Signing on for Sun

When community solar arrives for Santa Fe, the electrons will be 100% sun-grown, if not strictly local.

The New Mexico Public Regulation Commission announced in May the facilities that had been chosen to run solar operations in support of the state’s Community Solar Act, passed in 2021.

Community solar aims to extend the benefits of lower-cost, clean solar energy to people who cannot install solar themselves due to circumstances such as oddities of their property or roof, or being tenants in a non-solar building.

Utility customers will be able to subscribe, Netflix-style, to a share of energy generated by a network of community solar stations. New Mexico’s law includes incentives for low-income households as well. Typical savings might be 10% per utility bill, aside from any green impact.

“We see this as a great benefit to our customers,” PNM spokesperson Terri Reishus tells SFR. “It’ll give them an opportunity to get a bill credit and to help the environment, too.”

PNM customers in Santa Fe are likely a year away from seeing benefits, experts agree, but the buildup is beginning. Solar facilities—including one approved site in Eldorado—will be coming online with the utilities’ help, and the companies will be soliciting subscribers. Expect knocks on doors.

^^How it will work

PNM, the state’s largest electric utility, has committed to complete carbon-free power generation by 2040, and community solar is part of the big strategy. Even with a horizon of a year or more until switches are flipped, the utility is already staffing up and reaching out to the community solar companies—offering “white-glove service,” as Alaric Babej, PNM’s principal of customer energy solutions, describes it.

“As with anything new it’s hard to know what we don’t know, but we’re dedicated to working with all the vendors and customers to make this as seamless as possible,” he says.

The 45 approved community solar bids call for “farms” capable of generating up to 5 MW. Twenty-nine of them are in PNM’s service area, with a final capacity of 125 MW. The farms are operated by one of 11 “subscriber organizations”—the companies that submitted successful bids run the solar farms, and to subscribe customers to community solar.

The selection process proved controversial, and while the PRC dismissed most of them in May, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican, some complaints remain to be sorted out.

One winning bid will result in the Rancho Verano Sol Community Solar Garden in Eldorado, a 5 MW facility operated by SunShare Community Solar, based in Denver. SunShare says it has over 16,000 residential, commercial and municipal community solar subscribers in Colorado and Minnesota. It also had nine community solar bids approved in May, including sites in Deming, Portales, and Clayton. Neither SunShare Community Solar or the Eldorado Community Improvement Association responded to requests for comment.

Next, PNM and the two other participating New Mexico utilities will guide the bids through the process of grid “interconnection,” with a mind toward safety, reliability and compliance. Utility customers can expect to see solicitations from the subscriber organizations any time.

The 11 subscriber organizations can sign up community solar customers anywhere in the customer’s home utility range, and community solar power can be shared throughout the range. In other words, don’t expect local electrons.

Those who sign up can expect two monthly bills: One from the community solar company for their share of the electrons, and one from the utility with a credit.

^^Power to the people

Thanks in part to organizations like the Coalition Of Sustainable Communities New Mexico, community solar aims to benefit more than just people who were already eyeing private solar. The coalition is a nonprofit, nonpartisan membership organization within the Santa Fe Community Foundation that includes the city, Albuquerque and Las Cruces, Bernalillo and Santa Fe counties and others. It focuses on climate policy with an emphasis on equity, says Christian Casillas, director of policy development and research.

The organization lobbied for development of the community solar law and had a voice in the subsequent PRC rulemaking process. To address equity, the law sets a floor: 30% of the capacity of all community solar projects must be dedicated to low-income households or to low-income-serving organizations.

The bid process also incentivized the operators to better serve low-income households, Casillas says. Bidders could earn higher scores for things like more favorable solar credit rates and for plans to set aside more than the 30% capacity floor to low-income subscribers.

The coalition is working with low-income-serving organizations so people will be prepared when the operators begin soliciting subscribers. Members are also thinking bigger than just a utility bill discount, Casillas says. “We’re interested in job-creation, in apprenticeships, in community-based ownership of projects as well.”

On the flip side, “consolidated billing” of the subscriber organization bill and the utility bill is already on the coalition’s list for improvements.

“We want to remove every possible barrier to somebody signing up for community solar,” Casillas says. The prospect of paying two bills for what feels like one service “is not as easy for folks who are unbanked or who pay their utility bill with a cashier’s check.”