Community Solar Complements New Hampshire’s Resident-Owned Communities — Episode 235 of Local Energy Rules

Jeannie Oliver:
We now have the model in place. We know what we’re doing. We know how to help the communities tap into these projects. And so with the Solar For All program, we’re hoping to complete another 15 projects over the next five years.

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John Farrell:
How can you combine solar, community ownership, and serve low-income communities all at once? If you’re doing community solar for resident-owned communities or ROCs. Pioneered in New Hampshire, resident-owned communities are neighborhoods of manufactured or mobile homes where the residents have pooled their resources to buy the land. With 150 of these communities in New Hampshire alone, it’s provided a unique collaborative opportunity to lower the energy bills of some of the most energy burdened folks, and giving them an ownership stake in the clean energy economy. Joining me in March 2025, Jeannie Oliver, Vice President of ROC New Hampshire and Energy Solutions with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund shared the success stories of several community solar projects for New Hampshire ROCs, and about their plans to do many more.

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.

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Jeannie Oliver:
Thank you for having me. It’s really great to be here.

John Farrell:
So I love to start off with this question for my guests, which is kind of like what was your career arc that brought you into this leadership role for resident-owned communities and then being focused on helping them lower energy bills with community solar?

Jeannie Oliver:
This is kind of a long story. In my case, my arc isn’t really linear like many people’s careers, and really I have to pay tribute to all the mentors I’ve had along the way who’ve helped me identify those pivot points and sort of steer me in the right direction. But I started my career as a corporate and commercial lawyer in New Zealand, and some of our listeners might know this, but others might not. In New Zealand, you do your law degree straight from high school. So at 18, you’re sort of asked what do you want to be? And as all good 18 year olds, I didn’t really know what I wanted to be yet. I thought maybe journalism, but law seemed like a safer option at that time. So I did my law degree and I worked in corporate law for several years, and during this time I sort of started thinking how can I better align my love of the outdoors with my career?
I liked law, but it wasn’t quite hitting home for me. And so I looked into environmental law and actually just did a really basic Google search for environmental law degrees. This is back in 2011 that I did this, and Vermont Law School came up as the law school to go to if you wanted to study environmental law. And I have to confess, I’d never been to Vermont before. I’d been to the United States once. I wasn’t actually entirely sure where Vermont was, but I thought, why not? This sounds like a great adventure, so let’s give this a go. So that’s how I ended up sort of in an environmental law stream and in the United States, in my first semester at Vermont Law School, I took the introduction to enerSgy law class with Professor Dworkin, who at the time was the director of the Institute for Energy and the Environment.
And he said, gosh, a background in corporate law, you could be a really great energy lawyer. And I was like, oh, that never even occurred to me, but let’s give this a try. And he invited me to work at the Energy Institute while I was a student, and that’s where I really sort of cut my teeth on energy law and working in this field. I graduated, I went and worked for the Vermont Department of Public Service for about a year and a half. I was representing the public there in public utility commission hearings on energy siting cases and rate cases. And then in 2016, professor Kevin Jones, who had become the director of the Energy Institute at Vermont Law School at that time said, Hey, I’m studying an energy clinic. We’re going to be providing legal services and policy services to communities that are looking at energy solutions.
Would you like to be our first attorney? And I thought, yes, yes, I absolutely would love to be your first attorney. So back I went to Vermont Law and Graduate School where I started this career, this arc, and there I worked with students. We provided, like I said, policy and legal services to communities that were looking to do renewable energy projects. And one of the people that reached out to us while I was serving as a lawyer in this capacity was ROC USA. It’s a national nonprofit. Kevin Porter there was like, Hey, we have all these manufactured housing parks in the United States that are resident owned. Is there a way that we can do a guidebook for community solar for these parks? So as I have to give him credit here for planting the seed. And we were like, well, it’s going to be really challenging to do a guidebook for the whole of the United States, but why don’t we start with some projects in New Hampshire where there’s favorable rules and regulations for doing community solar and low-income communities. So that’s how this sort of ROC community solar idea came about. We started working with ROC New Hampshire, which is another nonprofit, well it’s part of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, it’s a program there working directly with resident-owned communities. So then when an opportunity came up in 2023 to serve as the director of the resident-owned communities program, I thought, gosh, this seems like another great sort of pivot in my career. I’d like to give that a go. And that’s how it happened.

John Farrell:
I think that’s a great overview, and I think it’s funny that you said that, oh, some other people have, these are smooth arcs in their careers. I feel like mine looks more like a squiggly line all over the place before I landed at ILSR many years ago. And I think that’s probably true for many other people. So I don’t think that’s quite so uncommon as you might think.

Jeannie Oliver:
And I like to share that with students too. When I’m working with students, both when I was teaching and now if I go and do a guest lecture, I think there are a lot of students who feel really anxious about not knowing what they want to do and what they want to be. And I actually think that some of the best career choices we make happen when we’re a little open-minded and we’re not entirely sure because sometimes I think when you’re too sure about what you want to do, you might sort of close off that door to something amazing and unanticipated. So that’s my number one career advice to students now, is keep an open mind.

John Farrell:
It rings very true. My wife all the way through college was convinced she wanted to be a teacher. She taught for about five years in high school after graduation and then was like, you know what? I don’t think I actually want to be a teacher. And she figured out she still works with students as an academic advisor, but had never even thought about the fact that there were other ways to do that. So I love that and feel similarly about giving that kind of career advice. OK, but I want to get back to resident-owned communities and community solar. So I love that diversion. I think that is really good advice for young people. So let’s just start with a definition for folks that may be unfamiliar. Can you explain what is a resident-owned community? It kind of sounds like there’s two distinguishing features here, both the types of homes and then also the ownership structure.

Jeannie Oliver:
Yes. So a resident-owned community or what I am going to call a ROC, it’s a neighborhood of manufactured homes owned by a cooperative of homeowners. So yes, you’re right. It’s the type of home: manufactured homes, what some of you might know as mobile homes, what used to be referred to as trailers. And then the ownership structure is it’s the owners of those homes who come together and collectively form a cooperative and purchase the land where those homes are situated. So this is really important because sometimes in manufactured housing parks, if you own the home but you don’t own the land, you don’t have that security that you would have when you do own the land. So the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund has been working with residents and manufactured housing parks since 1983. We really created this ROC model when we helped residents in the Meredith Trailer Park come together to purchase their land. And that’s led to this model, this ROC model. There’s now 151 resident-owned communities in New Hampshire, and this, like I said, is permanently protecting affordable homes. There’s more than 9,000 homes represented in those 151 parks. I think there’s over 300 ROCs across the nation. So out of the ROC New Hampshire program came ROC USA, the national nonprofit. It started in New Hampshire, but the people who were leading the program at the time saw that there was an opportunity for this to be scaled up across the country. There’s manufactured housing parks all across this country.

John Farrell:
I really love that. This is one of the things that attracted me to wanting to talk to you about this because so much of what ILSR talks about is communities having more say over their future. And I think you highlighted that there of the residents of mobile homes or trailer parks as they’re sometimes called or whatever, if they don’t own the land, they can be told to move or told to leave because it can be sold for development or there can be a reason that the landowner wants to change things. And I love that they’ve already got this cooperative structure in place because that’s actually been one of the most significant struggles that we’ve seen on the energy side of things is that when you want to have community owned energy projects, how do you form legal structures that help people share those benefits? So yeah, I love the history there. I also love that New Hampshire kind of got it started. You’ve got, what did you say, it sounded like about half of the resident-owned communities in the country in one tiny little state.

Jeannie Oliver:
Yeah, we feel pretty proud of that. And it really came about, it was it’s people who saw an opportunity and believed in the benefits of home ownership and the security that presents, but also the legislature who put in place laws to support this type of ownership. So in New Hampshire, we have something called the opportunity to purchase. It’s a law that gives residents in manufactured housing parks an opportunity to submit a competing offer when their park is for sale. And that’s really key to have that kind of support both in statute, but then the structures around it too. So the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, we provide both the lending, so the capital, and also the technical assistance to help residents understand what is the opportunity to put together their pro forma and their purchase and sales agreement working with an attorney that they engage because this is not easy. It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s well worth it.

John Farrell:
So let’s pivot and talk about community solar as it applies to resident-owned communities or ROCs. Community solar gives lower cost access to solar than having to pay upfront for your own solar panels. So it’s been a benefit to folks who are renters or people who just don’t have the money for the upfront costs. It typically provides ongoing bill savings. What has made it particularly useful for resident-owned communities?

Jeannie Oliver:
Yeah, so as we’ve been talking about in resident-owned communities, it’s manufactured homes or mobile homes. And for the most part, this isn’t true of some of the newer homes, but for the most part, manufactured homes aren’t built to have rooftop solar. The roof structure can’t take the additional load. And this is especially true in the Northeast where we have snow load to account for as well. So rooftop solar isn’t an option for most manufactured homes. Of course, now we’re starting to see some of the net zero ready homes, which is really, really exciting to me. I can’t wait to learn more about these as they become more common. So we had to look for a different solution for manufactured housing parks. It works really well in ROCs for a number of reasons. First, they often have land available to do a community solar project that’s scaled to their community.
So the projects we’ve worked on to date have been between 50 kilowatts and a hundred kilowatts, but thinking about projects up to one megawatt. So we’re looking at land between about a quarter of an acre and five acres at the very high level. And many ROCs in New Hampshire have this land available. Not all of them though. And then the ROC structure itself works really well for managing off-takers. So this is one of the complications of a community solar model is that you have multiple off-takers and someone has to do the administration on that. Someone has to find those off-takers. So the people who are going to consume the power and someone has to manage them. With a ROC, you have a structure in place where that management and administration, it’s already happening for other reasons. And so it just makes it a little more simple.
And this is true of both the direct ownership model. So where the ROC itself owns the solar project or if the developer owns the project with a PPA or power purchase agreement. With the power purchase agreement model, the benefit with a ROC is that typically the cooperative itself will be the power purchase agreement party. So you’re not entering into agreements with multiple off takers for that. So a lot of efficiencies there. And then the other advantage, sort of thinking longer term as we move beyond grant funded projects in the future, ROCs have access to capital and lending through CDFIs community development financial institutions. That’s what the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund is, but there’s others across the country as well, whereas a lot of times low income individuals may not have access to the type of capital they need to pay for that upfront cost. So those are some of the reasons.

John Farrell:
It’s so interesting. I want to get into the weeds in just one thing, which is in either of the direct ownership or the PPA model, how might a ROC decide to divvy up the amount of electricity that’s being produced from the community solar array? Is it sort of structured similar to in other states where the amount of solar credit you get on your bill is based on some sort of contribution that you’re making or is it just divvied up evenly? How is that kind of allocation take place?

Jeannie Oliver:
Yeah, so on the projects we’ve worked on so far, the communities have chosen to divide the credits up evenly. These have been primarily grant funded projects. There’s no subscription fee. And so the fairest way to distribute the benefits has been by distributing them equally. The New Hampshire group net metering and low income community solar regulations, they allow the host, in this case, the cooperative to retain a percentage of the credits and to use those to pay for the operating costs of the solar array. So in all of these cases, the cooperative is receiving a percentage of the output as well to pay for the ongoing costs because what we’re trying to do is not impose additional costs on the community. We need these projects to be cashflow positive from day one. So that’s how we’ve got around that.

John Farrell:
That’s really helpful to understand. Could you share a few examples of the completed projects that are serving New Hampshire residents? How much of their energy needs are being served and how much money can that save them?

Jeannie Oliver:
We currently have three completed projects, and that doesn’t sound like many, but in 2018, we started with a project in Lebanon. That’s the project that the energy clinic worked on with ROC New Hampshire, and this model didn’t exist at that time. So the first few projects are always the slowest, and this has certainly been true. They’re sort of experimental. So we have a project in Lebanon, a project in Tilton, and a project in Conway, New Hampshire. They range in size from 50 kilowatts to a hundred kilowatts, and it’s offsetting between 65 and 80% of those communities electrical needs, so very different size communities. The 50 kilowatt project is serving a community of 25 households, and the 100 kilowatt project is serving a community of 45 households. So that first project in Lebanon was under old group net metering rules where we didn’t have on bill crediting. The way that community chose to structure the benefits is they receive a check.
The cooperative receives a check from the utility once a month, and the cooperative distributes that financial benefit in the form of a lot rent reduction for everyone. They chose that as a way to avoid number one, cutting lots of checks to 45 households, but also not wanting to create income through the community solar array, rather reducing expenses so that it doesn’t have tax implications for the households. And also potentially throwing people off the benefits cliff if they happen to get a little bit of income. That puts them above the threshold. The other two projects are receiving on bill credits and on average that financial benefit looks like somewhere between $250 and $400 a year depending on the year, depending on what’s happening with electric rates and so forth. Yeah, we have, I think so we’ve got three completed. We have four more that are in different phases of the development process right now. So we should have seven by the end of 2026. They typically take about two years from start to finish and then super excited to be part of the New Hampshire Solar for All program. So with that program, we’re hoping to really accelerate this work. We now have the model in place. We know what we’re doing. We know how to help the communities tap into these projects. And so with the Solar for All program, we’re hoping to complete another 15 projects over the next five years. That’s a lot.

John Farrell:
Yeah, it’s wonderful though. I’m really glad that you talked specifically about the on-bill credits and avoiding the issue of taxable income, but particularly I wasn’t thinking of this, but given that you’re serving a lot of lower income residents, the potential to affect their ability to claim public benefits by doing this. So I think it’s really interesting to think about how the on-bill credits, I’m assuming now sort of solve that problem

Jeannie Oliver:
Yes

John Farrell:
But even previously to think of doing it as a rent reduction is really clever.

Jeannie Oliver:
I’d like to take credit for it, but it wasn’t me that came up with it. I have to give credit. We had a fellow at the Energy Clinic called Krista Shoot and she dreamt that up. So shout out to Krista Shoot.

John Farrell:
It’s so interesting too. Well, I could reminisce it all. It sort of goes back in my career, but sort of early on, we worked a lot on looking at some of the ways that Europeans did energy incentive policy and theirs were almost basically cutting people checks. You would have cooperative ownership, but people would get checks. But I guess it’s also different over there in that it wasn’t as likely that you would be losing public benefits as a European citizen or a citizen of a European country as it is here in the United States. So I suppose they didn’t have to worry about that as much.

Jeannie Oliver:
And just thinking about the cooperative structure and resident-owned communities, their board of directors are volunteer boards, often, they’re working full-time jobs as well, trying to make the administration of these projects as small as possible because these are busy people. So you don’t want the energy project to be a burden. You want it to be a benefit. The easier it is to administer, the more of a benefit it’s seen as.

John Farrell:
So in a September, 2024 webinar for the Clean Energy States Alliance, which we’ll link to on the show page, you talked about the North Words project, and I seem to remember that this town is not called Berlin, like Berlin, Germany,

Jeannie Oliver:
Berlin

John Farrell:
Berlin, New Hampshire. My aunt and uncle used to live in Littleton, and so I remember that being not too far away. Could you just talk about how it’s doing more than just community solar to meet the residents’ energy needs?

Jeannie Oliver:
Yes. This is a project that I am super excited about because I’ve spent a lot of my career in the solar space, but not a lot of my career in the weatherization and energy efficiency space. And so this project, which currently we anticipate will be funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Weatherization Assistance Program Enhancement and Innovation grant. It’s going to involve three phases. So the first phase is weatherization, so working with Tri-County CAP to do energy audits and weatherization upgrades in the 40- maybe 45 homes in this community. Once that phase is completed, we are going to be doing a complete energy measurement to try and figure out how much energy do people save from that phase alone. So from the weatherization phase. And then once we have that data collected, we’ll be installing cold climate heat pumps into these homes and transitioning the homes away from kerosene to electric heat, but high efficient electric heat.
And again, we’ll be measuring the energy savings after the completion of that phase as well. And I guess I’m going to call this phase three, but really it’s happening at the same time as phase one and two is installing a community solar array in this community to help offset some of the increased electric costs coming from the use of cold climate heat pumps. So although people will be saving by not using as much kerosene, they’ll still have their kerosene systems as backup because this is a cold part of the country and the heat pumps work best when there’s a backup source of heat. So although they’re going to be saving money by not using as much kerosene, it always comes as a shock when you electric bill goes up when you fuel switch, so the solar will help offset that.

John Farrell:
That’s amazing to have that kind of wraparound. Is this the first project that has had that combination of energy efficiency and solar?

Jeannie Oliver:
To my knowledge, it is. I know Efficiency Maine has done a lot of work in manufactured homes in Maine with heat pumps, which is super cool because it proves that it’s a technology that works for this type of housing. But to my knowledge, this is the first time where there will be a comprehensive energy retrofit in a resident-owned community or a manufactured housing park at all. So the hope by collecting all the data and collecting stories from this project is that it will serve as a demonstration model for other parks, both resident owned or investor owned as well. So really, really hopeful for this project.

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John Farrell:
We are going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask Jeannie about the role of grant funding and whether these projects could happen without it. I ask about the intersection of these community solar projects with energy assistance programs and we discuss what policies have made these ROC community solar projects possible. You’re listening to a local Energy Rules podcast with Jeannie Oliver, vice President of ROC New Hampshire, and Energy Solutions with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund.

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
You mentioned this earlier, but it sounds like most of the projects so far have been either partially or fully grant funded. Is that the primary model, and I guess you kind of alluded to this, in the ability of the ROC to have access to capital. Are there examples already or models that can be done without grant funding?

Jeannie Oliver:
Yeah, so the grant funding has been incredibly important to develop the model to prove that community solar can work in resident-owned communities. And even with the cost, the installed cost of solar coming down, it is still a significant upfront cost that most low-income families can’t afford. So I think that grant funding is going to continue to serve an important role in these projects. As we see the investment tax, hopefully see the investment tax credit become available to nonprofits and potentially to homeowner associations, we might be able to start looking at project models that have less grant funding and looking more towards power purchase agreement models as well. We preferred the model where the community owns the asset and operates the asset for themselves, but where grant funding is limited and also wanting to explore all options, that the party ownership model is a really important part of the equation too, especially as we start to look at larger community solar projects. So it can be quite difficult to find a developer that’s willing to do a power purchase agreement for a 50 kilowatt community solar project, but as we start looking towards the one megawatt size, there’s going to be more developers who are willing to play in that field.

John Farrell:
Just to get really specific, you mentioned that the resident-owned community as an entity might have access to capital through a CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution) and you also talked about the direct pay provisions with the investment tax credit, should they stay around, which I know is a risk right now with the federal government. Do you see it as possible for the resident-owned community to take on as much of the capital and debt to finance an entire project? I know some of the, I’m thinking of Cooperative Energy Futures in Minnesota, which does a lot of low income participation in their community solar projects just generally not in resident-owned communities, they do have a pay as you go subscription. So they’re getting the repayment on that initial loan at the same time that they’re providing the bill credit. So the participant gets something like a 10% or 20% discount on their bill. It’s not terribly significant, even if they have a large share of a subscription until the debt is retired and then they get the full savings for usually the last 10 to 15 years. Is that something kind of what you have in mind about how that could work, or do you imagine that the resident-owned community couldn’t raise enough capital to do that?

Jeannie Oliver:
I think it depends. So as I said, there’s 151 resident-owned communities in New Hampshire, and they’re all in really different stages of being. Some of them are fairly new, in which case they’ve taken on a lot of debt to purchase their park already, and so taking on additional debt for something like a community solar project really isn’t in their best interest. There are other parks who have been around since the eighties who are more financially mature, and they may have more of an appetite to take on debt to do a project like this. I think for communities that, well, first of all, it has to be cashflow positive, what you described in Minnesota, that that’s a cashflow positive project that could be attractive to some of our communities, that sort of model and certainly a model to explore. I think more likely it’s going to be sort of more like the USDA REAP grant loan type arrangement where you have partial grant funding and partial debt for these projects. Again, for the co-ops that are more financially mature who have been around for a lot longer and have less debt from their acquisition.

John Farrell:
Sorry, it’s going to be a weedy question, but I know one of the things that I have found interesting about USDA funding is how many places count as rural for the purposes of that, do you find that resident-owned communities often can get access to USDA funding?

Jeannie Oliver:
So yes, in New Hampshire, we have a lot of rural communities in New Hampshire, probably a little more difficult in states that are more urban. But in New Hampshire, a lot of our communities do have access to USDA funding and are tapping into it primarily for infrastructure improvements. So wastewater and groundwater upgrades. For the energy side of things it’s challenging for co-ops to take advantage of REAP. The REAP funding only really comes into play for co-ops that have significant cooperative electrical use. So not the household electrical use, but business use. It works really well in communities where they have done a lot of their water infrastructure upgrades and they might have increased electrical load coming from pump houses, that sort of thing, or if they have community buildings, that sort of thing. But yeah, it doesn’t work for the residential use.

John Farrell:
All right. Thanks for entertaining my specific questions here. I know I’ve been around too long. I have all these little questions about some of the specifics that I’ve run across from time to time. We’ve touched on this before about energy assistance or public assistance. So I know in a lot of states that lower income residents might also be on energy assistance programs such as the Federal LIHEAP program, which will help them pay their heating bills. Are community solar projects replacing the need for energy assistance or, this kind of gets back to that question before of how do you give people these credits without jeopardizing their assistance? Maybe it’s different for that project you were talking about that is going to be doing the cold climate heat pumps. So I don’t know if you could talk about how you’ve seen these projects interface with energy assistance. I’d be very interested to know.

Jeannie Oliver:
Yeah. So far our projects haven’t really interfaced with energy assistance at all. They’ve been very separate. There is a new program in New Hampshire, a low-income community solar program that does interact with the low-income energy assistance program in that it calls on the utilities to actually find the off-takers for the Community Solar project by looking at their list of households that have signed up for the low income energy assistance programs. And then looking at the Northwoods project, for example, a lot of the grant funding that we’re using, well, the grant funding we’re going to be using there presupposes that the households are eligible for the Weatherization Assistance program, so income eligible program. And then we’re also working with the town of Exeter on an energy efficiency initiative where that presupposes that the residents are eligible for New Hampshire Saves, which has similar income eligibility requirements as the low income energy assistance programs. So it’s relevant, but so far it’s worked very separately. But as we start to think about combining energy solutions for a more comprehensive energy upgrade and benefit, I think they will have to play together.

John Farrell:
And is it the case, I guess most people who are probably getting energy assistance in a cold climate like New Hampshire or in a state like Minnesota where I’m from, are getting it on their heating bill, not their electric bill. So that’s why there’s not going to be a lot of interface so far when you’re getting a bill credit from community solar.

Jeannie Oliver:
So you’re testing my knowledge here. So as I said, I play mostly in the solar arena and just starting to get into the weatherization and the energy efficiency space with our Northwoods project. So I am not an expert on the ins and outs of those programs yet. Ask me next year, I hope to know a lot more. We just did a energy essentials training in Exeter a couple of weeks ago. We invited cooperatives from that region to come in, learn from experts. So we had resilient buildings group presenting on weatherization and heat pumps. We had USDA attend talking about the 5 0 4 program. And then we did a presentation on community solar as well. And what was really surprising is although these weatherization assistance program, New Hampshire Saves, these low-income assistance programs are old, they’ve been around for a long time, and the number of residents who were not aware of them was really surprising. A little shocking to me, but I think it’s because although the information is out there, it’s not collected in one place sort of targeting this particular type of community, and so you have to know to go and look for it. So I’m hoping that over the next year we can bring that information to our communities so that there’s more people tapping into what’s available.

John Farrell:
I think you’ve really hit on an interesting problem there too. I know Ben Paulos, who is on the webinar as well, one of the things that he’s really focused on is that idea that you mentioned of how can we involve utilities or other entities that are already familiar with people who are asking on energy assistance lists, even though that is still a small subset of people who would be eligible. But are there more automated ways to just get people enrolled in these programs that they’re eligible for because they serve such a small fraction of people that are eligible?

Jeannie Oliver:
Yeah, I think information sharing is the low hanging fruit. There are opportunities out there. People just need to know what they are and how to access them.

John Farrell:
My next question I think we already kind of covered, but I’m going to ask it just in case there’s anything we missed, but you talked about how the resident-owned communities that the folks there living in those communities own the land, they have this cooperative ownership model. Was there anything we missed when we talked earlier about how that can make it easier to do community solar?

Jeannie Oliver:
I don’t think so. Although I will say the ownership structure, so the democratic decision making structure, I find that to be a really interesting part of ROC community solar projects, and I’ve learned a lot over the last couple of years working with these communities about what makes a community solar ready. So typically from a technical perspective, we think about the site and how close is it to three phase power or even single phase power for some of these smaller projects. I’m thinking about permitting and zoning, but what I overlooked in the beginning is how important it is to make sure that this decision is a decision that has community buy-in. So it’s not one person making the decision. It’s not me coming in saying, Hey, this is an awesome opportunity, you should do it. It’s holding meetings through their membership meeting structure and their board of directors meeting structure and making sure that everyone is informed and there’s significant buy-in for the project because this is an asset on their land that they’re going to manage for the next 20, 30, 40 years. So I wouldn’t say it’s something we missed when we talked about this question earlier, but I think it’s a really important part of doing community solar projects in cooperative communities.

John Farrell:
We’ve already touched on this somewhat between the New Hampshire community solar bill credit program. We’ve talked about the federal ITC. Maybe just to sort of roll them up in one tight package here. What are the particular state or federal policies that have made doing these community solar projects easier?

Jeannie Oliver:
Yeah, so I guess I would start by saying we have been incredibly lucky in the state of New Hampshire to have the support from the legislature, the Public Utilities Commission, and the New Hampshire Department of Energy. So back in 2018 when we started doing our first ROC community solar project, it took all three of those, well, the Department of Energy didn’t exist yet. They were part of the Public Utilities Commission, but it really took their support to put this program in place. So that’s point one. Net metering, group net metering, really, really important to these projects. Without group net metering, there’s no financial benefits to the community members. So we rely heavily on that program continuing. And then, yes, we have the low-income community solar program as well. So that works with the group net metering program. It’s a certain type of group net metered project where if you have more than five residential customers, half of which are low, moderate income, the project qualifies for a two and a half cent adder to the net metering rate.
That’s also been really helpful to getting these projects off the ground. I guess I should also mention the developers we work with as well. These projects being grant funded through the Renewable Energy Fund, they are not fast. And so working with developers who are willing to put the time in to help the communities understand the transactions, understand the project, to work through some of the processes that are in place because of grant funding, like I said earlier, I think it takes about two years to do one of these projects from start to finish. Without very patient developers that wouldn’t happen. So yes, the legal structures are important, the programs are important, but the stakeholders are really, really important also.

John Farrell:
Thanks so much. I just have a couple last questions for you. Alluding back to the September webinar presentation, you mentioned the importance of technical assistance and relationships in making these projects happen. I think you’ve kind of touched on that earlier. I especially appreciated how you kind of talked about the cooperative ownership structure and the community consultation process. But is there an example or two of what you meant when you were talking about that issue of technical assistance and relationships?

Jeannie Oliver:
Technical assistance is really important for these projects and it’s lots of different types of technical assistance. So I think a lot of people in this space know what technical assistance means, but I have to confess, when I first started working on these projects, I heard the word technical assistance and I thought someone who helps you with your computer. Technical assistance is really just like coaching. So in the case of a ROC community solar project, it starts at the beginning with information sharing. So helping to bring information about community solar, what are its benefits, what are the downsides for a community? And really helping that community to make informed decisions because this is a population that hasn’t typically had solar marketed to them. So they’re not starting with full knowledge of the ins and outs of this technology. And often there’s some skepticism about the technology.
Well, this sounds too good to be true. There must be a catch. And so it’s patient work, a lot of work before you even get to applying for a grant or looking at a ownership structure. Once you have community buy-in and they’ve decided they want to move forward with a community solar project, then you’re bringing in the developer who’s also doing some of that educating and information sharing, often legal technical assistance. Another word just say legal services. The Vermont Law and Graduate School Energy Clinic is continuing to provide that pro bono support. So helping with everything from permitting to negotiating and drafting an engineering procurement construction agreement, maybe if they’re going to own it outright or a power purchase agreement, helping to draft the agreement between each of the households and the cooperative. So there has to be some kind of participation agreement there. So there’s legal assistance there. And then once the array is installed, as anyone who has ever been part of a community solar project or part of any grant funded project knows, there’s ongoing regulatory compliance that has to happen. And so helping the community to work through the future filings as well. It’s a lot of administration. The goal though, is to provide that technical assistance early and then help the community to become self-sufficient at doing all of the administration for themselves for the long term.

John Farrell:
What advice would you give to folks who are working with resident-owned communities or maybe just mobile home communities in general, in other states, given that this ROC model is not as common, if they want to address energy costs and weatherization?

Jeannie Oliver:
I guess my advice is consistent with what I’ve been talking about with technical assistance, which is put the time in early to help inform residents and to inform the cooperative about what community solar is and what the benefits are and what kind of work is involved for them. What is going to be the downside, potential downside of administering this project into the future and really put in the effort and the patient work of getting community buy-in. A community solar project should be something to celebrate in a community. And until the community really feels informed and trust the technology and they have buy-in for the project, it’s not going to be something to celebrate. So putting in that time and effort early is my number one advice.

John Farrell:
Well, Jeannie, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today and talking about resident-owned communities and community solar. The work that’s happening in New Hampshire is amazing, not just for the fact that it’s bringing solar to communities that are otherwise often underserved or have high energy burdens, but also that it is sort of a pioneering integration with cooperative ownership models and community decision making. So just really wanted to salute your work, and thank you for taking the time to come share with our audience about on local energy rules.

Jeannie Oliver:
It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

*****

John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Jeannie Oliver, VP of ROC New Hampshire and Energy Solutions with the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, where we discussed the success of community solar projects serving resident owned communities. On the show page, look for links to the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund as well as the CESA webinar from September 2024 where Jeannie shared more details about the existing projects. We’ll also have links to other podcasts on community solar, including episode 231 about community solar 2.0 in Boston and episode 230 about the Hoahu Energy Cooperative on Molokai.

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.