Room to Build: Virginia Doubles Down While New Mexico Rewrites the Fine Print

Ray: Welcome to Community Solar News!

Ray: I'm Ray, that's Della, and today's rundown has got a little bit of everything. A hearing you can actually walk into, a rooftop portfolio turning storage buildings into power plants, a regulator doing some serious paperwork surgery, and a law that just doubled a program's ceiling.

Della: That's a good spread. Something for the developers, something for the policy nerds, and something for anybody who just likes a big number.

Ray: Which is all four of us, honestly. Let's start small and local.

Ray: Maryland's Public Service Commission has set a hearing date on a new community solar project out in Garrett County. TotalEnergies Renewables USA filed for this one back in September, and it's finally got its day.

Della: Bloomington Hill, right? Two co-located facilities on part of a seventy-two acre property, just off Route 135.

Ray: Nine point nine megawatts combined. Somebody clearly did the math to land just under that ten-megawatt line.

Della: Every developer in every state does that math at some point. It's basically a rite of passage.

Ray: The credits go to Potomac Edison subscribers once it's built, so this is a straightforward community solar play, nothing ambiguous about the siting here.

Della: And 'co-located' is doing some quiet work in that filing too. Two separate facilities sharing a site usually means the developer's keeping each one under a size threshold on purpose, probably for interconnection or permitting reasons, while still getting the economics of building them together.

Ray: Which is a pretty normal move once you've filed a project or two and learned where the thresholds actually sit.

Della: Worth flagging for anybody in the Maryland pipeline: the hearing is Thursday, August thirteenth, six p.m., at the Bloomington Volunteer Fire Company. If you've got a project anywhere near Garrett County, or you just want to see how these hearings actually run, that door is open.

Ray: Small project, but a good reminder that the queue keeps moving even when nobody's throwing a ribbon-cutting yet.

Della: Paperwork is still progress. Let's go bigger.

Della: Illinois is back.

Ray: It never really left, but sure, go ahead.

Della: ComEd, Solar Landscape, and Public Storage just announced sixty rooftop community solar projects over the next two years, adding forty-four megawatts to the grid.

Ray: Sixty projects, on storage facility roofs. That's a real answer to the site-control headache this industry keeps running into.

Della: Right, because Public Storage already owns the roof, already has the square footage, and is apparently growing to thirteen hundred Illinois properties by the end of the year. That's a lot of future roof.

Ray: ComEd's CEO said they expect around four hundred community solar installations across their northern Illinois territory by year end. Four hundred, in one utility's territory.

Della: And there's a workforce piece attached too. Something like three hundred construction jobs over the buildout, and a hundred and thirty-nine people already trained through STEP-UP Solar and its partners since twenty twenty-four.

Ray: I want to sit on that for a second, because rooftop siting on existing commercial buildings solves two problems at once. You skip the land-use fight entirely, and you're standing up a local workforce pipeline instead of flying in a crew for one project and leaving.

Della: It also means this isn't a one-and-done deal. Sixty projects over two years is a production schedule. That's a developer relationship, not a press release.

Ray: And the workforce partners on this one aren't just a nice line in the press release either. The Chicago Urban League, HACIA, YouthBuild Lake County, IBEW, that's a real coalition, not a single job-training vendor doing a photo op.

Ray: And I'd bet this pattern gets copied. Big self-storage, big-box retail, warehouse operators, they've all got flat roofs sitting empty and a real interest in a partner who does the work for them.

Della: That's a prediction, so I'm holding you to it. We'll see if another rooftop portfolio like this one shows up before the end of the year.

Ray: Illinois keeps racking these up. Warren County, Machesney Park, the Shines block closures, and now this. I'm calling it, nobody else in the country is stacking wins like this state is.

Della: You said something close to that a few weeks ago, right before Delaware stole the spotlight for a week. I'm not saying it happens again. I'm just saying it happened once.

Ray: Fair. I'll take the risk anyway.

Della: Quick heads-up before we move to the last story, and this one's for anybody with a project in New Mexico's pipeline.

Ray: This is the state you flagged a few weeks back, the gap between what's approved and what's actually built.

Della: Same state, different angle this time. New Mexico's Public Regulation Commission pushed through a pretty comprehensive rewrite of the community solar program rules, and the rehearing window on it closes this week, August third.

Ray: So this is close to final. What's changing?

Della: A handful of things worth having on your radar. First, the program administrator can now select projects totaling up to a hundred and fifty percent of available capacity to move into interconnection review, so there's built-in oversubscription at the review stage.

Ray: That accounts for the projects that drop out along the way.

Della: Right. Second, the bid application fee changes from a flat thousand dollars to five hundred dollars per megawatt, so bigger projects pay more up front just to apply.

Ray: That'll change some math for anyone filing a larger project, since the fee now scales with size instead of every bid paying the same flat rate.

Della: Third, the cap on how much capacity a single subscriber organization and its affiliates can hold goes from twenty percent up to thirty percent of a utility's allocation. More room for bigger players to consolidate share in one territory.

Ray: Worth a second look for anyone scaling up. Tighter for anyone counting on a crowded field.

Della: There's real teeth on compliance too. Subscriber organizations have to fulfill their bid commitments, file annual compliance attestations, and get sign-off before modifying a scored project. Utilities picked up new deadlines out of this as well: consolidated billing proposals due by January first, twenty twenty-seven, and subscriber organizations have to be paid within sixty days of a meter reading.

Ray: So the utilities got homework out of this deal too. That evens it out a little.

Della: There's also a new uniform disclosure form requirement, covering subscription charges, projected savings, administrative costs, cancellation terms, all of it standardized. That's less room for a sloppy subscriber agreement to slide through.

Ray: Which protects the developers doing it right just as much as it protects subscribers.

Della: Here's the part that matters for anyone with something filed or planned in New Mexico: go read the new disclosure form requirements and the compliance attestation language before you assume your old paperwork still holds up.

Ray: Practical advice, not a warning siren. I can live with that.

Della: That's the idea. Alright, last story, and it's a big one.

Ray: Virginia's shared solar program just more than doubled. Governor Spanberger signed the legislation back in April, and the capacity release actually took effect July first.

Della: This is the same program the Altus Power deal ran through a couple weeks back, the Appalachian Power territory buy of those five New Leaf projects.

Ray: Same program, and now it's a lot bigger. Dominion's territory goes from two hundred megawatts, which was fully awarded and tapped out, up to five hundred twenty-five megawatts of new capacity.

Della: That's not a small bump. That's more than doubling a program that was already maxed out.

Ray: And for anyone who's been watching Virginia from the outside because the old two-hundred-megawatt cap felt too small to bother with, that's exactly the kind of headline that gets a state back on the shortlist.

Della: Financiers pay attention to that too. A program going from fully-awarded to more than doubled, with a follow-on release already scheduled on the Appalachian Power side, that's not a state testing the waters anymore.

Ray: Appalachian Power's getting more room too. Fifty more megawatts released by July first, on top of the fifty-megawatt program that launched last year, with another fifty coming by January twenty twenty-eight.

Della: So both territories get a real runway instead of a waitlist.

Ray: Here's the number I care about most. Participating customers save ten percent or more on their monthly bill, something like a hundred seventy-five dollars a year. A third-party analysis put it at sixty-four million dollars in net benefits over the first two years, and two point four billion over twenty-five years.

Della: Billion, with a b. That's the kind of number that gets a program taken seriously at budget time, not just in a docket filing.

Ray: Hot take on this one. If you've been sitting on a Virginia project waiting for room in the queue, this is the moment. Five hundred twenty-five megawatts of fresh capacity doesn't sit around unclaimed for long.

Della: And here's the part that actually matters for the people building this stuff. Doubling a fully-awarded two-hundred-megawatt program to five twenty-five is a state saying it wants a lot more of this built, on purpose.

Ray: That's a real signal for anyone deciding where to point their next project. I'll be curious whether we see another acquisition like the Altus deal once developers start staking claims on this new capacity.

Della: Good instinct. Let's check back on that once the new capacity actually starts getting awarded.

Ray: So let's keep score here. A hearing that keeps Maryland's queue moving, Illinois turning storage rooftops into power plants, New Mexico tightening up both sides of its paperwork, and Virginia opening the door on five hundred twenty-five fresh megawatts.

Della: Good spread. Nothing flashy, but four states, four different stages of the pipeline, all moving in the right direction.

Ray: That's the show for today.

Ray: Before we go, today's episode is brought to you by Our Power Co.

Della: Their pitch is about as clean as it gets: you build the solar, we bring the community. They're in the business of filling subscriber capacity, wherever your project happens to be, no matter which state you're building in.

Ray: And a quick note on how this show gets made. We build it almost entirely with AI, and we deliberately picked tools from companies that cover their own energy and grid costs instead of passing that bill on to local households and small businesses. Felt like the least we could do on a show about energy.

Della: One more thing. If you're a homeowner or renter listening in who actually wants to subscribe and knock some money off your own bill, that's a different door than this show. Go to join community dot solar.

Ray: Every number in this episode is sourced and linked in the show notes.

Della: Find us on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and on YouTube if you'd rather watch the rundown than just listen to it. Head to community solar dot news for the newsletter.

Ray: I'm Ray.

Della: I'm Della. And that's the community in community solar.