Overview

We now continue our development of broader impacts in systems design and management. So far, we have addressed the Goal of Solar Energy Design through engineering applications (Lessons 2, 3, 4) and through financial/economic applications (Lessons 5, 6, 7). In Lessons 8, 9, and 10 we are addressing the Goal of Solar Design by helping the client to manage risk in the given locale.

In Lesson 8, we discovered that there are meteorological phenomena that are really out of our control, and our job as a design and management team is to help the client to manage risk. Now, we continue with important design elements tied to managing risk, but within the social realm of community, regional, and federal stakeholders. In Lesson 9, we want to address helping our client to manage risk in the social environment, through our developed awareness of permitting and policy within the given locale. As we shall see, just because you have a good solar resource and a sound financial return (in principle), doesn't mean that the policies of the locale will allow one to actually implement a SECS, or to implement a system in a financially responsible manner.

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• describe the connections between policy making and renewable energy adoption at the local, regional, and federal levels;
• define the difference between solar rights and solar access;
• describe the role of net metering and permitting in solar project development;
• describe the leading methods for community solar development.

What is due for Lesson 9?

This lesson will take us one week to complete. Please refer to the Course Syllabus for specific time frames and due dates. Specific directions for the assignment below can be found in this lesson.

Questions?

If you have any questions, please post them to the Lesson 9 General Questions and Comments Discussion Forum. I will check the forum regularly to respond. While you are in a discussion, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help out a classmate.

Context

Just think, in Germany, you have the right to be exposed to sunlight directly in any office scenario (no windowless cubicles permitted). In many states, you have the right to hang dry your clothes on a line outside. In ancient Rome, an individual had the right to access solar gains or be compensated for an obstruction of that resource. When we talk about policies for solar energy, one of the first is the basic ability to access that sunlight and then make use of it to do work!

The concept of solar rights is still emerging in the USA. I am going to recommend that you take about 10 minutes to review the current state of solar rights from the Solar America Board for Codes and Standards (the Solar ABCs [10]; choose 1 page summary). The coverage is brief but useful when considering the scope of solar legal status in the USA.

Solar Rights

The phrase "solar rights" is often used in a general sense and a specific sense. In general, solar rights are the broad class of legal rights to access and make use of the light from the Sun. In the specific sense, solar rights are distinguished from "solar access" by the following description:

• Solar Rights: the legal ability to install SECS on your property that is subject to land use restrictions. One of the classic SECS rights is the ability to dry your clothing outside on a clothes line. Perfect high utility SECS, but often blocked by local suburban covenants that would consider such displays as unwanted for the overall "appearance" of the neighborhood.

Here, solar rights describe the ability to make use of solar energy in your locale.

Solar Access

Solar access is the functional ability of a SECS within a locale to receive or "access" solar gains across property lines without shadowing or other obstruction occurring from buildings/trees/landmarks set in a nearby property. It also has to do with the enacted local policies to manage the commons of the solar resource system, and an individual's ability to be granted compensation if access is blocked in some way. Bronin has described solar access as being managed in three manners: as a solar easement, through covenants, and through lease agreements.

• Solar Easements: the legal ability for a property owner to use sunlight across property boundaries. Easements allow a designated landowner to hold some rights with respect to the property of another landowner. Such an easement will have been voluntarily bargained for and agreed upon. In such a case, one client will receive access to a solar corridor/envelope, while another landowner will receive some compensation to offset the burden from losing the access. [Bronin, 2009]
• Covenants: binding terms for current owners and those that follow later. A covenant can function well for newer subdivisions of homes, but they are more challenging to create for nonresidential regions or well-established residential areas. Of course, covenants have also been used to inhibit the use of SECS like clothes lines, foliage/tree types and density, and even visible displays of PV/SHW systems.
• Lessor-lessee arrangements: agreement that ties a solar right to the temporary term of tenancy. Solar leases will typically involve airspace (solar envelope or solar skyspace). Airspace has a common law role as real property, and is distinct from ground/mineral estates. A client owning property has the potential to sever the parcel of ground from the airspace, and then lease just the airspace. As such this type of lease allows the solar client to make use of or “occupy” the airspace without obstruction.

We have already discussed the role of minimizing shading in SECSs that intentionally collect and convert solar gains (rather than shading devices that attempt to control solar gains). Solar access has to do with access to the solar resource within the locale over many hours of the day, and across the months of the year. Recall that we already developed some skill to assess the solar access at a site through the sun path diagrams in Lesson 2. Hey, we just tied together something that was a lot of work earlier with an advanced topic in Lesson 8! Great!

Solar Envelope

The solar envelope is an extension of solar access, conceived for urban scenarios with a cluster of buildings and obstructions. Professor Emeritus Ralph Knowles of the Dept. of Architecture, the University of Southern California, conceived and developed an extensive exploration of the solar envelope as a concept for policy development and planning. You are welcome to read about Dr. Knowles' solar envelope concept in complement to our assigned reading.

Net Metering

One of the more recent trends from the past decade of photovoltaic adoption is the ability to connect directly into the power grid. In such cases, policies have been adopted to allow renewable generators to "bank" excess power into the grid and receive credits for the excess energy (in kWh). But each locale will be subject to different policies enabling or prohibiting such practices. Net metering is expanding in creative ways, including aggregation of multiple distributed energy sources for credit, and distributing joint credit from a centralized solar garden [13] among multiple participants in a community.

Solar Permitting

Permitting is the unseen monster of project development that will slow or stop a project from moving forward. The key rewards of an established permitting process for SECS include reduced costs of installation and faster turnaround from design to deployment. It will be well worth your integrative design team's time to familiarize yourselves with the permitting process for your locale of interest.

Best practices have been itemized by IREC in our reading. We can distill those into a few core features that we would hope for in an integrative process that includes permitting:

• speed of processing (expedited processing, online processing);
• transparency of the process (requirements posted online and openly);
• reduced permitting costs (flat fee over value-based fees); and
• supporting permitting staff are knowledgeable of solar installations.

Different Countries, Different Approaches

So, first, "REN21" is the acronym for the "Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century". REN21 is a non-profit network of stakeholders established to connect key contributors from governments, international organizations, industry partners/associations, participants from science and academia, and society at large. We are using their centralized information base to expose the diverse approaches that countries can take to develop energy generation and manage energy demand at the Federal level.

After reviewing the REN21's Renewables GSR, you will have a little broader perspective on the various approaches, and will be able to compare solar policies in Germany vs. China vs. Columbia vs. Kenya.

Discussion Activity - National PV Targets for Electricity Production

Based on the information contained in the REN21 Renewables Global Satus Report [5], take a look at different countries that are actively setting PV targets. Among those, review the data for the following three:

• Argentina
• India
• South Africa

Directions

After reading and taking down some comparative notes, please take 10-15 minutes to consider if there is anything in common with the choices for targets, or if there are strong contrasts in targets and time horizons. Can you speculate as to why these countries have targets for PV, while countries like Brazil and the Russian Federation do not?

The discussion is open-ended, and so a dialogue among students is strongly encouraged. If you have local knowledge of other countries in relation to the discussion, please contribute.

This discussion will take place in the Lesson 9 Discussion Forum in Canvas.

Grading Criteria

Discussions will be graded on the quality of your post and the thoughtful contributions you make to your classmates' posts. Please see the Discussion Expectations and Rubric [14] under Orientation/Resources.

Deadline

Typically initial posts are due in the middle of the study week (Sunday), and comments and replies are due by the end of the study week (Wednesday). Please see the Canvas calendar for specific due dates.

Language of the Commons

In both readings, we are going to see the language developed by Nobel Laureate in Economics Elinor Ostrom, from her seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

• Resource Systems: the larger stock from which a good is appropriated.
• Resource Units: the flow of goods being produced.
• Providers: teams or individuals who arrange for the provision of a resource system at multiple levels, to ensure long-term stability or sustainability of the resource system.
• Producers: teams and individuals who construct, commission, and maintain access to the resource system.
• Appropriators: individuals who make use of resource units.
• Arbiter: a third party, as either an impartial person or an institution, that is given the power to decide among stakeholders in a controversy.

From this, we state that the Sun is an energetic resource system providing the flow of light (as resource units) in the shortwave band (280–2500 nm). Once we have established our language for resource systems and resource units, we can review the Typology of Goods, discussed with examples in the article by Brownson (2013). We summarize those four main goods below:

• Excludable Goods: restriction of access to the good. High excludability means access to the good can be intentionally restricted, while low excludability means one cannot easily restrict access to the good.
• Rivalrous Goods: when the appropriation of a good takes away from another’s ability to appropriate that good (called subtractable). High rivalry means that the goods are subtractable (independent of excludability), while low rivalry means that subtraction of a unit of the good does not take away from the ability of another to use the good.
• Private Good: when a good is both rivalrous and excludable.
• Public Good: when a good is both non-rivalrous and non-excludable (really big resource systems like the Sun).
• Club Good: when a good is non-rivalrous and excludable.
• Common Good: when a good is rivalrous but non-excludable.

Models of Community Solar

Our final reading puts a few boundaries around the varieties of "community solar" that appear to be emerging in the USA of late. There are good examples in the document, which will be helpful for our Learning Activity in this lesson.

1. Utility-Sponsored Model: A utility owns or operates a project that is open to voluntary ratepayer participation.
2. Special Purpose Entity (SPE) Model: Individuals join in a business enterprise to develop a community shared solar project.
3. Nonprofit Model: A charitable nonprofit corporation administers a community shared solar project on behalf of donors or members.

While community solar PV is just now emerging onto the market, note that community solar products have been in existence for millennia as shared fields and gardens for produce development and resale. Based on the prior examples from farming, the management of a community resource is well within the scope of SECS expansion.

Community Solar Case Studies

As of 2020, Community Solar is now authorized in 19 states and Washington D.C. There are companies that specialize in community solar that would arrange deals with farmers to lease portions of their land to build solar projects. As this segment of solar industry expands, farmers (and landowners in general) may take advantage of this new revenue stream. In addition to generating local revenue, solar projects help states make progress toward their clean energy and sustainability goals [Gahl, 2020].

The case studies presented in the report show that typically farms will lease portions of their land to community solar companies for a fixed term at a fixed price. These solar lease payments tend to be higher than those for traditional agricultural operations and are normally based on the state policies, where the project is located. Land leasing for solar often provides farmers with higher and more stable income than that obtained through producing agricultural products, which creates an incentive.  

Scenario

Imagine you are part of a superior design team based in PA, a state with a restructured electricity market such that community solar is possible. Your integrative design team is already capable at commercial and residential PV installations, but wants to branch out and take advantage of this "community solar" concept. Your job is to make a short survey of best practices available elsewhere and suggest a model for developing community PV in an urban community in the Philadelphia area. Understandably, your report would be based on limited information of the actual site, but you can leverage extensive access to general information about the types of building and potential stakeholders in the locale of interest. Based on your findings, you need to prepare a concise but convincing summary document for your supervisor to review.

Directions

1. Find and review a case of community shared solar anywhere that would align with a prospective community solar scenario in Philadelphia area. Make sure to state the commonalities in that real case with those in the potential project scenario.

2. Develop a 2-3 page executive summary that includes:

• background information of the locale
• client base and stakeholders
• proposed model for community solar
• comparative analysis (cons and pros) for community solar vs. individual solar. (If you like, you can present this information in a table).

3. Provide a conclusive statement about the feasibility and benefits of the project.  

Submission

Submit your Summary as a PDF document into the Lesson 9 Learning Activity Dropbox: Community Solar in Canvas. Remember to appropriately cite any sources of information used in your report.

Grading Criteria

You will be graded on your ability to develop a compelling outline that provides scope for applying the community solar concept in a residential Philadelphia neighborhood. The activity assesses your knowledge of investigating the potential client and stakeholders at the locale when planning to maximize solar utility in the pre-design phase. Please see specific grading rubrics in Canvas. 

Deadline

Please see the Canvas Calendar for specific due dates.

Summary

In this lesson, we attempted to flesh out some major policy topics tied to solar energy. In doing so, we were able to describe the connections between policy-making and renewable energy adoption at the local, regional, and federal levels. We explored the deeper meanings and implications of solar rights and solar access, which engage multiple stakeholders from a local and regional government. Then, we addressed the policy and permitting barriers/opportunities in solar project development.

Recall that we want to help our client to manage risk in the social environment, through our skill in negotiating permitting and policy barriers within the given locale. A good solar resource and a sound financial return (in principle) alone doesn't guarantee the locale will even allow a SECS, or to implement a system in a financially responsible manner.

The research of Dr. Ostrom suggested to us how local community action for solar energy is not only possible but is actively used today in other similar industries, where the dynamic appropriation and provisioning challenges of a resource system and resource units are addressed in a sustainable fashion. In turn, we used that thought process to describe new and expanding methods for community solar development.