers on those systems for the duration. Nexamp tries to capitalize on that long relationship by working with municipalities to inform their citizens about community solar. Additionally, the company advocates for community solar legislation in state legislatures to open new doors to shared PV.

All this marketing, educating and advocating is done in the hope that utility customers subscribe to these projects; and community solar managers staff entire customer service teams to help enrollees through the first steps of subscribing to a project and to answer any billing questions after they are subscribed.

Community solar management encompasses many different tasks, like working with utilities, educating the public and ensuring energy credits appear on a utility customer’s bill every month. As the U.S. community solar market grows, so will the demand for services capable of managing these many moving parts that ultimately make solar PV a little more accessible to the public.