Community Solar 2.0 is Coming to Boston — Episode 231 of Local Energy Rules

Gregory King:
The idea of the Solar Trust Fund, it gives us the ability to help individual families receive passive income and to identify projects and communities that are determined by our members to be of value and fund those projects.

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John Farrell:
As the energy transition accelerates more communities seek opportunities to capture the benefits of the transition, including income and wealth building jobs and local decision making. The Boston Community Solar Cooperative was created to capture these benefits through local solar developments built for and run by the community. Their first project will start construction later this year. The first of what acting president Gregory King, who is also managing director of TSK Energy Solutions, hopes will be many projects. Gregory joined me in January, 2025 to talk about the economic opportunity the cooperative will be building from solar. I’m John Farrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. And this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system. Gregory, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Gregory King:
Well, thank you for having us.

John Farrell:
I wanted to start by just asking you to share a little bit about yourself. How did you end up working in solar energy and can you tell us a little bit more about your work with TSK Energy Solutions?

Gregory King:
Yeah, well, thank you. So TSK Energy Solutions is a consultancy focused on the energy transition. A lot of my work involves environmental justice as well as workforce development. Really looking to see to what degree we can use the energy transition that we need for climate mitigation to empower local communities with jobs, with ownership opportunities, and with economic benefits.

John Farrell:
How did you end up getting into this field, out of curiosity?

Gregory King:
Yeah, so my personal background is I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my career, spent many of my years in software development. I took a company public at one stage in my career and I transitioned into energy through my consultancy practice where I had a client who was developing energy modeling software and I was assisting them in figuring out go to market strategy. And I was intrigued by the amount of investment we were going to need to get off of fossil fuels. And so that was sort of my entry into the energy world. Prior to that, I was working primarily with early stage startup companies, as a mentor and sometime investor, helping them get their businesses off the ground. Once I discovered that there was this $265 trillion investment needed, according to McKinsey, to transition to a net zero economy, I thought that was a great place to spend some of my personal time trying to cultivate opportunities for others.

John Farrell:
So talking about cultivating those opportunities, can you explain a little bit about what the Boston Community Solar Cooperative is? Maybe starting out by just some of the logistics of it. Where are the panels going to go? How is it going to be financed? Who’s involved? How did you get involved in the project?

Gregory King:
So the Boston Community Solar Cooperative really was created when the Inflation Reduction Act was passed, and there was a group of local folks who were meeting around community solar opportunities through an organization called Energy Allies. And we as a group began to realize that with the Inflation Reduction Act tax credit in particular, there may be a new tool for financing projects. So a group of us got together and formed the Boston Community Solar Cooperative intentionally as a cooperative with a goal of being able to qualify for the IRA base and bonus tax credits and to use those tax credits and monetize those tax credits as a way to finance projects. As you’re probably aware, solar is pretty much a capital intensive business, and historically solar developers have used tax equity as a financing mechanism. Prior to the IRA, tax equity investors had to have an ownership stake for a minimum of five years in order for those tax credits to be viable. That changed with the IRA. There are now tax credit exchanges like Crux Capital where developers can go and sell their tax credits they receive from the IRS on an open marketplace. And typically those credits now are getting anywhere from 89 to 92 cents a dollar, and the people that are buying them are largely corporations with large profits that are looking to minimize their tax burden.

John Farrell:
That’s amazing that there’s already an open market for exchanging tax credits. I feel like most of my life in this world examining policies and opportunities around community energy has been defined by this trick of creating legal structures for projects that allows those previously not exchangeable tax credits to be used by these projects. So what a great opportunity that that’s now possible. So the project is going to be, it’s on a food co-op, right? Is where the solar panels are going to go. Could you talk a little bit more about that?

Gregory King:
Yeah, yeah. Let me just take a step back and talk a little bit about the vision of the Boston Community Solar Cooperative. At the Cooperative, we believe in a future powered by the sun and owned by the community. And when I say that what we’re really trying to do is to create a solar development entity that benefits our members and subscribers and that delivers economic benefits in the form of passive income as well as reducing energy burdens. And so our vision and goal is to develop multiple projects in four targeted communities in Boston specifically, which is Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury. And these are primarily EJ communities that have been defined as historically under invested. A good percentage of the population of these communities are Afro-Americans or immigrants. So we are looking to provide membership opportunities for regular folks to be able to essentially receive income every day the sun shines.
And so our first project is at the Dorchester Food Co-op, which is a new retail grocery store focusing on healthy foods and is organized as a cooperative. And so one of our founders was involved in that project as an architect and talked to the board about the opportunity for them to reduce their energy burdens. You can appreciate grocery stores have refrigeration loads, so typically when their electric bills are higher than other types of businesses. And so in this particular case, the food coop has signed up what we call a purchase power agreement with the [Boston Community Solar Cooperative], and they will be buying the energy from that we generate at a 20% discount and we use that income that we’re earning for the sale of electricity to obviously pay our bills. What the goal of really trying to operate as efficiently as possible so there’s passive income or profit sharing for our co-op members.
So we’re actively engaged now in pursuing other projects across the city. So I’m pleased to say we have had a good response. We’re in discussions with a lot of different mission-driven organizations around the city in the affordable housing space, in our faith-based organizations and some of our basic services like grocery stores, et cetera. So again, our plan is to develop as much solar as possible. We need a lot of solar energy to decarbonize buildings, transportation, and power generation. And so we think the timing of our entry into the market is ideal because here in Massachusetts we passed a law in 2021 mandating certain climate goals, which is driving the growth of renewable energy assets across the state.

John Farrell:
Can you talk a little bit about how the community solar product will help people sort of access solar energy, who otherwise maybe they’re a renter, they don’t have a sunny rooftop. And I guess in particular, you kind of referenced this already, but maybe explain a little bit more how the cooperative structure makes the relationship between the participants different than a typical community solar project just for folks benefit and a lot of times the community solar projects that we’ve seen in Minnesota, for example, and in other places it’s a third party company that owns the solar array. I might sign up as a subscriber – I’ll be called – I’ll get a discount on my bill, but I don’t get to have any decision making power in that relationship. I’m just a customer almost the same way that I’m a customer to the utility. It’s just that I’m buying power maybe from a solar array that’s kind of closer to my home. Maybe you could describe a little bit more about the difference between those kind of projects.

Gregory King:
Community Solar 1.0 has historically been a system where there’s a central solar array located somewhere on the grid. And energy consumers can subscribe to receive power from that array, typically at a discount anywhere from five to 10% and sort of meet their clean energy goals through that particular mechanism. We call our model Community Solar 2.0 because what we’re doing is we’re adding community ownership. So rather than a third party privately held for profit organization owning the array, our members own the array. And so we have three kinds of members today. 1) We have subscribers – so when you become a subscriber, you become a member and a cooperative. 2) We have workers who can earn a share, they’re paid to perform services for the co-op, but they also are earning ownership shares. And by the way, those shares are issued in a form of stock and that stock can be passed down to relatives, et cetera.
It’s a tangible ownership arrangement. 3) And then we have investors. And so investors are folks who invest in projects and in that case they get a return on the use of their capital. And so we created this with the idea of making certain that not only are we providing an economic benefit in the form of profit sharing or passive income generation, we’re also enabling the members to decide where we source projects, who we hire to develop the project itself, and what other community benefits. So one thing that we are currently working on is standing up a solar trust fund that would essentially receive income from the sale of electricity and put that into a trust that then the members can vote to use for perhaps support like a renovation of a playground or maybe decarbonizing a recreation center. So we are really very much focused on wanting to use the power of the sun and this particular model to empower communities and to make communities more sustainable. So between the mechanisms we’ve created for ownership and then the idea of the Solar Trust Fund, it gives us the ability to help individual families receive passive income. And it also gives us the ability to identify projects and communities that are determined by our members to be of value and fund those projects.

John Farrell:
I love that you have such a range of benefits, both specific to developing clean energy, the opportunity to build wealth, the fact that workers can get a share of ownership, that subscribers are also members. ILSR a couple of years ago published a report called Advantage Local that talks about the benefits of locally owned renewable energy projects. And I think this project really embodies several of them. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the opportunity to build wealth. If I understand correctly, your project on the Dorchester Food Co-op, your revenue is coming in from selling electricity to the co-op. So are the subscribers, is there any electricity that the subscribers are getting with bill credits? Is that also part of the mechanism or is it actually just the revenue that’s being shared?

Gregory King:
So the Dorchester Food Co-op project is one of several different project types we’re pursuing. And so in that particular case, we have a single subscriber off taker. However, other projects that we are in the process of securing development rights for would probably fall more in the traditional community solar where we will develop a solar array and we will solicit subscriptions from consumers in the general marketplace. In terms of our overall strategy, we have this single cooperative entity developing. The goal is to develop multiple projects. Every project we develop increases the amount of income that we generate and in theory provides a bigger pool of profits that can be shared with our members as well as could support our Solar Trust Fund. So it’s really, there’s strength in numbers. This model really is pretty dependent on our ability to scale up and do multiple projects. And we’re very, very fortunate that we sort of have this perfect storm in Massachusetts that’s going to contribute to our success.
And that perfect storm is built on the following. Over the last 15 years, we’ve had about 15 gigawatts of solar capacity developed around the state. Only 2% has gone to a low income offtaker or subscriber. And so our state has recently supported a number of initiatives to try to break through some of those barriers that have existed. One is it’s competed for a Solar For All from the EPA grant. So we have $156 million that was awarded to Massachusetts to support solar development and low incomes. And in the program design of that program, there is a specific allocation for community owned solar because access to capital remains one of our challenges.
I mean, I’ll give you an example. In trying to get financing for our project with the Dochester Food Coop, we ran into the reality that the food co-op itself is only a 1-year-old entity.
Traditional bankers typically like to see financial statements from the off-taker that would be a few years, two or three years. And because they didn’t have that, we ended up having to do some credit enhancement through some grants to help support the financing of that project. And so that’s one of the challenges in terms of just low income programs and one of the reasons why there’s been such a small percentage of solar allocated. So developers have had challenges getting financing for projects that go into low income communities that have high energy burdens who struggle paying their bills. And so we have the Solar for All program in Massachusetts.
We also have just approved a bunch of reforms that improve the local incentive program, which is called SMART. It’s statewide energy, solar energy program, which provides incentives typically in the form of kilowatt hour incentives. And so we have some new more-attractive incentives that have been specifically targeted to do smaller and mid-size projects in the built environment.
So those are going to be very helpful.
And then two other things that have happened here that are I think relatively unique is back in November we passed a new climate bill with solar permitting and permitting reforms that I think would be very helpful to help streamline the ability for projects to get permitted and built.
And then lastly, we also have something called the Electric Sector Modernization Plans here, which have been approved by the Department of Public Utility. Their plans involve millions, actually billions of dollars of investment in grid infrastructure because one of the other challenges that we have in essentially populated urban communities is the fact that the grid itself is pretty congested and getting an interconnect into that grid can be very challenging, can trigger an upgrade. So there’s going to be funds – ratepayer funds – that are going to be used generically to sort of identify where those congested areas are and to invest in new substation upgrades, some energy storage assets and some distribution of DER-related investments that are going to help again, projects in these densely populated urban underserved communities become more viable because we’re not going to trigger a system upgrade in the process.

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John Farrell:
We’re going to take a short break. When we come back I ask Gregory about how all of the federal and state policies have supported the community-driven solar project model. I ask if there are any missing pieces that could still be filled in and what advice he has for folks wanting to similarly design cooperatively-owned community solar projects. You’re listening to a Local Energy Rules podcast with Gregory King, acting president of the Boston Community Solar Cooperative and Managing Director of TSK Energy Solutions. Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Five stars if you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun. Now back to the program.

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John Farrell:
Do you happen to know are some of those investment dollars going to be structured in a way that say maybe some of your community solar projects would be considered part of those modernization plans, like somehow get incentives or maybe you guys can add a battery to the project and have that paid for or partially paid for. Are there any kind of overlaps there between that, those investments or is it mostly just that it will open up grid areas that are previously not available?

Gregory King:
Yeah, no, it’s really about providing more core infrastructure for renewable energy and also other technologies like EV charging and what have you, things that are going to be required for us to decarbonize, but why it’s important to us is because in many of the areas that we want to do development substation capacity is very limited and so this will be very important. There are blackout areas in the city of Boston, for instance, that there’s just no additional grid capacity for that have historically been off limits to any developer and those are now going to be opening up, and so we’re very excited about being able to work with building owners who historically have not been able to have a solar project on their rooftop, are in a parking lot, be now eligible to receive solar because of these new investments being made by our local utilities. And by the way, those modernizations have been approved. The rate case to support how it’s all going to be funded is still not quite settled. So there’s certainly going to be an interesting process here locally to try to balance to make certain that those investments do not become too burdensome because here in Massachusetts we have some of the highest electric rates in the country.

John Farrell:
Yeah, that is going to be a widespread issue I think, across the country as we’re looking at major investments in the electric grid and the costs. I wanted to circle back just for a second, you’ve mentioned a few of the different incentive programs, and I want to sort of tie this together a little bit. You mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act has the tax credits that have now been transformed to make them easier to use, that there are bonus tax credits for projects that specifically are serving historically marginalized communities. You have the Massachusetts SMART Program that is now going to have incentives for projects that are on the built environment that are small and mid-size projects. You have the Solar for All grant. That might help with some of the credit enhancement it sounds like, to make it easier to get financing. Did I miss anything there? Are there other things or is there anything else that you’d like to tell me about how these different programs specifically help the focus on allowing you to serve low income participants or have local ownership?

Gregory King:
Yeah, no, I think it’s the totality of the incentives and of course the siting and permitting provisions of the new climate law are also a factor because historically there hasn’t been a lot of guidance, and this doesn’t affect us directly because we are very solely focused on Boston, so we have one municipality, but across the state, developers have run into the reality that local municipalities control the siting and permitting and that there’s not a common system or guidance that exists to help create more of a level playing field so developers know what to expect and what might be a set of requirements. A lot of that variability is being squeezed out of the system by this new law, which has a framework for how municipalities are required to site and permit projects. And oh, by the way, one of the things that the site and permitting changes is discouraging development on greenfields or agricultural lands and incenting development in the form of solar canopies or in the built environment for rooftop solar.
Because if you look at the history of solar in Massachusetts and you look at that 15 gigawatts of capacity, you’ll notice that a good percentage of it is in fairly rural areas where there’s no major grid congestion. Land is cheap and people have been able to develop in that environment. And so the siting and permitting reforms and the new SMART incentives really combined to make being able to do solar developments much more financially attractive in these highly densely populated urban environments and the credit enhancements services makes the ability for organization like us, which is we’re a startup, we’ve been at this for about 18 months. It makes it a little bit easier for us to get access to bridge capital and to finance and construction financing than if those programs did not exist.

John Farrell:
As you said, it’s kind of a perfect storm for you of all of these different pieces coming together. Is there still anything though that you think of as a missing piece where it’s like, oh, if we had this other component, I know some states, for example, when they do community solar in the sort of subscription model, they don’t have what’s called consolidated billing, so people actually end up getting two bills. They get one from the community solar project and one from the utility, which can be kind of inconvenient and also make it hard to understand how they’re actually saving money overall. Is there anything like that that you feel like is a missing piece at this point, or do you feel like actually the market is structured pretty well to make it easier?

Gregory King:
You raised an important point around the consolidated billing and just for folks in the audience, typically when you subscribe to a community solar farm and energy from it, you may end up with two bills. The good news here in Massachusetts is that we’re also addressing that, and so the local utilities are becoming actively engaged in actually providing that billing service. And so rather than receive multiple bills, you have a single consolidated bill from your local distribution partner. One of our local hospitals here, the Boston Medical Center, who you may want to talk to in the future podcast, has recently launched something called the Prescription for Power Program. This is a program where they as a hospital have rooftop solar generation, and because they’re a social safety net hospital, they are taking their renewable energy credits and in partnership with the utility, they’re accrediting their low income customers who have dependency on reliable electric service can’t be shut off. They might have dialysis machines or other critical equipment in their homes. And so the Prescription for Power program is literally crediting certain qualified low income patients with energy that’s being generated by the hospital and being credited to those individual patient bills. So that’s another example of an innovation that was created by this opportunity to think outside the box and figure ways that we can use solar energy to create new forms of benefit.

John Farrell:
That’s amazing. I love that. The Prescription for Power – and to make that connection. I think that’s one of the things I’ve learned from folks who do a lot of advocacy around power shut offs is that you don’t know necessarily for a lot of people if they have these critical needs where maybe they have medical equipment that requires electricity. I mean, it’s just crazy to me in general, the idea that you would shut off someone’s electricity that you could even participate in modern society without it, I mean refrigeration, your cell phone and the ability to communicate with people, but I think even more directly there, to tie that in on the medical needs, it’s terrific. I wanted to just ask you specifically, you’ve talked about so many of the kind of supporting actors or supporting policies for your project. When I was looking at the news stories about this Dorchester Food Co-op project, which we’ll link to on the show page, about a year ago, it mentioned that the project was kind of in pre-development. How is it progressing right now? Where are you at in the project development process? How soon will you be able to generate electricity if you’re not already?

Gregory King:
We have run into an interesting challenge with the Dorchester Food Co-op project. The project itself is in a mixed use affordable housing building. So think of a building that has affordable housing units on the top and then a food co-op on the ground floor. And this is something we’ve learned the hard way in terms of our lease agreement. We have stumbled into a problem getting our lease agreement, which is an agreement between the co-op and building owner that pays the building owner income for use of his roof. Of course, the building owner is different from the food co-op, which is a tenant. And so we have encountered some delays associated with securing consent from lien holders. So if you’re familiar with affordable housing, typically there will be a number of different financing partners that have an ownership stake. And so unfortunately, we are just finally getting those consents secured, which is the thing we needed in order to, one, submit our application for the tax credits. And because of the nature of our project, because it’s in an affordable housing complex, it qualifies for the 20% bonus credit. So we’re looking at a 50% tax credit for the project. And by the way, this delay was unexpected because I didn’t anticipate that if you’re trying to give people money that they would actually drag their feet. But some of the lien holders are organizations like Mass Development, which is a quasi-state development entity, and trying to get a small transaction through that organization is quite challenging, but we’re at the tail end of sorting that out, and we hope to start construction on the array sometime in the March timeframe. Everything’s ready. We have all the financing. Everything we need is all in place just, and you can imagine the frustration of encountering a situation that none of us would’ve anticipated that we’d have difficulty giving some more money, but here we are.

John Farrell:
That’s so funny. Just out of curiosity, do you anticipate having members among the residents in that housing development as well as having the solar panels on the roof?

Gregory King:
For other projects in that community the answer is yes. We are talking to the Boston Housing Authority, for instance, it has some property. We actually have a grant application that we submitted jointly with the Boston Housing Authority for two of their properties where, because in the case of a public housing authority, they are the owners of the electric bill as opposed to their tenant. But there’s an incentive on their part to reduce the energy burden of their tenants while also providing an opportunity for their tenants to get involved as members of the cooperative. One of our general missions are we are trying to, I call it metering, the number of members we have because we’re trying to make certain that we have local community representation for every project we’re doing. And so as we add projects, we are going to be growing the size of our membership. We also want to make sure that we’re guaranteeing that income from the array based on the financials of the project. And so that’s one of the dynamics for our growth is we want to grow the number of projects, generate increasing amounts of electricity, and extend those benefits that we’ve been talking about to more and more families across the city of Boston.

John Farrell:
I think you already answered my next question, so I’m going to jump ahead and I guess just ask you, what advice do you have for people who are trying to do community-owned community solar, who or what has helped you? Do you have suggestions about, we’ve talked about a lot of the policies that have been supportive. I don’t know if there’s any in particular that you’d say if you’re in a different state, get them to adopt this, or is there anything else kind of needed in terms of relationships or other expertise that you think has been particularly helpful in being able to develop these projects and this concept of community-owned and cooperatively-owned community solar?

Gregory King:
We’re here and available for any of your listeners. If there’s folks out there who want to learn more about how to create a solar cooperative, we are actively sharing our bylaws and we’re available to consult at no charge with the other organizations that might be considering solar.
So there’s one organization, national organization that we’re a member of called the People Solar Energy Fund or PSEF and PSEP is both a lending organization as well as offers some technical assistance. Now, in our case, we’re pretty fortunate that we had some members like myself and a few other members who had some pretty deep knowledge of solar and solar policy and in financing and tax credits. So kind of the secret sauce to making all this work is you do need to have someone who kind of understands Solar Development 101. We, by the way, quarterly offer something called We Got the Power workshop.These are workshops open to the public where we talk about solar development. What are the components of it? How do you get organized to make it happen? Again, our goal is to see as much of the renewable energy we need for the energy transition be community-owned. I refer to it as a movement, a movement that empowers communities to embrace clean energy, and it provides additional benefits because they can own the asset and determine who works in projects and where projects get deployed and what kind of projects a solar trust fund could make.
And so I could say that PSEF has been helpful to us. I think they’re a good organization. If I was in a different place in terms of just starting out and wanting to do this, I probably would make them my first call because they do have a good technical assistance program and they have training. There’s a current cohort going on right now of communities from across the country that are learning about cooperative ownership. So they’ve been helpful.
And then we’re members of the Solar Energy Business Association here locally called SEBA. And members of SEBA have been very helpful to us as far as kind of looking over our shoulder. We’ve shared some solar designs using tools like HelioScope and some financial modeling with other more experienced developers, and they’ve been very helpful in pointing us and giving us some feedback. And we appreciate that because we’re a startup. We want to be very community centric. We’re a flat organization. We make all of our decisions as a group. So there’s really little or no hierarchy. We do have a board defined by our bylaws, but our goal really is to educate people about solar energy, about the fact that solar energy pays for itself over time, that they can really own it, that they can actually get the real benefit of it.
So we’re super pleased about the amount of support that we’ve gotten. You have seen some of the articles that have been written about our work, which has stimulated interest from potential subscribers and offtakers. And so we’re pretty bullish about our future, even in spite of potential policy changes at the federal level. The good news is that solar policy is something that is regulated at state basis, and anybody who’s in state other than Massachusetts, I would certainly say you might want to take a look at what Massachusetts has done with its SMART program, with the siting and permitting reforms and with the grid modernization efforts because those are all ingredients that are going to make solar ubiquitous. And also that’s enabling every community, not just the wealthy communities to be able to invest in solar technology.

John Farrell:
Gregory, is there anything that I should have asked you about that you were thinking of sharing in this conversation that you think people should hear about in terms of the Boston Community Solar Cooperative that I failed to ask?

Gregory King:
No, I think we’ve covered quite a bit of ground. I think there’s a new opportunity created. I would also, for your audience, suggest they might want to take a look at Crux Climate, which is a tax credit exchange, and see how quickly that tax credit exchange has grown from its inception to now processing billions of dollars of tax credits from renewable energy projects. And being able to monetize those credits is really a very, it’s a game changer, because imagine taking 50% of your development costs and being able to sell those credits on the market and get cash and not have to have an owner of the asset be your partner. So this is what really is the secret that created the opportunity that we see, and we’re out evangelizing the reality that now this system exists. It can be used to help finance projects. You don’t have to wait for a direct pay arrangement.
You can transfer your tax credits for cents on the dollar – 89 to 92 cents on the dollar – and be able to use those funds for purchasing panels, inverters, meters, and other things that are part of the capital intensive solar project.
So we’re optimistic that the future is bright, that there’s this new opportunity for community-owned solar to get not just the environmental benefits of solar energy, but the economic benefits of ownership. And we’re here to help any other organization around the country that might be interested in replicating what we’re doing because again, we’re hopeful to create a movement that is enduring and that’s beneficial to as many communities as possible.

John Farrell:
Well, Gregory, thank you so much for taking the time to come join me and talk about the Boston Community Solar Cooperative. I learned a lot about what the opportunities are in Massachusetts, but also how you’re taking advantage of federal policy. This tax credit exchange was new to me as well, and I just think it’s such a great story to hear that there are more opportunities for local ownership of community renewable energy projects. So thank you again for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Gregory King:
Thank you, John. Thank you for the work you’re doing to put a spotlight on innovation and renewable energy.

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John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Gregory King, acting president of the Boston Community Solar Cooperative and Managing Director of TSK Energy Solutions, where we spoke about the opportunity to build community wealth and serve low-income communities with community-owned community solar.
On the show page, look for links to news stories about the cooperative, as well as links to resources about the various programs Gregory mentioned that support the cooperatives community ownership model. Everything from the federal Inflation Reduction Act to the Massachusetts SMART Program to the state’s 2024 Climate Bill. We’ll also link to related Local Energy Rules podcasts, including episode 127 with Timothy DenHerder-Thomas about the People’s Solar Energy Fund, which provides financing and technical assistance to communities looking to do renewable energy projects, as well as episode 213 with Jeremy Kalin about the direct pay provision of the Inflation Reduction Act. Also look for a link to Advantage Local, a 2023 report by ILSR documenting the benefits of local ownership of renewable energy. Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local and thanks for listening.