WASHINGTON ― With the largest community solar project in the nation’s capital as a backdrop, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Thursday announced new funding opportunities and projects aimed at expanding access to solar for low- and moderate-income (LMI) consumers and communities.

At 1.8 MW, the D.C. Water Brentwood Reservoir Community Solar Project sits on top of a capped reservoir and, when it comes online in June, should cut electric bills in half for 500 low- and moderate-income households in D.C and support the construction of more affordable housing in the city.

Granholm called it a “dazzling success” that the U.S. Department of Energy wants to replicate all over the country through programs like the Community Power Accelerator Prize, which aims to build out a network of community solar developers. DOE on Thursday named the first 25 teams that will compete for a chance to tap into $5 billion in project financing.

The teams are located in 16 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Together, they have the potential to put up to 150 MW of new community solar online, Granholm said. In the initial round of funding, each team receives $50,000, according to DOE.

In subsequent rounds, the teams will compete for prizes of $200,000 and $150,000, DOE said. The program is part of the department’s larger Community Solar Partnership, which has set a target of deploying an estimated 17 GW of community solar projects across the U.S. by 2025, enough to provide a total of $1 billion in savings.

Thursday’s announcement was the latest in the Biden administration’s efforts to show its commitment to an equitable and just transition to clean energy, with 40% of the benefits of federal funds going to low-income and disadvantaged communities. (See IRA Tax Credits Draw Clean Energy Projects to Coal Communities.)

The Brentwood project “is proof that that’s not just a pie-in-the-sky concept,” said National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi, who joined Granholm at the event. “It’s not a plan on a piece of paper. This is steel in the ground. It’s a real project. It’s going to make a real, visible difference in the lives of people who live in this community, in the bottom lines of families around the kitchen table.”

Solar for All

Community solar projects were initially developed as an alternative to rooftop solar, providing access to clean energy for apartment dwellers or anyone who couldn’t or didn’t want to put panels on their roofs. Early projects offered consumers options to either buy one or more panels or specific blocks of power — 100 kWh/month, for example — and receive a credit for that power on their electric bills.

D.C.’s Brentwood Reservoir project is part of the city’s Solar for All program, which has the ambitious goal of cutting electric bills in half for 100,000 low-income households in the city by 2032. Rather than buying panels or blocks of power, subscribers to a project simply receive a credit of up to 50% on their electric bills, and projects often provide other “community benefits.”

For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the proceeds from a project built in 2020 on the roofs of five buildings at George Washington University were channeled into an emergency fund to help low-income residents at risk of power shutoffs.

To date, Solar for All has helped to complete 207 community solar projects — called community renewable energy facilities (CREFs) — totaling 29.3 MW of power, according to the D.C. Sustainable Energy Utility (DCSEU), which administers the program.

DOE also recognized the program with one of its first rounds of Sunny Awards for Equitable Community Solar, announced in January. The program received a $10,000 cash prize as part of its award, which has been “redirected back to nonprofits in the city,” said Richard Jackson, interim director of the D.C. Department of Energy and Environment.

EPA is hoping to replicate D.C.’s success with its own federal Solar for All program, funded with $7 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act. Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe was also on hand Thursday to announce the release of her agency’s implementation plan for the program, which is part of the larger $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

“We’re going to be able to provide grants to 60 grassroots [groups], tribal governments, municipalities and other recipients to expand the number of low-income and disadvantaged that are primed for investment in residential and community solar,” McCabe said.

The implementation plan says at least one award will go to each state and territory, with one to three grants reserved for tribal groups and governments. The plan does not include specific award amounts but said grants would be “based on program need and vision including geographic factors, solar deployment potential factors, program design components and impacts, and other merit-based factors.”

LPO’s VPP Loan

DOE’s Loan Program Office (LPO) added another announcement to the list on Thursday, with a conditional commitment for a $3 billion loan to Sunnova Energy for a company initiative to install rooftop solar and storage systems for low-income homeowners or those with low credit scores.

If finalized, the money will be used to provide loans for solar-plus-storage systems for approximately 75,000 to 115,000 homeowners throughout the U.S. and its territories, the LPO announcement said. Over the next 25 years, the project could install an estimated 568 MW of solar, while avoiding 7.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The Sunnova systems also come with “virtual power plant-ready” software that can “give customers insight into their household’s energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions, allowing customers to reduce electricity use — or even contribute electricity to the system in markets that allow such contributions — when the grid is under stress,” according to the LPO announcement.

Dan DeSnyder, Sunnova’s vice president for capital markets, described the software as “a Fitbit” for energy, encouraging consumers to use energy more efficiently and during off-peak hours when rates are lower.

The DOE loan could help the company be a bridge to build out a market for solar projects in low-income communities “by demonstrating to the rating agencies that these people pay their bills, and it can be a benefit,” DeSnyder said. “We think that we’re going to be able to drive more activity in the space for these people.”

The loan would be LPO’s first in support of virtual power plants, which combine smart software with aggregated distributed energy resources.

Announcing the conditional commitment on LinkedIn, LPO Director Jigar Shah said the loan is intended “to induce two key behavioral changes in the current residential appliance market: the inclusion of virtual power plant technologies to unlock demand shifting as a tool to reduce electricity bills across the United States; and to expand the availability for all households to access affordable financing for residential energy equipment so that Americans don’t have to pay 30% interest for capital improvements and appliance replacements [that] will lower their energy burden.”

Solar Innovation

Granholm’s other announcements focused more on promoting innovative solar technologies and their integration into the nation’s power systems, while building out U.S. solar supply chains.

According to DOE, $52 million will go to “research, development and demonstration projects [that] aim to enhance domestic solar manufacturing, support the recycling of solar panels and develop new American-made solar technologies.”

Among the 19 projects receiving these funds are:

• Solarcycle of Oakland, Calif., which will receive $1.5 million to develop technologies that can “recover key materials from end-of-life solar panels with high purity by developing a mechanical method to concentrate the materials, followed by an environmentally friendly chemical process to recover them.”
• First Solar of Perrysburg, Ohio, receiving $7.3 million to develop a tandem module combining thin-film and silicon to create “a new residential rooftop product that is more efficient than silicon or thin-film modules on the market today.”
• Mission Drives of Potsdam, N.Y., which is receiving $1.2 million to develop an inverter that can “switch electricity input 100 times faster than conventional products using silicon carbide and gallium nitride wide bandgap components.”

The other $30 million will be awarded through the new Operation and Planning Tools for Inverter-Based Resource Management and Availability for Future Power Systems (OPTIMA) program.

According to DOE, the program will target “projects that address emerging challenges and opportunities for grid planning and operation engineers and technicians arising from the power system’s transition to variable renewable energy sources and inverter-based power electronic grid interfaces.”

The department expects it will fund between nine and 13 projects, with awards ranging from $2 million to $4 million.