Three Pieces at a Time, Two Hundred Million All at Once: Same Business, Every Size

Ray: Welcome to Community Solar News!

Della: Thursday again, and Ray's been holding onto this first one since Tuesday.

Ray: I have. Because it's a solar farm. On the shoulder of an interstate. Cobb EMC just opened enrollment on something called SolarShare, and it's sitting right along I-75 in Cherokee County, Georgia.

Della: Wait, actually on the highway?

Ray: Right of way along it, built with the Georgia DOT. One megawatt. And here's the part I love: it's only the second interstate solar project in the whole country, and the second one in Georgia specifically, so Georgia's just quietly cornering this entire category.

Della: A category of two. Niche, but I respect it. So how do you actually buy in?

Ray: This is the fun part. It's blocks, and a block works out to three pieces of equipment. Members can take up to five blocks each. You're not buying a slice of a megawatt, you're buying it in these tiny, countable chunks.

Della: That's such a small, legible unit. I like that more than I should.

Ray: Gas South is the program partner, Colite Technologies installed it, and Cobb EMC's EVP, Tim Jarrell, called it proof that innovation and collaboration can produce practical solar for their members. Which, sure, but also: it's on a highway.

Della: I actually think there's a real idea buried under the novelty, though. Right-of-way land next to a highway is land nobody's fighting you over. No neighbor meeting, no "not next to my backyard."

Ray: That's my hot take too. If this works, DOT partnerships are a siting shortcut other co-ops should be stealing, not just a fun headline. I'd bet somebody else tries this within the year.

Della: I won't take that bet, I think you're right. So, practically, enrollment's open right now, meaning if you're a Cobb EMC member, that's a today problem, not a someday problem.

Ray: Which, by the way, is the whole game with a project like this. You can build the cleverest site in the country and it still needs people saying yes to a block. That's the piece our sponsor Our Power Co. actually does for projects, filling the subscriber side once the site's ready.

Della: Noted, and we'll get to them properly later. One more thing on Georgia before we move, though: Gas South and Colite aren't household names on this show yet, and I think that's worth saying out loud. Not every project needs a brand-name financier to make news.

Ray: Agreed, sometimes it's just a co-op, a DOT, and two partners nobody's heard of yet, and that's a perfectly good story. Okay, from small blocks on a highway to something a little more local. Oswego, Illinois.

Della: Illinois. Again. We need an actual counter on the wall at this point.

Ray: Give it another month and I'll build you one. This is One Energy Renewables, going through Illinois Shines, on land owned by Specialty Oswego LLC. The village's zoning commission just recommended it unanimously, October 8th.

Della: Unanimous is the detail I'd flag. No fight at the zoning meeting is its own kind of news on this beat, because so many of these projects die right there, at the local board, long before Springfield's even involved.

Ray: Right, and that's the part that should actually travel. If you're a developer somewhere else fighting a skeptical zoning board, "here's a village that got a unanimous yes" is a useful thing to bring into that room.

Della: Here's the part that actually matters underneath the vote, though: what's in it for the village, not just the subscribers.

Ray: It would serve over a thousand residents in Oswego and the wider Kendall County area, schools included, and ComEd-territory subscribers would see roughly a ten percent bill discount.

Della: And the village gets paid for hosting it, not just taxed for tolerating it.

Ray: Nine thousand dollars a year into the village's capital fund, stepping up five percent every five years under the annexation agreement. Construction's not until spring 2028 though, running that fall.

Della: Two years out. That's a long runway for something that got a unanimous yes already. Makes you wonder what's actually holding the queue up between a clean local approval and a shovel in the ground.

Ray: Thirty to forty year project life too, and then the land goes back to farming. So whoever's a toddler in Oswego right now might be the one watching it get decommissioned.

Della: I keep coming back to that annexation payment structure, though. A flat nine thousand with a built-in step-up is such a small, specific number, but it tells you the village actually negotiated instead of just taking whatever first offer showed up.

Ray: Agreed, and that fee structure is the part worth other small villages copying, not just "say yes to solar."

Della: Okay, that's a wild way to think about a solar project's timeline, but sure. Illinois tally continues. Next one takes us out of one state and into four at once.

Ray: Captona just made a preferred-equity investment in a Nexamp community solar portfolio. Fifty-five megawatts of solar, plus five megawatt-hours of storage, ten projects across Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, and New York.

Della: Nexamp. We've talked about them before, right?

Ray: Solar Power World's number one community solar company, four years running, as of this past July. So this isn't some unproven platform Captona's betting on, this is the incumbent getting fresh capital stacked on top.

Della: Which is sort of the flip side of a question I keep asking on this show. We talk a lot about consolidation and capital finding its way to the platforms that already have the relationships. This is literally that, in real time, for the already-biggest player.

Ray: Sure, but I'd push back a little. Preferred equity behind an operating portfolio, with storage already attached, isn't the same as buying up a smaller developer. It's financing what's already working, not swallowing a competitor.

Della: Fair distinction. I'll allow it. For anyone whose capital stack doesn't usually include this layer, remind me why preferred equity is the tool here instead of just more debt.

Ray: Because at this scale you don't want to load up more fixed debt service on top of what's already there. Preferred equity sits between debt and common equity, it gets paid before the sponsor's own return but it's not adding a hard repayment schedule the portfolio has to hit every quarter.

Della: So it's growth capital that doesn't make the balance sheet more fragile if a few projects have a slow year.

Ray: Exactly, which is probably why a platform this size reaches for it instead of just going back to its lenders again.

Della: Okay, that actually changes how I read the deal. And how much did Captona actually put in?

Ray: Didn't say.

Della: Of course not.

Ray: Fifty-five megawatts, four states, storage attached, and the dollar figure just... isn't in the release anywhere. Somebody's very deliberate about that.

Della: I'm not even mad, it's just funny how consistently this industry announces the shape of a deal and keeps the actual number in a locked drawer. Captona's calling it the next phase of their preferred-equity approach, whatever that means exactly.

Ray: It means they want you to know they do more than one of these. And Illinois shows up in the project mix again, so, counter.

Della: I'm building the counter. Last one today is the big one, and it's not even a project, it's a budget line.

Ray: New York just put two hundred million dollars into NY-Sun, through the state's Sustainable Futures Program, as part of this year's state budget. That program already covers rooftop and community solar, over five hundred sixty-five megawatts of it statewide, enough for ninety thousand homes.

Della: Okay, break down where the new money actually goes, because "two hundred million for solar" could mean a lot of things.

Ray: About a hundred and sixteen million of it is earmarked specifically for commercial and community solar projects over one megawatt, which is projected to cover roughly four hundred fifty megawatts and reach more than seventy-three thousand homes and businesses.

Della: So the community-scale piece isn't an afterthought in there, it's most of the number.

Ray: And twenty million carved out on top of that for low- and moderate-income homeowners doing on-site solar, enough for sixty-five hundred homes.

Della: That's a real split, not just a headline figure with no follow-through. What's the industry saying about it?

Ray: Noah Ginsburg from the New York Solar Energy Industries Association put it simply: rooftop and community solar are powerful tools to lower utility bills for all New Yorkers.

Della: Hard to argue with that framing. My one caution, and it's the same caution I'd put on any budget line: money allocated isn't megawatts built. We just covered that Lawrence Berkeley Lab data a couple weeks back, the forty-five month median wait for one-to-five megawatt interconnections, which is exactly the size tier most of this new funding would land in.

Ray: That's fair, and it's worth holding onto. Budget certainty helps a developer plan a pipeline, but it doesn't move a project through a queue any faster. So the two hundred million is real, it's just not the whole story until projects actually come out the other side.

Della: Right, that's not a knock on the funding, it's just the honest next question. Worth checking back on once the first round of this money actually gets assigned to projects.

Ray: Agreed. So today we went from three pieces of equipment at a time on a highway shoulder, to a village getting paid to host a project, to the biggest community solar platform in the country stacking fresh capital, to a state writing a nine-figure check. Same business, every size.

Della: I like that as the whole episode, honestly. No heads-up this week, four clean wins did the job on their own. Before we go, let's properly thank today's sponsor.

Ray: Our Power Co. brought you this episode, and it's a simple pitch. You build the solar, they bring the community.

Della: Which, tying back to that highway project earlier, is exactly the gap between a site that's finished and a site that's actually subscribed. Filling subscriber capacity is the entire job, nationwide, whatever state's program you're working inside.

Ray: And if you're listening as a homeowner or renter instead of a developer, that's a different door for you. Go to join community dot solar, and you can subscribe yourself to start lowering your own bill.

Della: Since we're on the sponsor, one more honest thing. This show is made almost entirely with AI, and that's a deliberate choice about which tools we use. We picked ones built by companies that cover their own energy and grid costs, with water-efficient cooling, instead of passing that cost onto the households and small businesses around their data centers.

Ray: On a show about lowering bills, that felt like the least we could do.

Della: And every figure you heard today is sourced and linked in the show notes, as always.

Ray: Find us wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and now full video episodes on YouTube if you'd rather watch than listen.

Della: And head to community solar dot news for the newsletter.

Ray: See you Tuesday.

Della: That's the community in community solar.