Solar Gardens: A Blooming Trade

BY Matt Rehbein

Published August 17, 2018

Here's a working draft on a look at community solar gardens, an increasingly popular way for businesses, local governments and homeowners to source more of their energy needs from renewables.

Solar gardens -- also referred to as community solar or shared solar -- are fields of photovoltaic panels that customers can buy or lease a portion of and apply the energy produced to their electricty bills. The Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) maintains a database of solar gardens in the country.

The NREL database contains 543 solar gardens, located in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Massachusetts, Minnesota and Colorado, each of which have nutured community solar with renewable-rewarding policies, are the runaway leaders in number of gardens.

Massachusetts is leading the way in community solar with 121 gardens, operated by seven different utility companies. The first garden was built in 2012. The most powerful one pumps out about 5,700 kilowatts.

A state with a notable absence of solar gardens is California. The authors of the NREL database stiplate that it may not be at all times comprehensive. But if there are any solar gardens in The Golden State right now, the number is likely small. California's legislature passed a pro-green-energy law in 2013 that was meant to clear the way for investor-owned utilities to start taking bids from developers to build solar gardens, but the nascent regulatory groundwork hadn't allowed any projects to get off the ground as of late last year, according to a report from Greentech Media.