There’s also the value of word-of-mouth marketing, which is far more effective than corporate advertising in getting people to go solar, according to a growing body of research. Solar adoption also rises through what research has identified as the “solar contagion” effect — seeing panels sprout up on neighbors’ houses can increase local adoption rates by significant margins.
Consumer protection, consumer education
Beyond bringing down solar costs and spurring greater adoption rates, a well-designed cooperative solar program must also provide consumer protections, Mitchell said. “We help people through every step in the process,” she said, from understanding how the laws and regulations in their region affect the economics of rooftop solar to how to comb through competing installer proposals.
Dallefeld agreed that “having another intermediary side by side with installers” helps give customers more confidence in the deals they’re making. “It’s the Wild West with solar — people are knocking on doors, selling,” he said, referring to the door-to-door sales tactics that drive a significant share of the U.S. residential solar business.
“[If] you sign up with someone who’s knocking on your door, it’s a crapshoot,” he said. “If they don’t do due diligence, the customer can lose out. If there were co-ops popping up everywhere and setting standards, you’d have a lot less of the dark-horse solar industry.”
That’s particularly true in Puerto Rico, Sutch said, where, in the years since Hurricane Maria devastated the island’s power grid, the solar market has grown rapidly, with 2,000 to 3,000 installations every month. “But there are a lot of people who don’t know where to start” when it comes to assessing the deals they’re being offered, and “a lot of customer-unfriendly solar tactics in Puerto Rico and in the market generally,” including “high pricing, leasing that’s not customer-friendly.”
Without an independent third party like SUN, “you’re kind of on your own to deal with the private solar market, which is quite aggressive in many cases,” said Cathy Kunkel, energy program manager at Cambio PR, a Puerto Rico–based environmental group working with SUN on the island. “Companies are trying to sell systems that are oversized, more than what people need, and there isn’t necessarily a good third-party source of information to go to.”
David Ortiz, a longtime community organizer and activist in Puerto Rico, worked with SUN to launch its first co-op on the island in 2020 and is now helping to establish a second one. He said he has witnessed customer confusion firsthand. In a recent informational meeting for the second co-op, there was a woman who had been a part of the 2020 group but at the last minute decided not to buy solar panels. Ortiz said she told him, “‘I’ve been getting flyers from every solar company you can imagine since 2020, and I’ve waited two years because I wasn’t going to go with anyone until there was another info session.’”
Along with consumer protection, co-op participants have the benefit of receiving advice that’s hyper-local, Ortiz noted. Puerto Rico’s highly unreliable power grid is driving many would-be solar owners to add batteries to their homes, which is more expensive than solar alone. In another co-op meeting, “someone shared with the rest of the group that, where they live, there are huge flooding issues,” he said. The fix was to “put the battery on the second floor, so if there’s flooding, his system will continue to work. That’s something people learned from being part of the co-op.”
In this sense, co-op members are like “solar ambassadors” to the broader community, Sutch said. “Someone who has been through the process knows how interconnection works, knows what it’s like to look at a proposal. We mobilize and amplify their voices in the community.”
Building more equity into the cooperative solar model
Getting solar to customers regardless of income will take more than the cost reductions made possible by cooperative purchasing. Of the more than 6,000 families that have installed solar through SUN-sponsored co-ops, only 117 are in the low- to moderate-income category, according to the group’s 2021 annual report.
Mitchell cited the lack of access to capital and credit as the key barrier for lower-income customers seeking to participate in SUN’s residential solar model. While groups negotiate prices and terms, and SUN works with a set of credit unions that offer loans on a nationwide basis, individual families need to be able to qualify for the loans, she said.
SUN partnered with nonprofit decarbonization think tank RMI to study the demographic and economic factors that have held back greater solar uptake in lower-income and disadvantaged communities. In 2020, RMI published a summary of its research, which found that cooperative models could boost solar adoption in communities that have largely been barred from it in the past, and highlighted how partnerships with governments, financial institutions and nonprofit entities can help. (Canary Media is an independent affiliate of RMI.)
RMI has worked with 20 city governments to launch Solarize campaigns, including Boston, Columbus, Louisville, Kansas City and others, said Ryan Shea, a manager with RMI’s Urban Transformation team and co-author of the 2020 article on the group’s findings. One of the key factors for successful programs has been “having really strong community partnerships,” he said.
“Bringing frontline-community-based organizations in at the start is important,” he said. This ensures that equity is factored into the program development from the very beginning. “Those trusted organizations can spread the word about the campaign’s benefits.”
But upfront costs are still prohibitive, he said. “For moderate-income residents, low-interest, accessible financing is what’s needed to spread out that upfront cost,” he said. “But for low-income residents, campaigns need to secure funding to pay that cost outright.”
RMI’s article cited the example of the Solar for All Campaign. The partnership between the Connecticut Green Bank and PosiGen, a solar installer that specializes in serving homeowners with limited means and credit access, brought solar to more than 900 low-income households in the state between 2015 and 2021 through a combination of higher incentives and targeted outreach.
Green banks — entities that use public funds to make low-cost, long-term loans to underserved markets — are playing similar roles in other states. In Orlando, Florida, SUN has partnered with the Solar Energy Loan Fund, the state’s version of a green bank, to extend affordable solar installations to hundreds of lower-income residents. The Inflation Reduction Act will bring $27 billion in federal funding to expand the scope of green-bank lending across the country, making these entities a potential source of significant growth for cooperative solar purchasing models.
SUN’s 2021 annual report features a Q&A with Yesenia Rivera, the group’s former director of equity and inclusion, in which she lists several other approaches to serving lower-income and disadvantaged communities. In Colorado, the success of a solar rebate program in the community of Mountain Village drew follow-on funding from city and county sources, she said. SUN has partnered with Habitat for Humanity in Nebraska, Texas and Virginia, and with community development nonprofits in Pittsburgh and other cities to bring solar to low-income homeowners.
Rivera cited financing as the biggest barrier to low-income solar adoption. “Who pays for these systems? We know it’s going to have to be a combination of philanthropy, tax credits and loans.”
Beyond that, SUN’s model of banding homeowners together to access rooftop solar also leaves out renters, she noted. Community solar programs, which allow people to subscribe to solar power generated at sites that aren’t on their properties, are one way to expand access to those who can’t install it on their own rooftops, she said. Rivera is now executive director of the Solstice Initiative, a nonprofit that assists communities seeking to develop such shared solar projects.
Kunkel pointed out that in Puerto Rico, rooftop solar, community solar and community microgrid projects are all potential solutions to solving the energy-cost and reliability woes that the island’s residents face. “Relatively wealthy people who want to go solar are doing it, and everyone else is left with this expensive and unstable power grid,” she said.
As more people gain access to solar, they’ve joined in political activism to keep it affordable. SUN members were among the coalition that helped defeat a proposal by Puerto Rico’s centralized utility to add surcharges to customer solar systems, Kunkel noted.
While a number of U.S. states are facing debates over whether rooftop-solar incentives discriminate against lower-income utility customers, “those debates don’t really exist in Puerto Rico,” she said. “Everyone recognizes the value of rooftop solar and is frustrated with the electrical system as it is. The key is to make it accessible to lower-income families.”
Be sure to check back every day this week for our Power by the People special coverage. And sign up here to watch our live panel event Wednesday with three changemakers who are on the front lines of bringing clean energy to their communities.
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