Twenty States Behind: California Finally Makes Its Move

Ray: Welcome to Community Solar News!

Della: Ray. Second week straight with no Illinois story on the rundown. I want that on the record too, just like last time.

Ray: Noted, for the second week running. I promise I'm not doing it on purpose.

Della: Sure you're not. So what's actually on the board?

Ray: A road, first of all. Not a project, not a bill, an actual road.

Della: A road.

Ray: Gordian Energy Systems just finished the Kimmey Solar project down in Delmar, Maryland, for Summit Ridge Energy, and the thing they're proudest of isn't the array. It's the access road.

Della: Okay, now you have to explain that, because I did not have 'road' on my bingo card this week.

Ray: It's their first permeable Geoweb roadway. Instead of paving a hard access road that sheds every drop of rain somewhere it's not supposed to go, this thing lets water soak straight through into the ground underneath it.

Della: What actually is a Geoweb, mechanically? Because I want to picture this.

Ray: Fair question, and honestly the release doesn't get into the specifics. Just that it's a permeable system built for water to infiltrate straight through instead of running off. I'll take 'they released the fact sheet, not the engineering manual' as historically normal for a press release.

Della: Sure, but the headline number that matters is it survived construction. That's the part I'd want proven before I copied it onto my own site.

Ray: That's exactly the part that stands out to me too. It held up fine through the whole build, which is what usually kills a clever idea like this in practice.

Della: Right, because the pretty rendering always survives. It's the part where heavy equipment rolls over it every day for months that tells you whether the idea actually works.

Ray: Their senior project manager, Katelyn Knox, said it met the stormwater goals while still holding up as a durable access solution through the whole build. Translated, it didn't turn into a mud pit the first time it rained.

Della: Okay, I'll take that as a genuine engineering win. Press releases don't usually earn that much out of me. Who's the county on this one?

Ray: Wicomico. So the tally keeps moving, just not the state you were hoping for.

Della: I wasn't hoping for anything, I was noting an absence. Though this one's twins with the Bloomington Hill hearing we covered a few weeks back, different county, same state quietly staying busy while everyone was watching Illinois and Virginia.

Ray: Maryland's turning into the reliable background hum of this beat. Never the loudest story, always somewhere in the mix.

Della: Anyway, Gordian's a name we haven't said much.

Ray: First time on the show, I think. They're a full-service developer and EPC, north of a hundred fifty megawatts of assets nationwide between rooftop, canopy, and ground-mount, and they're leaning on the Cole Roofing name for the Maryland side of things. Cole's a fourth-generation roofing company, so there's real local roots behind the name.

Della: And the client's Summit Ridge, who we cannot stop talking about lately for completely different reasons every time.

Ray: Right? First it was BlackRock's infrastructure arm buying a controlling stake. Then it was the Foss tax equity deal with Apollo. Now they're just the client on somebody else's nice road.

Della: Which might be the most normal thing we've said about Summit Ridge all year. Sometimes a company's just quietly getting projects built while everybody else writes headlines about who owns them.

Ray: Fair. It's a small story, I'll grant you. But I like it precisely because it's small. Not every good idea on this beat needs a press release with a dollar sign in the headline.

Della: Agreed, and it's the kind of detail a developer in a wet county actually files away for the next permitting fight. 'Here's a road that solved our runoff problem and survived construction' is a useful sentence to have in your back pocket.

Ray: This is starting to feel like its own pattern, actually. Two weeks ago it was Northern Sun figuring out a bridge with a weight limit and a snow load nobody wanted to engineer around. Now it's a road that doubles as a drainage system.

Della: Different problem, same instinct. Don't walk away from the annoying site condition, design around it.

Ray: Which is a nice way of saying the boring engineering stuff is becoming the actual competitive advantage. The easy flat parcel next to the highway is getting harder to find in a lot of these markets.

Della: Whoever gets good at solving for stormwater, weight limits, and snow load first has a real edge over whoever's still only bidding on the easy sites.

Ray: Exactly. Okay. Della, from a road to an entire state.

Della: Oh, I know where this is going.

Ray: California.

Della: Finally. I feel like we've said 'and California still isn't really doing this' out loud on this show more than once.

Ray: We have. Well, that might be changing. The state Senate just passed AB 1813, officially the Community Renewable Energy Program Act, over the weekend.

Della: Passed, past tense? Is it law?

Ray: Not yet. One more procedural step in the Assembly, then it's on Governor Newsom's desk.

Della: Any signal on whether he's actually going to sign it, or are we just hoping?

Ray: Nothing in what we've got confirms his position either way, so I'm not going to pretend to know. All we've got is it passed the Senate and it's one step from his desk.

Della: Fair, I'd rather say we don't know than make something up. Okay, close but not done. What does the bill actually do, though, because California's tried this before and it went nowhere.

Ray: It did. Back in 2022, AB 2316 told the CPUC to go build a community solar program, and the program the commission actually came up with didn't produce operational projects. Nothing built.

Della: Right, that's the one advocates have been calling unworkable for a while now.

Ray: This bill is the do-over. It requires the CPUC to value community solar and storage using its own Avoided Cost Calculator instead of whatever formula produced the last dud, and it requires storage paired with every project so the power's actually available during peak demand instead of whenever the sun happens to be out.

Della: That second part matters more than it sounds like. A program that only delivers power at two in the afternoon isn't solving the problem California actually has, which is the evening ramp.

Ray: Exactly the fix. And the numbers being floated aren't small. Conservative estimate is five and a half gigawatts of new community solar and storage, enough to serve something like two point two million Californians.

Della: Conservative, meaning there's a bigger number somewhere.

Ray: There is. Kevala ran the numbers on capacity during summer peak demand and came back with more than seventeen and a half gigawatts of potential.

Della: That's not a rounding difference, that's a completely different market. Where's the gap between those two numbers coming from?

Ray: My read is the conservative figure is what actually gets built in the program's first stretch, and the bigger number's the ceiling if the whole thing works the way it's designed to. Which, fair, is a big if for a state that's already whiffed once.

Della: What's it worth to an actual subscriber, though? Gigawatts don't pay anybody's electric bill.

Ray: Average subscriber savings projected around a hundred ninety dollars a year, two fifty a year if you're a low-income household.

Della: And statewide?

Ray: Aurora Energy Research put the ratepayer savings, across the whole state, at six and a half billion dollars. Plus the backers are citing over a hundred sixty thousand jobs, twenty billion in new investment, and seven hundred million specifically earmarked for grid modernization.

Della: Those are the kind of numbers that get printed on a fact sheet and argued about for a year. I'd want to see the first actual project break ground before I fully believe the top end of any of that.

Ray: Sure, that's fair, healthy skepticism. But even the floor of this is a real market. Derek Chernow runs CLASS, the advocacy group that's been pushing this, and his line was that California's fallen behind more than twenty other states on community solar.

Della: Twenty states. That's not close-behind, that's not-even-trying behind.

Ray: His exact words were that in the middle of an affordability crisis and rising bills, this is, quote, a popular and sensible policy solution to lower bills for every Californian while moving closer to the state's climate goals.

Della: It's hard to argue with 'we're the biggest state in the country and we've been sitting this out.' If this actually gets signed, it changes the map for every developer who's been building everywhere except California because there was nowhere to plug in.

Ray: That's the part I keep coming back to. Virginia doubling its shared solar cap, New Jersey running its dual-use pilot, that's what room to build looks like when a state actually commits. California's been the biggest name missing from that list.

Della: One signature away from not missing anymore. I want to see what happens when the Governor actually gets it on his desk before I call this a win, but it's the closest this state's come.

Ray: One practical note for anyone already building in the state, or thinking about it: keep an eye on how the CPUC actually implements that Avoided Cost Calculator piece once this is signed. That's where the last program's math went sideways.

Della: Good point. A bill passing is one thing, a commission translating it into a value stack that actually pencils for a developer is a completely different fight, and it's the one that decides whether five gigawatts becomes real or stays a fact sheet.

Ray: Exactly why I'm holding off on the confetti until we get the implementation story too.

Della: We'll get you both. Circle it.

Ray: Alright, before we go, a word about who makes this show possible.

Della: Our sponsor is Our Power Co. You build the solar, we bring the community.

Ray: They're a community solar customer acquisition company, meaning if you've got capacity to fill, on a project like the ones we just talked about, they're the ones out finding the subscribers to fill it.

Della: And if you're listening as someone who actually wants to subscribe and lower your own bill, that's a different door. Go to join community dot solar to sign up.

Ray: One more thing about how this show gets made. It's built almost entirely with AI, and we're deliberate about which tools we use, ones from companies that cover their own energy and grid costs and use water-efficient cooling instead of quietly pushing that bill onto somebody's local utility.

Della: On a show about who pays for power, that felt like the least we could do. And every number you heard today is sourced and linked in the show notes.

Ray: Find us on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, wherever you get your shows, and on YouTube now if you'd rather watch.

Della: And head to community solar dot news for the newsletter. If your project just solved a problem the way Gordian solved theirs, or your state's about to run its own version of this California bill, tell us before it shows up in someone else's newsletter.

Ray: Alright, that's the rundown. Thanks for spending part of your week with us.

Della: That's the community in community solar.