DALTON, Ga. — Growing up in Cartersville, Georgia, Lisa Nash saw what happens to communities when factory jobs disappear. It was the 1980s and corporations were offshoring production to reduce costs and raise profits. The jobs that remained in this northwest corner of the state were typically lower-paying ones that didn’t offer the same ladder to the middle class.

“My parents and grandparents were in manufacturing, and they were the ones saying, ​‘Don’t do it,’” Nash recalled.

Nash disregarded their advice, embarking instead on a long career in manufacturing — first in textiles, followed by stints in aviation, automotive, and steel. Now she’s helping to bring higher-tech, higher-paying factory work back to the corridor between Atlanta and Chattanooga. 

Nash is the general manager of the Qcells solar panel factory in Dalton, a town of 34,000 located 50 miles up I-75 from her hometown. It opened in January 2019, after the Trump administration imposed a fresh round of tariffs on Chinese-made panels. The Korean conglomerate Hanwha owns Qcells, and initially planned to hire several hundred people at the site, Nash told me on a recent visit to the factory. By the end of 2019, it employed more than 800. 

Then, in 2020, Georgia helped elect President Joe Biden and sent two Democrats to the Senate, clinching a thin majority. Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock got to work crafting detailed policies to promote domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies, which China had dominated for years; they wanted solar panels and batteries made in America — specifically Georgia — instead of in China, a geopolitical rival.

Those measures made it into the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in August 2022 — two years ago this week. The legislation created the nation’s first comprehensive policies to support domestic clean energy manufacturing. Qcells broke ground on a second facility in Dalton in February 2023. Completed that August, the expansion added two football fields’ worth of manufacturing space with four new production lines — which produce 1.5 times more solar panels than the original three lines, thanks to technological advances. Now the whole complex employs 2,000 people full time and makes 5.1 gigawatts of solar panels a year, more than any other site in the U.S.

Politicians have been promising for decades to retrain American workers and revive long-lost manufacturing, with little to show for it. Now, though, the U.S. has entered a new era on trade: Leaders of both parties have rejected the long-standing free-trade consensus and its penchant for offshoring jobs. Biden married that reshoring impulse with a desire to boost clean energy production, to both stimulate the economy and fight climate change. 

This grand experiment remains in its infancy, and the success of the clean energy manufacturing revolution is by no means guaranteed. Cheap imports could outcompete even newly subsidized American products. 

And if Republicans win the presidency and retake Congress, they’ve threatened to stop subsidizing low-carbon energy resources and instead double down on fossil fuel production. House Republicans — including Dalton’s representative, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have voted repeatedly and unsuccessfully to repeal the domestic manufacturing incentives in the IRA. (Greene’s press office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

“Donald Trump and his Republican allies promised to gut the Inflation Reduction Act if he’s reelected, so there’s a lot at stake here,” Representative Nikema Williams, who leads the Georgia Democrats, told me.

Since the IRA passed, Georgia has received $23 billion in clean energy factory investment, much of it flowing to northwest Georgia. I wanted to see what impact this is having on communities formerly hit hard by industrial decline, so I followed the money trail to Dalton earlier this summer. 

I found a population that seems to like having advanced solar manufacturing in their backyard. Dalton’s solar jobs are boosting wages, invigorating the historic town center, and employing local high school graduates. Those benefits are starting to spread to nearby communities, where new solar factories are springing to life. In November, voters will weigh two very different visions of America’s energy future on the ballot, but Dalton is already reaping the rewards from slotting solar into its storied history of industrial production.

From carpets to solar

Both CSX and Norfolk Southern run Class I rail lines through Dalton, a testament to its industrial legacy, and freight trains bellow day and night.

That legacy harks back to 1900, according to local historians, when Catherine Evans Whitener sold a hand-tufted bedspread from her front porch for $2.50. The cottage industry took off in this land of forested ridges and stream-crossed valleys, and over time, local factories consolidated into global carpeting giants Shaw Industries and Mohawk Industries.

“The carpet industry was born here,” Carl Campbell, executive director of economic development at the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce, told me when I visited the Chamber. The New Georgia Encyclopedia states that 80 percent of America’s tufted carpet production happens within 100 miles of Dalton.

The conference room where we spoke sported large-format aerial photographs of the major factories nearby: the largest Shaw site, 650,000 square feet; and the new Engineered Floors colossus, 2.8 million square feet. 

“You feel like there’s enough carpet in that building to cover the whole world,” said Campbell, who grew up in Dalton. 

Dalton employment numbers peaked at 80,200 in 2006, per the Chattanooga Times Free Press. But the Great Recession crushed the homebuilding industry, cratering demand for Dalton’s carpeting products. 

Dalton ​“was a ghost town in 2011, nothing going on because everybody was hurting,” Campbell added. From June 2011 to June 2012, Dalton notched the dubious distinction of most jobs lost of all 372 metro areas surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By that point, one-quarter of Dalton’s pre-recession jobs had vanished, and unemployment surged to 12.3 percent. 

Since then, the industry has recovered somewhat. Engineered Floors, Mohawk, and Shaw still dominate local employment, with some 14,000 jobs among them, Campbell said. Those companies have had to adapt to evolving consumer tastes, shifting from wall-to-wall carpets to hardwood and other flooring materials. They’ve also automated aspects of production, reducing the number of workers needed.

In the wake of the Great Recession, local leaders sought to diversify Dalton’s industry. The county acquired an undeveloped lot south of town, and Campbell later pushed to clear and level the site, so it was shovel-ready for some future tenant. When Trump’s solar tariffs kicked in, Campbell’s counterparts at Georgia’s Department of Economic Development sent Qcells his way. 

Qcells showed up in February 2018, looking to spin up its first American solar-panel factory in less than a year. ​“Suddenly, we had exactly what they needed,” Campbell said.

Thus Dalton managed to bring in new industry to balance out its base of carpets and flooring. Qcells originally promised to invest $130 million and hire 525 people within five years, Campbell said. 

“They did it in three months,” he added. ​“In terms of an economic development project, they check all the boxes: Everything they said they would do, they did it faster than they said they would do it.”

Domestic solar manufacturing, by humans and robots

When I asked folks around town what they thought of Qcells, they kept mentioning the dozens of air-conditioning units arrayed on the factory roof, like a field of doghouses, easily visible from I-75. I later learned that Qcells brought in helicopters to install those units, which made for a bit of small-town spectacle. Still, it struck me as a surprising detail to dwell on for a business that somehow turns the sun’s rays into cheap, emissions-free electricity. 

Once I crossed Qcells’ sizzling parking lot and stepped indoors, it started to make sense. Georgia gets hot, and carpet factories get hot, but the vast floors of the twin solar factories are quite literally cool places to work. 

The climate control is not unique to assembling solar panels, but it is required for the sensitive, precisely calibrated product. The air conditioners are but one sign that high-tech manufacturing has arrived, and that it makes for pretty comfortable work.

I met my two tour guides, Wayne Lock and Alan Rodriguez, in the factory lobby, and they quickly confirmed the physical appeal of Qcells jobs. Lock, now a quality engineer at Qcells, previously worked in carpet manufacturing; he had to wear special heat-resistant gear to handle carpeting materials that would otherwise deliver third-degree burns. Rodriguez, an engineering supervisor at Qcells, used to apply the coating material underneath carpets.

“You’re sandwiched between the steamer and the oven, so it gets quite hot,” Rodriguez told me. Attending to those machines exposed him to temperatures that could exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Even more than Qcells’ air conditioning, though, people I spoke to kept bringing up the pay.

By offering more for zero-skill, entry-level positions than the other factories in town, Qcells started attracting workers and pushed up wages across Dalton, Campbell said: ​“Competition brings everybody, so everybody’s had to kind of equalize to keep employees.” 

Now Qcells hourly wages for non-experienced hires start at $17.50 to $22 — that amounts to $36,400 to $45,760 a year for full-time work. Workers with experience in robotics and manufacturing can take home much more than that. Employees can raise their pay through a variety of on-the-job training, most of which involves handling and troubleshooting the in-house fleet of robots.

Lock, Rodriguez, and I walked into the newest factory, past meeting rooms with names like Naboo and Mandalore, Star Wars locales where quirky robots coexist with all manner of creatures. As we strolled across the floor, squat wheeled autonomous vehicles rolled past us down pathways marked by tape on the smooth floor, ferrying bales of materials or hauling out hulking boxes of finished panels.

“We try to stay out of their way, and if we don’t, they yell at us,” said Lock. ​“It’s fun.”

As we stood talking, I noticed that one such robo-buggy was waiting for us to move. Barely discernible over the background drone of machines, a female voice intoned, ​“Robot is moving. Please look out.” When humans hold up more time-sensitive deliveries, Lock explained, the voice switches to male and gets louder. 

Other robots remain fixed in place, carrying out repetitive precision tasks. I stared, mesmerized, at one machine that split wafer-thin silicon cells in half, first scoring them with a laser, then slicing them with a concentrated jet of water. A taller machine grabbed nearly 8-foot metal frames and sliced them through the air like a master swordsman in a Kurosawa film, to slot them around glassed-in silicon panels. 

Throughout the process, cameras scan cells and use artificial intelligence to shunt defective items off the line for manual correction. 

In the 2019-era factory next door, humans carry out many of these tasks. Lock, though, didn’t see the robots as competitors — he said they were taking on more physically demanding jobs so the humans could step into higher-skilled roles tending to robots.

“The ergonomics are better for you,” he said, and the new lines are more productive. 

Hiring local, spending local

When Qcells was first staffing up, it relied on Quick Start, a Georgia state program that funds worker training for new factories before they open — a major draw for executives deciding where to locate their factories.

Qcells still recruits to meet ongoing staffing needs, and it has been paying special attention to high schoolers who are graduating and looking for employment. Nash speaks passionately about Qcells’ recruitment efforts; she’s seen the civic fallout from decades when local families encouraged kids to avoid manufacturing.

“Small communities cannot thrive with kids graduating and leaving those communities to live elsewhere, to get high-paying technical jobs,” Nash said. ​“That’s what’s happening across the country. Bringing manufacturing back, and bringing highly automated manufacturing, is offering job opportunities where now these students are staying here.”

Some 56 percent of Dalton-area students enroll in postsecondary education within 16 months of graduating high school, said Stephani Womack, director of education and workforce development for the Greater Dalton Chamber of Commerce. For the remainder, the chamber wants to make sure family-supporting jobs are available.

For two weeks in June, Womack helped run Project Purpose, a crash course in how to start and navigate careers that pay living wages. Recent high school graduates prepped for interviews, shopped for professional clothes, and toured housing options and downtown hotspots — the kinds of places they could frequent once they join the workforce. 

But the centerpiece of the program amounted to professional speed dating, as Dalton’s major employers offered tours and entry-level jobs. Last year, Dalton’s first time running Project Purpose, seven young adults completed the program, and Qcells hired one of them. This time, 18 finished, and Qcells hired 12 of them to start on July 1.

“Next year, we hope to double that, or more,” Nash said. 

Several participants came in knowing about Qcells, betting that the intensive crash course would increase their odds of landing good roles there, Womack told me over a table at Garmony House, a downtown coffee shop that draws lines for its statuesque strawberry cupcakes and coffee-glazed cinnamon rolls.

“Qcells is providing a diverse set of options for our students who need to go to work but want to stay in our community,” Womack said. ​“They see a climate-controlled facility with entry-level opportunities — that’s exciting for them. … Manufacturing isn’t what it used to be.”

For younger people to stay in town and build a life, Dalton needs more housing, and now it’s getting its first large apartment complex in over two decades, Campbell said. In total, 900 apartment units are slated to come online from last August through this November — not enough to catch up on a long-running housing deficit, but a step in the right direction.

That renewed real estate activity is reflected in downtown Dalton’s bustling core. 

Locals pack the booths at the Oakwood Cafe, perhaps the only place in America that sells a platter of egg, sausage, toast, and grits for just $3.65. Multiple microbreweries beckon, as does a plush cocktail bar, the Gallant Goat, which stocks fresh mint by the fistful to garnish its drinks. Down the road, diners can sample ceviche of shrimp shipped in from coastal Mexico, succulent chicken wings, and high-end Southern cuisine. 

This spring, the plush Carpentry Hotel opened across from the Oakwood Cafe, decked out with vibrant textile art to commemorate the town’s carpeting heritage.

“That’s been big for us, getting that hotel in downtown. That’s indicative of a robust local economy that people are coming to participate in,” local real estate agent Beau Patton told me as the late afternoon sun streamed into the Gallant Goat. Patton works with Qcells employees who want to buy homes in the area. He sees the factory’s decision to locate there as ​“very mutually beneficial” for Qcells and Whitfield County: ​“What you hope is Whitfield County grows with it, and it grows with Whitfield County.” 

From Dalton to towns across Georgia

Dalton got in early on the national clean-energy factory revival, and has already seen its solar factory push up wages, enable high school graduates to stay and start careers, and inject money into a reinvigorated downtown. Many more communities in Georgia are following close behind with their own cleantech factories, seeking a similar economic jolt.

“There is a palpable and intense sense of excitement across the state about how these manufacturing and infrastructure policies are supercharging Georgia’s economic development,” said Senator Jon Ossoff, the Georgia Democrat who authored the IRA manufacturing incentives that Qcells is tapping into. ​“And I would add, it’s not just the primary industrial facilities; it’s all of the secondary and tertiary suppliers and vendors and service companies and the financial services firms needed to support them.”

Qcells is building an even bigger factory compound down in Cartersville, which won a conditional $1.45 billion loan guarantee from the Department of Energy on August 8. This facility will take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits to onshore more steps of the solar supply chain: slicing silicon wafers, carving them into solar cells, and assembling finished modules with even newer robots than the ones I saw in Dalton. Until now, those high-value precursors to solar panels were shipped in from overseas. Workers in Dalton complete just the last step: assembling modules. Cartersville promises to bring the dream of American-made solar a bit closer to reality.

To achieve that dream, the industry has a few other challenges to confront. For one, 97 percent of the glass that encloses solar panels comes from China. Besides the geopolitical implications of that dependence, glass is so fragile and heavy that its shipping costs make domestic production enticing both economically and environmentally. 

“We need domestic glass to have an efficient supply chain,” said Suvi Sharma, founder and CEO of solar recycling startup Solarcycle. His company is breaking ground on a combination solar-panel recycling facility and solar-glass factory in Cedartown, some 70 miles southwest of Dalton. Sharma expects to invest $344 million in the community and hire 600 full-time employees.

Compared with Dalton and Cartersville, ​“Cedartown is more off the beaten path — this would be the first large-scale factory going up there,” said Sharma. After years in which the population declined and young people looked elsewhere for jobs, ​“this enables them to keep people and bring in more people. There’s a cascading impact.”

Solarcycle will use its rail spur to ship in low-iron silica from a mine in Georgia, plus soda ash and limestone. Over time, it will supplement those raw ingredients with increasing amounts of glass the company will pull from decommissioned solar panels, including those made by Qcells. The goal is to produce enough glass for 5 gigawatts of panels per year; Solarcycle will ship the glass to nearby customers. At that point, workers in northwest Georgia will have a hand in all the major steps of solar-module production except the processing of raw polysilicon. Hanwha recently became the largest shareholder in REC Silicon to secure access to domestic polysilicon from the Pacific Northwest. 

Georgia also nabbed a hefty chunk of the electric-vehicle factory buildout catalyzed by IRA incentives. Hyundai is dropping nearly $1 billion on its ​“Metaplant” near the deepwater port of Savannah and building an adjacent $4.3 billion battery plant with LG. Kia erected a new EV9 SUV manufacturing line at its plant in West Point, about halfway down Georgia’s border with Alabama. The first EV9 rolled off the line in June — less than two years after the IRA was signed into law.

Dalton, then, is a leading indicator of the industrial invigoration that clean energy factories are bringing to cities and towns across Georgia. People broadly appreciate it — if not for the role in combating climate change or countering China’s industrial might, then for high starting wages, comfortable working conditions, and opportunities for advancement. 

But for this nascent factory boom to endure, the policies that triggered it need to stay in effect. The people of Georgia played a decisive role in spurring this manufacturing revival; this November, they’ll have an outsize role in deciding if it continues.

How Dalton, Georgia, went from Carpet Capital to Solartown, USA is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This story was originally published by Canary Media.

How hard could it be to bring more carbon-free power to New England, a region with a professed dedication to tackling the climate crisis?

It hasn’t been easy or straightforward for the New England Clean Energy Connect, a long-running effort by Massachusetts to import 1,200 megawatts of electricity produced by hydropower from Quebec. Instead, the project’s storyline resembles the unrelenting mishaps of Odysseus’ journey home from Troy, or perhaps the more contemporary twists of a Shonda Rhimes show. The transmission line doesn’t need to get away with murder, but it is on trial this week in Maine.

The specifics have a distinctly Mainer flavor to them — a jury of nine Cumberland County residents in Maine’s Business and Consumer Court will now decide if the billion-dollar project can move forward. But the missteps and setbacks in Maine offer lessons for all the other places where more clean-energy transmission lines are needed to clean up the grid — and that’s pretty much everywhere.

The U.S. Department of Energy found there is a ​“pressing need” for more transmission infrastructure around the country to keep the grid reliable while incorporating more renewable power. However, recent history is riddled with failed or delayed projects, and the NECEC saga shows how much can go wrong along the way.

Populations that may be committed to clean energy in a general sense have fought the NECEC transmission line over its effect on the local environment. But many also decry the project for operating in a way that prioritized the corporate profits of a scandal-ridden utility over the input of the affected communities.

The case also hits on the structural difficulty of building transmission lines across states. Massachusetts leaders hope to claim the imported renewable energy toward their ambitious decarbonization goals. But to do so, the lines must traverse someone else’s territory; Maine gets the construction jobs along the way, but bears all the ecological downsides for a project instigated by its neighbor — not long after Massachusetts balked at building the Cape Wind project in its own backyard, for that matter.

A history of misfires

Massachusetts’ missteps started back in 2018, when a state panel picked a winner from a solicitation of all sorts of clean energy sources.

Rather than building new clean power plants, Massachusetts picked a transmission line to bring electricity from Canadian hydropower through New Hampshire, burying the power lines through the scenic White Mountains to minimize visual impact. But New Hampshire regulators denied a key permit just a week after Massachusetts trumpeted its selection, effectively killing that plan. Later that year, Massachusetts switched to the Maine transmission line, which would be built by that state’s largest utility, Central Maine Power, a subsidiary of Avangrid.

Picking your partners has huge ramifications for clean energy projects. Massachusetts bet its clean energy supply on a corporate affiliate of Central Maine Power, which had just bungled the launch of a new customer billing system in 2017, resulting in erroneously inflated bills for some and unjustified threats to cut off service for others, according to a detailed investigation by The Portland Press Herald. That article called the episode a ​“customer service disaster that shattered the reputation of Maine’s largest utility.” Fresh from that scandal, the utility got to work locking down approvals for a project that it clearly stood to benefit from, but which offered more ambiguous upside to everyone else in the state.

Opponents couldn’t stop the project from getting its necessary approvals from the Maine Public Utilities Commission. Usually, when a project goes through the regulatory process and gets approved, it’s safe to go ahead and build it. But after the utility spent $450 million on construction and cut a path through 124 miles of forest, opposition groups rallied voters to pass a ballot referendum to stop it in November 2021, in a lopsided 60%–40% win.

For many Mainers, the resistance wasn’t so much about disrupting pristine nature — much of the region in question is already a working industrial landscape, noted Mary Ignatiadis, who is working on a documentary about Maine’s rejection of the transmission project. Mainers objected to what they saw as the project being ​“rammed through” with ​“a lack of inclusive stakeholder engagement.”

“Urban policymakers and investors underestimate the intuition and intelligence of rural communities and write them off,” said Ignatiadis, who works in clean energy and got involved in the documentary after the planned transmission line was proposed to be routed near her partner’s parents’ home in Anson, Maine.

But the coalition opposing the project deserves some scrutiny as well, because it’s indicative of how clean transmission lines can incite a diverse group of antagonists.

In this case, environmental and conservation groups like the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Council of Maine were joined by well-funded fossil gas plant owners like NextEra and Calpine, which would suffer economically if cheap hydropower started competing with their polluting plants in New England’s wholesale market.

“Project opponents, particularly when bankrolled by incumbents looking out for their own bottom lines, will find opportunities to misinform the public and obstruct development,” said Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law.

A common critique is that Maine would suffer environmentally for the project on behalf of Massachusetts. There’s no doubt that the physical disruption would take place in Maine. But, Peskoe pointed out, though Massachusetts would keep the renewables credits for its climate accounting, Maine would still enjoy downward pressure on energy prices from the influx of cheap hydropower in New England’s regional grid.

“Maine consumers should pay lower prices due to that project,” he said.

Transmission proponents may decry the pushback to NECEC as NIMBYism obstructing the clean energy transition. But jumping to the NIMBY label is ​“unnecessarily derogatory,” according to Portland-based energy and environmental lawyer David Littell.

“Maine has permitted and allowed more large-scale wind, solar and new transmission than any other New England state,” said Littell, who previously served as a commissioner on the Maine Public Utilities Commission. ​“When good projects are proposed, they are eventually approved. And Maine processes work better than most others I’ve seen.”

Now, the jury’s specific task is to decide whether Central Maine Power had completed enough work by the time the referendum intervened that it can legally finish the project, per the Boston Globe write-up of the case.

Either way the trial goes, it’s clear that Massachusetts’ bet on a quick clean-energy fix did not pay off. A story I wrote about the original plan in January 2018 pointed out that ​“project organizers have also promised that the whole thing will be done in time to begin delivery of power in 2020, but projects of this scale have a knack for thwarting timelines and budgets.”

Five years later, the saga continues to elucidate how not to get transmission built in America.

The fate of a key transmission line in Maine is on trial now is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.

This article was originally published by Canary Media.

California leads the nation in rooftop solar installations by a long shot. But it has never managed to craft a viable community solar market for people who can’t put panels on their own roofs. That’s been a glaring oversight in a state where median home prices in major cities have soared above $1 million, pushing home ownership out of reach for millions of residents.

But a late-summer legislative breakthrough could unleash community solar statewide in the next couple of years. AB 2316 passed the legislature by a broad majority last week with widespread support from interest groups — not just solar developers, but also environmental justice organizations, consumer advocates, the homebuilding industry and utility workers. By learning from successes and shortcomings in other states’ community solar programs, California designed its version to benefit customers, developers, workers and the overall power system at the same time.

In doing so, community-solar advocates sidestepped ongoing and contentious debates on how to properly compensate owners of rooftop solar. And they avoided critiques of unfair subsidies or cost shifts by ensuring these projects are, by definition, a good deal for everyone. 

The most common community-solar model has private developers build projects that individuals can subscribe to. As the projects generate solar power and feed it into the grid, subscribers earn credits that are applied to their electric bills. The subscription fees should be lower than the value of the credits so subscribers come out ahead financially. 

To make this work, policies are needed that tell utilities to credit customers’ energy bills for power produced elsewhere. In some states, these rules set a certain price that utilities must pay for community solar production. But exactly where to set that compensation level becomes a contentious question.

In California, compensation for community solar will be pegged to the actual value of electricity at the time it’s delivered to the grid. Since California is awash in solar in the sunny hours but desperately in need of power during evening hours, market forces will push community solar projects to be built with batteries in order to allow projects to sell their power when it can command the best price.

“The value of the bill credit is going to be driven by the value of the power — and the value of the power varies within the day, within the month, within the year,” said Richard Caperton, vice president of regulatory affairs and market development at Arcadia, the cleantech unicorn that manages community solar subscriptions across 13 states and Washington, D.C. ​“That seems intuitive, but that’s not the way it works everywhere.” 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) still needs to sign the bill to make it a reality. If he does, he could usher in a new market for potentially hundreds of megawatts of solar production that will be stored in batteries for delivery when California’s grid desperately needs it. The customers who save money on their bills would fund an expansion of clean, dispatchable power that makes the grid more reliable for everyone.

Community solar designed for equity and grid value

For years, California homeowners have been able to buy or lease their own solar panels and reap the benefits. But that was not possible for millions of renters, nor for condo dwellers or people who own a home that happens to be shaded by, say, a majestic redwood grove. People in these groups could sign up for a clean-energy option through their power provider, but that typically costs extra instead of saving money.

The problem wasn’t that California lacked a community solar policy; it just didn’t have one that really worked.

“We had some well-intentioned bills in the past that just haven’t played out the way that they were intended to,” said Derek Chernow, Western regional director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access. ​“It just didn’t pencil out for companies to come in and go all-in on community solar.”

Now, assuming Newsom approves the bill, a new option will be available to everyone in the territories of the state’s three big investor-owned utilities: Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric. 

California’s new program will go beyond conventional community-solar design by stipulating requirements to serve equity and just-transition goals:

• At least 51% of subscribers to a project will have to be low-income. This avoids issues seen in other states, where much of the community solar production ends up serving businesses, which solar financiers typically see as less risky than low-income families.
• The projects will be built by workers paid prevailing wages. The goal is to ensure the emerging clean-energy economy creates family-supporting jobs, replacing well-paid fossil-fuel power-plant jobs as they recede.

The program does not contain subsidies to help low-income families subscribe to community solar projects, but the families should benefit from reduced power bills and lower costs overall. Additional funding may become available from federal or state sources to lower the cost of projects serving communities that suffer from air pollution from dirty power plants.

The program design also tries hard to ensure community solar projects act like good neighbors for the power system at large. 

California doesn’t need more solar production dumped onto the grid at noon; it’s looking for clean power delivered in the evening hours when solar generation dips out but demand is still high. These are the hours when the grid gets wobbly in a heat wave, like the one that bore down on the state earlier this week. Instead of encouraging community solar whenever, wherever, the legislators tailored the new program to attend to the needs of California’s grid:

• Community-solar production will be paid based on the ​“avoided-cost calculator.” That’s a complex technocratic calculation, but the gist of it is that projects earn more for delivering power when it’s more valuable to the grid. In effect, this means each project will have energy storage attached so it can maximize the savings for subscribers.
• Projects will be connected to the distribution grid, rather than the bigger transmission network, Caperton noted. This serves local resilience because if a long-range transmission line gets knocked out by a fire or earthquake, community solar can keep delivering power locally.

While California grapples with keeping the lights on, it’s also working toward a legal deadline to decarbonize the grid by 2045. In aggregate, this new community-solar program in California could deliver substantial amounts of clean power at much-needed times, without socializing the costs of construction. 

“It uses private capital to fund public infrastructure, taking those risks off ratepayers’ backs,” Chernow said. ​“Developers have every incentive to make the projects cost-effective, innovative and competitive.”

Dodging solar policy pitfalls

In California, energy policy emerges from conversations — or knock-down, drag-out struggles — between interest groups that hold influence with the Democrats who control state politics. Utility unions regularly square off against generally non-unionized rooftop solar installers over who should supply clean power to the grid. Pro-nuclear climate hawks joust with anti-nuclear environmentalists. Things can get messy.

The community solar proposal that became AB 2316 started out as a pitch to regulators deciding the future of rooftop-solar net-energy-metering policy in California, known as the NEM 3.0 proceeding — a divisive issue, to say the least. The utility regulator released a draft in December that got slammed as overly punitive to rooftop-solar customers, kicking off a political firestorm. The revised proposal still hasn’t been released.

Community-solar advocates did not wait around for that procedural logjam to get disentangled. 

“NEM 3.0 just lost all momentum, so we took it to the legislature,” Caperton said. 

They found a sponsor, Assemblymember Chris Ward (D) of San Diego, to introduce the proposal as a stand-alone bill. The coalition that united behind it avoided the usual internal struggles among Democratic interest groups. 

In other states, this kind of community solar program might kick up opposition because it could be considered a threat to a regulated utility that makes a guaranteed profit by building new power plants. But in California’s semi-deregulated market, the investor-owned utilities get most of their new power from contracts with independent renewables and battery developers; the community solar structure doesn’t radically alter that system. 

There is one open thread on the legislative front. Advocates including the California Environmental Justice Alliance had campaigned for dedicated state funding to support community-solar projects serving low-income areas. That did not make it into the budget. But SB 846, the last-minute breakthrough to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant running, includes $1 billion over three years for a ​“Clean Energy Reliability Investment Plan.” It’s up to the California Energy Commission to decide how to spend that money, but advocates believe community-solar projects fit the bill and deserve some of the funding.

The recently passed federal Inflation Reduction Act could also bolster community solar development in California. That law creates tax credits for solar and storage projects built with prevailing-wage labor and expands the credits for projects serving low-income or frontline communities. The law also earmarks $7 billion to support state community-solar programs. If project developers can tap those funds, they should be able to lower the cost of subscribing to their projects.

AB 2316 calls for California’s utility regulator to approve final community solar programs by the summer of 2024. Previous experience in the state has shown that a lot rides on implementation. But the strong majorities in both chambers of the legislature who voted for this new approach to community solar, and the wide-ranging political coalition behind it, suggest that the model has broader buy-in than ever before. A lot of eyes will be watching the program as it moves toward fruition.

California is finally unlocking community solar for the masses is an article from Energy News Network, a nonprofit news service covering the clean energy transition. If you would like to support us please make a donation.