The Land Nobody Wanted Is Having a Moment: Apples, a Superfund Site, and the Money That Followed

Ray: Welcome to Community Solar News! I'm Ray.

Della: And I'm Della. Ray, before we get into the rundown, I need you to brace yourself, because today we've got an orchard.

Ray: An orchard.

Della: An actual, four-hundred-year-old apple orchard. With solar equipment tucked in around the trees.

Ray: Okay, I'm already in trouble, aren't I.

Della: You're going to light up like you did about the sheep. I can feel it coming.

Ray: I never apologized for the sheep and I'm not going to start now. Let's get into it. Four stories today, no heads-up, which, that's four weeks in a row now without one?

Della: I'm not counting out loud because I don't want to jinx it. But yeah.

Ray: Alright. First up, Della, tell me about this orchard.

Della: So this is in Granville, Massachusetts, out near the Connecticut border. Developer's BlueWave, and it's a finalist in Solar Builder's Project of the Year Awards this cycle, the one to ten megawatt category.

Ray: Finalist, not winner yet.

Della: Finalist as of the vote closing last Friday. But I wanted to get this one on air regardless of how the vote lands, because the design is the story, not the trophy.

Ray: Okay, sell it to me.

Della: Three sites, forty five acres total, eight point eight megawatts DC of solar plus over twelve megawatt hours of battery storage. And the land belongs to the Roberts family, who've been farming it since the seventeen hundreds.

Ray: Wait, the seventeen hundreds? Like actual colonial-era.

Della: Actual colonial era. And instead of clearing it for a flat field of equipment, BlueWave offset the equipment's edges and tailored the row spacing so they could keep farming right alongside it. About a thousand apple and conifer trees growing in and around the arrays.

Ray: A thousand trees. Okay, this is the sheep story's cousin. I'm calling it now, this is the new one I bring up every time somebody tries to tell me agrivoltaics is a niche.

Della: I knew it. I knew the second I read 'apple trees' you'd be insufferable about this by Thursday.

Ray: Give me till Thursday, I'll be insufferable about it well past that. But seriously, this matters for the audience. The equipment stack on this one's worth noting too. Qcells modules, Solectria inverters, Solar FlexRack trackers on APA foundations, Gotion on the storage side.

Della: Right, and the installers were Elm Electric and Western Earthworks, local shops, not some national roll-up crew. If you're a developer sitting on land with an existing farm tenant you think disqualifies the site, this is the proof it doesn't. You design around the trees instead of through them.

Ray: That's the actionable bit right there. You don't need to pick between the farm and the array.

Ray: And it's not nothing that this got nominated in the first place. Solar Builder runs an award category specifically for projects this size, because the little ones don't usually get the spotlight the three hundred megawatt portfolios do.

Della: Which is kind of the whole deal with this show too, honestly.

Della: Exactly. Alright, story two is yours, and this one's got dirt. Literally.

Ray: Literally dirt, yes. This is Hillsboro, Illinois. AC Power built a six point nine megawatt DC community solar project on thirty three acres of what used to be a zinc smelting operation.

Della: Used to be. Past tense doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Ray: The site's been on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List since two thousand seven. It's a hundred thirty two acres total, and there's still a ten acre containment cell sitting right there from the cleanup. The solar array shares the property with it.

Della: So they didn't wait for the land to be perfect, they built around the part that still needs watching.

Ray: Right. Pepper Program Management handled the EPC, JA Solar modules, Chint inverters, Array Technologies single axis trackers. Over eleven thousand five hundred modules. And the output, about eleven thousand five hundred fifty megawatt hours a year, enough for something like twelve hundred fifty homes.

Della: And it's a city owned property, right?

Ray: City owned, so Hillsboro's collecting lease payments and tax revenue on top of everything else, on land that was sitting there as a federal liability. About ten thousand metric tons of carbon avoided a year is the number they're citing.

Ray: And this isn't a one-off either. Brownfield and Superfund sites keep coming up as EPA-cleared land nobody wants for housing but works just fine for an array that doesn't need people living on top of it.

Della: Okay, I want to say something slightly sharp here. Every time somebody tells me there's no good land left for solar, I want to just hand them this one. A former Superfund site. If AC Power can permit and build on dirt the EPA had to fence off, 'we couldn't find a site' is not really a planning problem anymore, it's a looking problem.

Ray: That's the hot take of the day right there. And it's also another one for the Illinois pile.

Della: Oh, here we go.

Ray: I'm not even going to pretend I'm being subtle about it anymore, Della. Illinois just keeps showing up.

Della: We are never renaming this show, but I'm also never letting you forget how often I have to say that.

Ray: Give it another month, we'll see.

Della: Alright, story three. This one's a financing story, and it's actually a nice companion to what we just said about Illinois and about land nobody else wanted, because it's about who's willing to lend against that kind of portfolio.

Ray: Pivot Energy closed its first term loan. A hundred seventy three million dollars, covering fifty one community-scale solar projects, a hundred thirty five megawatts DC, spread across six states.

Della: First term loan. That phrase is doing something, Ray.

Ray: It is. First Citizens Bank, Huntington Bank, and BankUnited did the lending, and what this actually does is take projects that were sitting on Pivot's construction warehouse facility, the short-term, more expensive money, and roll them into one long-term structure.

Della: Which frees up the warehouse line to go build the next batch.

Ray: Exactly. Pivot's CFO called it an important step, said it gives them room to grow faster. And look, I know you've got your standing line about this kind of deal.

Della: You know me so well. My pushback's been, this kind of institutional money goes to platforms that already have the lender relationship, not the developer still chasing their first construction loan.

Ray: Right, and normally I'd just nod along. But this is Pivot's first term loan. They're not six funds deep like Generate Capital and KeyState. This is a company proving the structure works for the first time, not cashing in a relationship they've had for a decade.

Della: Okay, that's fair, actually. I'll take that one. First time is a different animal than sixth time.

Ray: I'm framing that and putting it on the wall.

Della: Don't get used to winning these.

Ray: Last story, and it's the big number of the day. Aligned Climate Capital, three hundred eighty seven million dollars, construction to permanent financing, for a hundred twenty six megawatts across twenty community solar projects.

Della: Where's this one sitting?

Ray: Split between Illinois and Maryland. About a hundred fifteen megawatts DC across eighteen sites in Illinois under the Adjustable Block Program, and eleven megawatts DC across two sites in Maryland under the state's community solar program.

Della: Illinois again.

Ray: Illinois again. Apterra Infrastructure Capital led the deal, and the lender list is long. BankUnited, Stifel, a bank called Banco de Credito e Inversiones, Amalgamated, Siemens, Farmer Mac, BTG Pactual. Seven different names on one capital stack.

Della: That's the part I want to sit on for a second. Aligned's CEO, Peter Davidson, basically said the quiet thing out loud, that individual community solar projects are too small on their own for a traditional infrastructure investor to bother with.

Ray: Which is exactly why you bundle twenty of them together.

Della: Right, and once you do, you get Apterra's co-CEO talking about scale and contracted revenue and experienced sponsorship, which is banker-speak for 'now this looks like something we understand.' It's the same story we keep telling on this show, just with bigger numbers attached.

Ray: And on the Maryland side specifically, at least forty percent of that capacity is reserved for low and moderate income subscribers. That's the detail I actually care about here, more than the dollar figure.

Della: No, and that's worth saying. Two hundred twenty five million kilowatt hours a year out of this, enough for around thirty one thousand five hundred homes.

Ray: Thirty one thousand five hundred homes off twenty projects that, on their own, nobody wanted to finance. That's the whole argument for bundling, right there.

Della: Said like a man who loves a good tally.

Ray: So let's tally the day. An orchard that's older than the country doing agrivoltaics right, a Superfund site turned into a tax line for its own city, a developer proving out its first term loan, and now the biggest check of the four, three hundred eighty seven million dollars, landing in the same two states we keep ending up in anyway.

Della: Illinois and Maryland, holding up more than their share of the rundown again.

Ray: Four wins. Not a single heads-up needed.

Della: I'll take a week like that.

Ray: Before we let you go, a couple of things. First, our sponsor.

Della: Community Solar News is brought to you by Our Power Co. You build the solar, we bring the community.

Ray: Let that sit for a second, because that's really the whole pitch. If you're a developer or operator with capacity sitting unfilled, subscriber acquisition is the one thing Our Power Co. does, and it's what they do nationwide.

Della: And if you're listening as a homeowner or renter who just wants to subscribe yourself and lower your bill, that's a different front door. Go to join community dot solar.

Ray: Quick honest note too, since we're talking about who's actually behind this show. It's made almost entirely with AI, and we picked tools from companies that pay for their own energy and water use instead of passing those costs onto the households and small businesses near their data centers.

Della: On an energy show, that felt like the least we could do. And every number you heard today is sourced and linked in the show notes.

Ray: One more thing. If you want the day to day between episodes, we've got a free daily rundown called the Solar Docket, docket filings, capacity block changes, program notices, deals, with a quick read on what each one actually means. It's at community solar dot news.

Della: And for the full show, we're on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and now YouTube if you'd rather watch Ray get emotional about an apple orchard.

Ray: I will not be apologizing for that a second time.

Della: Head to community solar dot news for the newsletter too. I'm Della.

Ray: I'm Ray.

Ray: And just to give you the shape of it, this is fifty one separate projects, not one mega-site. That's the kind of granular, scattered portfolio that used to be nearly impossible to term out under one clean structure.

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