Beating the Queue: An Airport, a Nonprofit, and the Four-Year Wait Behind Them

Ray: Welcome to Community Solar News! Della, I've got a strange one for you today. Two projects that moved fast, and a dataset that says they shouldn't have been able to.

Della: Oh, I like that already. Fast how fast are we talking?

Ray: Fast enough that I want to hold both of them up against the Berkeley Lab numbers we're closing with. Today's rundown: a Staten Island nonprofit finds a way to subscribe its own tenants to its own project, an airport in northern Illinois turns part of its runway buffer into eight megawatts, and then a heads up on just how long the interconnection line has actually gotten for projects that size.

Della: Illinois again.

Ray: Illinois again.

Della: I feel like we need an actual counter on the studio wall at this point.

Ray: Give it another month and the show might as well be called Illinois Solar News.

Della: We are never renaming the show, Ray. Okay, Staten Island first, this one's got some real craftsmanship to it.

Ray: Alright, hit me.

Della: Sisters of Charity of New York has a 75 unit affordable housing building on Staten Island, and instead of picking one kind of solar, they built two systems. One behind the meter, net metered, serving the building itself. One in front of the meter, an actual community solar project their own tenants can subscribe to.

Ray: Wait, so the landlord's also running the community solar program for its own residents?

Della: Sort of. They set up a nonprofit subsidiary, Charity Solar, just to own both systems. 279 kilowatts combined. And more than fifty tenants signed up for the community solar piece.

Ray: Fifty subscribers out of seventy five units. That's a strong signup rate for a building that's basically a captive audience.

Della: Captive, but it still had to be sold to them. Subscribers are getting about a ten percent discount on their bills since August. Crauderueff Solar handled the system design, a firm called Power Market got people signed up and keeps the subscriptions running.

Ray: Two separate systems is the part that catches my eye. Most owners would just pick one and move on.

Della: Right, but behind the meter only helps the building's own electric bill. The front of meter piece is what actually lets a tenant subscribe and see a number drop on their own statement. If you only build one, you're leaving a whole audience out.

Ray: And because the owner's a nonprofit, they used direct pay on the federal credits instead of hunting for a tax equity partner. Twenty percent bonus adders stacked on both systems, so they're pulling close to fifty percent total credit.

Della: Direct pay is the thing a lot of smaller nonprofits still don't realize applies to them. No tax equity partner to go find, no partnership flip structure, the credit just comes back as cash. That alone probably made this project pencil.

Della: Plus a New York solar grant stacked on top of that. A dollar sixty a watt for the behind the meter system, two dollars a watt for the affordable housing community solar piece.

Ray: That is a lot of stacked incentive for a 279 kilowatt system. I almost want to file this as a how to guide instead of a news story.

Della: That's kind of the point though. A housing nonprofit with zero solar experience just proved out the whole playbook, direct pay, state grant, nonprofit subsidiary, done. And they're not stopping. There's a second project planned for Rockland County, solar plus battery backup, also state funded.

Ray: Rob Crauderueff and Xiomara Pedraza both got quoted on this one, and good for them. Small system, but it's exactly the kind of project that makes a landlord somewhere else call their own developer and ask why they haven't done this yet.

Della: Exactly the kind of ripple we like seeing.

Ray: 279 kilowatts isn't going to move any state's capacity numbers. But the paperwork trail here, direct pay plus a state adder plus a nonprofit subsidiary, that's a template a hundred other affordable housing owners could just copy.

Della: Which matters more on this beat than one more big portfolio deal, honestly. Nobody needs us to explain financing to Nautilus. They need somebody to show the Sisters of Charity of the world that this is actually doable.

Ray: Okay, now the big number. ComEd and SunVest energized a community solar array at DeKalb Taylor Municipal Airport. Northern Illinois. Nearly eight megawatts DC.

Della: At an airport.

Ray: At an airport. Sited right next to the airfield, on land the airport authority wasn't really doing anything else with. Sixty percent of the subscription capacity is carved out for low to moderate income customers.

Della: Sixty, not the state minimum. Somebody oversubscribed that carve out on purpose.

Ray: And it's not the first time we've seen somebody put a community solar array on airport land either. There's something about a municipal airport, acres of cleared, flat, already-fenced buffer land that nobody's rezoning into condos any time soon.

Della: It's underused land with a government landlord who actually wants the rent check. That's a much easier sell than knocking on a private landowner's door.

Ray: Looks that way. And the subscriber math backs it up. Average savings over three hundred dollars a year, close to eleven thousand dollars over the full thirty five year life of the project, per customer. Add it up across the whole subscriber base and you're at two hundred forty six thousand dollars a year, eight point six one million over thirty years.

Della: What does the airport get out of hosting it, besides being a good neighbor?

Ray: Ninety one thousand a year in site rent. Thirty six thousand in property taxes to DeKalb County, and most of that's earmarked for local schools.

Della: So the runway buffer is now a line item for the school district budget. I love that.

Ray: ComEd's CEO called it a quick way to bring down costs by bringing more power onto the grid, and for once I'm not going to argue with the sound bite. Their whole territory is up to two gigawatts of distributed resources now, over two hundred eighty community solar sites, fifty three thousand residential subscribers, and they're projecting four hundred twenty sites by the end of the year.

Della: Four hundred twenty by year end, from two hundred eighty today. That's not incremental, that's a build-out pace.

Ray: It really is, and it tells you the DeKalb airport project isn't a one-off novelty, it's a template they're clearly running again and again.

Della: Fifty three thousand subscribers is a headline all by itself. That's a subscriber acquisition machine running at full tilt.

Ray: It is. Filling capacity like that, especially the LMI carve out, is a subscriber acquisition job every single time, which happens to be exactly what our sponsor Our Power Co does for a living.

Della: Noted, we'll get to them properly in a minute. But also, an airport authority, a county, and a school district all got a cut here without anybody calling it a subsidy.

Ray: That's the trick with siting on public land. Everybody's already at the table.

Ray: Quick heads up before we wrap, and this one's a little less fun.

Della: Go on.

Ray: Berkeley Lab put out an analysis of interconnection applications. Two point seven million of them, a hundred eighty eight utilities, twenty four states, going back to 2000. Isolate the one to five megawatt tier, which is roughly where most of our community solar stories live, and the median time from application to interconnection is forty five months.

Della: Forty five months. Nearly four years just to get plugged in.

Ray: Compare that to under thirty kilowatts, two months. Thirty to a hundred kilowatts, nine months. Five hundred kilowatts up to a megawatt, two years. It's not a slope, it's a wall, and the wall shows up right around the size most of you listening are actually building at.

Della: And it's not even across the country. For the fifty kilowatt to one megawatt range, Washington state's averaging six months. Massachusetts is at eighteen point one. Same country, same rough project size, three times the wait.

Ray: Seventy six percent of everything over a hundred kilowatts in that dataset still hadn't gotten permission to operate by the time the study closed out.

Della: So that's not a backlog that clears itself. That's most of the pipeline sitting in queue limbo at any given moment.

Ray: Which should worry anyone whose return assumptions depend on a project actually energizing on schedule. An EPC crew that's staffed up and ready doesn't get paid to sit around waiting on a utility study.

Della: So what do you actually do with that if you're underwriting a project right now?

Ray: Build the queue time into your financing model like it's a real cost, because it is one. If your pro forma assumes eighteen months to energization on a three megawatt project, you're planning around a number that doesn't exist in most of these states anymore.

Della: And push your state regulator for actual public reporting. Part of why this is even murky is the report flags inconsistent disclosure, utility to utility, state to state. You can't fix a queue you can't see.

Ray: No doom here. Just plan for the real number instead of the one you wish was true.

Della: Practical heads up, not a horror story. Noted, and moving on.

Ray: That's the rundown. A Staten Island nonprofit running its own subscriber program, an Illinois airport turning idle land into a school district's budget line, and a queue problem worth planning around instead of ignoring.

Della: Illinois tally stands. Before we go, the sponsor.

Ray: This episode's brought to you by Our Power Co. Their whole pitch fits in one sentence: you build the solar, we bring the community.

Della: They're a community solar customer acquisition company, full stop, that's the entire business. If you've got capacity to fill on a project anywhere in the country, that's the call to make.

Ray: And if you're listening as a homeowner or a renter instead of a developer, this show isn't really built for you, but there's a door for you too. Go to join community dot solar to subscribe and start lowering your own bill.

Della: We should say, this show is made almost entirely with AI, and that was a deliberate choice about which tools we use. We picked ones built by companies that cover their own energy and grid costs and use water efficient cooling, instead of pushing that onto the households and small businesses around their data centers.

Ray: On an energy show, that felt like the bare minimum, not a bragging point.

Della: Every number you heard today traces back to a source, and it's linked in the show notes.

Ray: One more thing, by the way. We've also got The Solar Docket now, a free daily rundown of what actually moved in community solar, capacity blocks, docket filings, deals, the stuff that happens between episodes. It's at community solar dot news.

Della: Find us on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, or on YouTube now if you'd rather watch than listen. And head to community solar dot news for the newsletter too.

Ray: See you Thursday.

Della: That's the community in community solar.