Wisconsin’s SolarShare: A Co-op Model for Local Clean Power — Episode 228 of Local Energy Rules

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Cory Neeley:
And really ultimately, cooperatives were created to solve problems that traditional capital investors have decided not to solve. So if it made sense for traditional investors to do this, they’d already be doing it.
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John Farrell:
Almost 20 states now have laws allowing people to share the electricity from a solar array, often called community solar. But what if we didn’t need new laws but could instead invest in community solar under a different model? Cory Neeley is the executive director of the SolarShare of Wisconsin Cooperative, an organization whose members earn a return on their investments in local solar and who have decision-making power in the cooperative to decide where to invest next. He joined me in November, 2024 to talk about SolarShare and how it works well with local utilities, helps address NIMBY responses to solar energy and even builds a local solar industry. 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. Cory, I’m so glad to have you on Local Energy Rules. Welcome to the program.

Cory Neeley:
Thanks for having me, John. I really appreciate you bringing us on.

John Farrell:
Well, I want to start off by just asking you what I ask all my guests, which is what kind of brought you to doing this work on Cooperative Solar Farms? Have you always been working on clean energy issues? Has it been something that has drawn your interest for a long time?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been involved in energy one way or another for a few decades now, starting out with my time in the Green Madison program in Madison to my time working with municipal utilities with WPPI in Sun Prairie and five other member communities around southern Wisconsin. I left WPPI around the pandemic time, went to do a startup that was focused on energy as well that didn’t end up panning out. And so I was in this kind of weird space looking for something to focus on, and I started developing an idea around a cooperative charging network. So electric vehicles, cooperatives tend to solve market failures and I think EV charging in rural areas is going to be the next market failure. We’re just not going to see that type of investment, just like we didn’t see with original electrification. And so I was working on that.
I pitched that idea to a few of the folks that I knew within the state. One of them was Renew Wisconsin at the time. They were like, well, we’re actually working on something of our own, a cooperative idea. Would you be interested in applying for the executive director position? And so they sent me some information on it. I said, this is just right up my alley. I believe in this. I think that I can help you guys make this happen. So I started with them in January of 2022. SolarShare was incorporated by folks from Renew the month or two prior to that. And so they were really looking for someone to get it off the ground. I had the entrepreneurial background, I had the energy background and the connections within the state, so they felt like I was a good fit for them. So I was really excited about it and I still am.

John Farrell:
That’s awesome that it was such a merger of interest and how cool that you were thinking about this kind of cooperative approach and others were at the same time too, and it was really more just like a merging of your ideas than somebody having to go it alone, for example, to get it all started. Want to then, let’s just talk about SolarShare. Can you describe what a typical project is like for SolarShare? How big is it? Where are the panels located and who’s buying the electricity?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah. Our projects are typically one to five megawatts in scale. And I guess for folks that aren’t really up to knowing what that looks like, it’s about 40 acres of land up to 40 acres of land. So not really huge solar projects, but they’re in front of the major projects still. They’re in the distribution system of a local utility. And up to this point, we’re going to sell all of our power directly to that local utility, either through a PPA or some other agreement that allows them to get access to that power. And generally for those local utilities, they’re offsetting power that they would normally buy from a vertically integrated or a larger utility via transmission. So generally we want to help them reduce their costs and also help ’em get access to clean energy, local clean energy.

John Farrell:
I’m going to definitely come back to this question of where they buy from because I’ve got some interesting examples in Minnesota, but I don’t want to drown in the power market stuff yet. I want to ask you more about your business model here. So when a lot of people are talking in the clean energy space about this idea of going solar together, they talk about community solar. So people are subscribing to a project, they’re receiving a credit on their bill through the utility bill or maybe in parallel to the utility bill. Can you explain how the SolarShare Cooperative Solar project works differently? How are people participating and how are they benefiting?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, so I wrote an op-ed about this a while back, but really that op-ed focused on the differences between our model and community solar. And really that was because our community solar bill in the state of Wisconsin didn’t pass for various reasons. And I wanted to reach out to folks in that article and say, Hey, all is not lost for those that are fighting for community solar. And likewise on the utility side, we’ve got options for you as well. You’re right that we don’t focus on bill credits. I think that’s actually a good thing because having worked for utilities, I saw how the community solar model works and I believe that there’s significant friction within that model, and there’s significant issues facing some of the folks that participate in that. One is that we can bring anyone in the state of Wisconsin on to participate in our cooperative, whereas if you’re in a certain utility footprint and your utility doesn’t offer community solar, then you’re kind of out of luck.
So we allow anyone in the state to participate, not just those who are living in maybe a more progressive utilities footprint. The other thing is we offer dividends instead of credits. So folks are getting cash back in. They own equity when they buy those shares versus when they would buy subscription. They don’t necessarily own equity in that solar farm or they don’t really own shares specifically. So when it comes to transferring that stuff, it makes it a little difficult for those folks. They have an opportunity to reinvest. So it’s not like you could just have a certain amount of subscription that you can get and then you can’t get it anymore. Folks are allowed to invest multiple times over different investment cycles. So this allows them to continually invest in solar across the state of Wisconsin. And additionally, there’s no issue if you move.
So in a traditional model, if you’re let’s say in a utilities footprint and you decide to leave, you have to figure out what do you do with your subscription at that point? Do you get a refund on some of it or are you able to pass that onto another customer? It just makes things a little more simple on our side. And then for utilities, this is an easy button for them. There’s no administrative burden for them to deal with us. We handle all that on our side. They just get the clean energy at a price that they negotiate for those stable PPAs that they’re getting from it, to help them offset the energy that they would buy from someone else. It provides that price stability and the production against the fossil fuel volatility that we’ve seen in the last few years. And then it also helps ’em lower their transmission costs because these projects are feeding into the local distribution system versus from the transmission projects that they have to pay extra for that power. So we feel that our model provides broader participation, investment flexibility and cost efficiency for utilities while delivering all those benefits of reliable renewable energy solutions.

John Farrell:
You’ve kind of already alluded to this in describing the differences between a subscription-based model and this cooperative model, but I just want to emphasize this. It sounds like the model that you’ve developed could really work in any state, whether it has a community solar policy or not in any utility service territory, whether it has a community solar policy or not, that because you’re building solar projects, selling electricity to the utility and it’s SolarShare that is handling the relationship with the investors. This is pretty replicable

Cory Neeley:
And we’ve had a lot of interest from other states as well on this. So I’ve had folks from Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Nebraska, who see this model as a way to increase solar investment in their state. And really ultimately cooperatives were created to solve problems that traditional capital investors have decided not to solve. So if it made sense for traditional investors to do this, they’d already be doing it. And in some cases they are credited. Investors have invested in these projects, but we’re not seeing the type of investment that we need to see to really address the problems facing our world. And so because anyone in our state can participate in the investment, they don’t need to worry about whether or not their local utility offers that instead of those bill credits to get equity. This is what I saw as a workaround, but I like to call it Community Solar 2.0 where we’re improving upon that original model or giving at least a version that’s different.
Folks can focus on that original version if it works for them and if the utility wants to do it more power to ’em, we actually, I appreciate that they do that, but if they don’t and if they don’t want to spend all that time and maybe utilities don’t want to stand up a program on their own, we can offer that for them. That’s really a way to get around it. And we allow businesses and institutional investors to participate as well. So not just individual investors. We’re working on a model for institutional investors because we know that those folks have goals that they’ve set aside that their boards and their trustees have decided we want to meet these goals by 20 40, 20 50. Those goals are still important to them. And so we want to provide options for those folks as well to participate. And I like to think of it as an ecosystem really where everybody has an opportunity to participate, everybody has an opportunity to bring that money back into our state.
And there’s a story that early on, I was at a farm event in central Wisconsin and there were a lot of Mennonite folks there, and I was talking to the guys, I’m like, why are there so many Mennonite people at this farm technology event? And they said, well, they do a lot of work on those newer farm implements. They do stuff, but he said, if you ever spend a dollar in the Mennonite community, it will never leave. He goes, US English, we spend money, and that money gets passed around to everybody in their community. They do stuff for each other. And I started thinking about that. I’m like, well, that’s a good analogy to what we’re doing really. Ultimately, we’re paying ourselves and our neighbors for the clean energy that we’re producing in our local communities. And that sure beats spending a bunch of money on fossil fuels, which in Wisconsin, we do not have coal or natural gas resources. So every dollar we spend on those resources leaves our state as soon as that energy gets into our communities. So it’s a matter of creating an ecosystem that feeds in itself a terrarium of sorts of energy. The moisture never leaves, the energy never leaves our communities, but I really like that idea and I think that’s a model that’s with all the struggles we’re facing economically as a nation, focusing on what we can do locally and what we can provide to our local neighbors is really important.

John Farrell:
It’s a great chance for me to plug that. ILSR published a report called Advantage Local that talks about the benefits of local ownership of energy. So this is just, I think, a perfect illustration of that. We’ll link to it on the show page, and I forgot to mention before Cory, I’d love you to share that, that you wrote about SolarShares community solar model. I’d love to put that on the show page as well. So for folks to find that, you kind of alluded to the fact that you’ve got the opportunity to attract a lot of different kinds of investors. You can have an individual, you could have a business, you could have an institutional investor. What does a typical investment look like? I mean maybe for an individual or a business, I guess you could invest whatever you want right up to the limit of how large the project is. Tell me a little bit about what that’s like for folks, how much they put in and then how they earn their return

Cory Neeley:
To democratize Investment means you need to provide a wide range of investment options for folks. And ultimately we started out with a thousand dollars minimum investment. We actually heard from our members that we would like to actually lower that so more folks could invest. So we dropped that relatively quickly down to $500 minimum investment. And to join our co-op is 25 bucks and that’s a one-time fee, but really that’s more just like getting you in the door type of money. Our average investment so far is around $12,000 and folks could invest up to a hundred thousand dollars and we’ve had a few of those folks do that. But really this is about crowdfunding and getting as many people to be a part of. This is possible. And what we offer is a 5% return over five years at this point. We’re looking at going to yearly dividends as we kind of mature, but when we started out the co-op, that 5% was, I mean that was better than cities and bonds.
Not even five months later, the interest rates spiked and we were competing directly with these CDs and bonds. So we changed our messaging around, Hey, this is safe and stable and better than CDs and bonds to, Hey, this is local impact investing. This is investing in your backyards. And while I won’t lie to folks and say, this is going to be whatever you could get on the open market, on the stock market, what I can say is that we’re offering you an opportunity to invest in your community, but also this is tortoise, not hair investing. You want this to be a nice Sunday drive where you put your money in there and you relax versus, Hey, what’s happening to the market? We have to worry about this every day. We want folks to feel comfortable in investing in their communities and feel safe that their money’s being put to good work.

John Farrell:
I love this Sunday drive analogy. I’m just already picturing myself like the sun is out. I’m not in a hurry. I love that. I want to get into the weeds for just a second here about the kind of investment thing. You’ve used the term accredited investor a couple of times. I’m guessing that most people listening have no idea what they’re talking about, but I’m very familiar. I wrote this report in 2016 called Beyond Sharing, which was about this idea of how could you create an investment model a lot like SolarShare, honestly, and the thing I kept running into in my research was that securities laws generally make it hard to either advertise to ordinary folks like you had to have these so-called accredited investors, which I’m going to let you define because probably more in the know in terms of how that term works, but how does your cooperative model get over some of those hurdles for an investment model for community Solar that have plagued this entire sector for so long?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, so I mean an accredited investor, and this is my own personal view on is somebody has enough money that they can lose money and it won’t ruin them. Whenever you’re investing in things that there’s an element of risk, you want to make sure that what’s going on, you’re fully informed of what the risks are and those types of things. And our PPM aligns that with our private placement memo, I should say it lays that out for folks pretty clearly. It is still legal, so it’s a little difficult for the layperson to read, but really we say, what are the risks? And the risks for us are, one, we are not able to complete any projects or we’re not able to build stuff or that the market completely changes and solar isn’t cost effective anymore. And so a credit investor would go into a thing, they would read the prospectus, they would read all the risks, and they would make that investment and being accredited if they lose no harm, no, well, I guess I wouldn’t say no harm, no foul, but they’re still going to be able to feed their children and have their house and things like that, right?
For us, because we’re pooling money, we essentially become an accredited investor on behalf of all of our members. So while our co-op has the opportunity to build these projects, we don’t do so in the vacuum of one person’s thought of what we’re going to do, things we do. So with the backing of our board choosing what investments go in and our membership voting to elect those board members. So there’s checks and balances, there’s ways around things. I don’t operate in a vacuum. I don’t operate in my own kind of doing whatever I want. We have monthly meetings where we talk about stuff. We have meetings upon meetings where we decide what is within our ethos of investment and what are we going to choose to invest in these times? And we put it out to our board to decide is this the right thing for our membership?
And every year those folks get elected from the will of our people. So it’s a fully democratic model and I think it has a way to solve some other issues besides just solar investment. I think about cooperatives as a model to solve healthcare, childcare, housing, and we’ve looked at housing as an option in the future of how we help affordable housing options for workforce development and that type of stuff because that’s what’s holding back some small communities as well. So yeah, we are here to solve a problem. It’s need over greed, right? That’s our focus.

John Farrell:
You kind of alluded to this earlier when you were talking about lowering the investment share. I know with some community solar folks who are doing the subscription model, they sort of have a pay as you go model, which is a little different. Of course there’s bill credits coming in. Do you have anything like that where you can help someone who’s low income or for whom even $500 is a barrier in terms of participating?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, we don’t at this point now, solar for all, Wisconsin received 62 and a half million dollars. They applied for a hundred million dollars and we were actually part of the development of their application. They included us in our model as part of it. One of the issues with Solar for All is that you have this 20% threshold where you have to reduce individual households by 20%. And the struggle I had with that model is that you’re picking and choosing winners at that point. And we know that poverty isn’t just scattered around areas, especially in rural areas where it isn’t concentrated as much. Folks struggle with paying their bills, and I’ve been thinking about models that allow us to pair our investment with micro philanthropy, which is micro philanthropy is such an idea, is like a roundup program where a local utility could round up and use that money to buy shares.
We can basically take the value of that, put it back into the local low-income funds so that you continually create an endowment of sorts of low-income funds. The other model, I think in Minnesota, I’ve spoken with some folks over there, they have a community solar model that allows them to bank kilowatt hours during periods of nonpayment, which for Wisconsin, the periods of nonpayment are generally during the moratorium or November through April when it’s so cold that you can’t shut off some bill someone’s house. Well, in the years that I worked as a utility person, I saw that the folks that were doing that and not paying their bills during that periods of time, they had an option at the time in April of either getting shut off, coming up with the money, which generally came from their tax returns or things like that, or moving to escape that bill and moving, anytime you move, especially if you’re income constrained, it’s an opportunity for you to fail at finding a place to live.
And what ends up happening then is people become unhoused and this period of unhoused or cycles kind of perpetuates itself. So I think if we go to the model where we allow folks to bank kilowatt hours and we help them with their bills and help them not come out of winter with this huge bill to worry about, we might be able to stop folks from treading water and help ’em swim. It’s something I think about a lot. I spent a lot of time in people’s houses that were struggling to pay their bills when I worked for the utilities, and it broke my heart because a lot of times these folks didn’t really have any options. They were stuck with baseboard electric heat, which is expensive or they’re stuck with houses that were poorly insulated. And while the IRA has been focused on trying to help fix that, we still have a lot of housing stock that is poorly insulated and relatively too expensive to live in. So like I said, a long way of answering, we’re working on it, it’s something that we’re focused on, and ultimately we find the right utility partner and it’s going to happen. Up to this point, we’re just selling all the kilowatt hours. We haven’t worked on developing a program specifically for that, but I think Solar for All is an option. We just have to find a way to do that within the Solar for all guidelines. We’ll see what happens with that program under this new administration and how it’ll be implemented.

John Farrell:
I want to come back to one thing that you mentioned earlier, which was this idea of one of the upsides or the selling points of the SolarShare model is that you’re selling energy to a local utility and helping them offset purchases maybe from power from further away that has to be delivered on the transmission system or from an investor owned utility or some other larger utility. One of the things I’ve seen with publicly owned or member owned utilities like rural electric cooperatives is that they have these contracts with their supplier, their wholesale supplier. I’m sure you’re very familiar with this, having worked in the utility, so sorry, I’m going to overexplain it for the audience here, but these contracts might limit the amount that local utility can buy themselves or it can cause some interesting conflicts with the federal law Purpa, which allows utilities to purchase, in fact compels them to purchase power from what are so called qualified facilities, which these projects, I imagine would be but often create some interesting legal conflicts between these local distribution cooperatives and their sort of larger wholesale cooperative neighbor. Have you run into this issue? Are you generally sliding into those exceptions in those contracts where there’s some ability to buy locally? Are there any tensions that you’ve exposed in trying to do this local sales model between these local utilities, which I’m sure are very interested and their suppliers who often are seeing that as a form of competition?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, I think what a lot of these the wholesale suppliers have done in the last few years is offer carve-outs or the ability to self-serve a certain percentage of your utilities needs. And really that allows them to hedge costs locally, but also show their local community that they’re invested in this renewable energy. And the wholesale suppliers themselves are actually investing in renewable energies as well, which is great. More renewable the better. I think that’s a good thing. We haven’t run into any issues with the wholesale side because ultimately we need our customer, which is the local utility to come to the table with a want or a need. They have an option to do this stuff. And our member contractors that are the ones that build and develop these, they’ve got the relationships with those utilities anyways. They’re already working with those folks so they know what they need and they have an idea of where we can put these projects.
One of the issues we run into sometimes is how big can you go? And really it’s limited to the amount of energy on that substation that you’re feeding into. And so you don’t want to backfeed out to the system because that’s wasted money. But ultimately there isn’t a whole lot of low growth in some of the rural communities anyway. So they’re very stable. They’re also limited by their load size. They don’t have as much industry as say like the municipals or the investor owned utilities have in the bigger cities and things like that. So we haven’t run into issues. I mean, actually our third projects with Excel, and they’re actually using the project as a way to help three of their customers get clean energy through a sleeve tariff type of arrangement. And it is working out really well because one, those customers have a need for renewable energy.
They have their own renewable energy goals, but two, they want cost assurance that their bills aren’t going to go up above a certain point. So when they buy power for a long term, they might pay a little more for it upfront, but over the long period of time, over that long contract, it allows them to kind of hedge their costs, keep their costs affordable in a way that they need that flexibility to do. So. I know we didn’t anticipate working with IOUs when we started out. We figured we’d be working with Munis and co-ops mostly, but I think IOUs are looking at our model and saying, well, this makes a lot of sense for us. If we can do these projects with them, we can have local investment and we can have folks that want to get this clean energy and that they want to buy that power, more power to ’em. So yeah, having worked for utilities, I take a broad view approach. This we need to transition and we need to do it reliably and responsibly. And so our projects are small enough that we’re not taking a huge bite out of those bigger vertically integrated utilities projects, but we’re doing a little bit at a time. We’re transitioning piece by piece versus wholesale change.

John Farrell:
One of the things that a lot of renewable energy projects have struggled with in recent years is local opposition. Could you talk about how the SolarShare model helps address this nimbyism? Have you had opposition to any of the projects that you’ve built?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, I go to the permit hearings for a lot of these projects. And when folks voice their concerns, a lot of times it’s out of, I read this online or I saw this on Facebook. And we have to acknowledge that there’s people out there and there’s an industry in itself of providing misinformation around renewable energy, and it’s these Facebook facts that we struggle with fighting against. And I believe personally that the misinformation and disinformation is the biggest problem of our lifetimes right now. The folks that you could go out there and work an honest trade and have someone come out there and lie about what you’re doing so they could stop you to do it. Now in rural areas also, there’s this feeling that they’ve been passed over and that, Hey, this project’s going to come here, but what are we going to get out of it?
And so we provide this opportunity for folks to invest. And I saw this in our very first permit hearing where I sat down and there was a farmer sitting there and he had his arms crossed and he asked a lot of good questions, and some were based on some of the Facebook facts and things that he’d read, but after it passed, I could tell you it wasn’t super happy about it. He was going to be right next door to our project. And afterwards I ran over and I was like, Hey, I just wanted to introduce myself and invite you to join our co-op. And he’s like, what do you mean? I’m like, well, our co-op’s going to be allowing local people to invest in this project. And it was like a flip of a switch. He was instantly like, oh, well, I didn’t realize that I could be a part of this.
And oh, and then his wife and him start talking, well, maybe we could get sheep and we could put them in there. And I’m like, yes, all these things could be true. We just wanted to make sure that you knew you could be a part of this. And I like to use this analogy that if you’re going to have a party or you’re going to have a dance, you should invite your neighbors because one, they might show up and you might have a really good time with them, or two, they might be less likely to call the cops if the music gets too loud. So by allowing folks to invest and allowing folks to participate or at least inviting them to participate, it changes the perspective of those people. And I personally believe, and this is just grand scheme of things, that every project, every solar or wind or any large institutional project that has an impact on local people should have a public investment component.
And if there’s money to be made on those projects, then those local people should get similar to whatever that corporation’s getting. And I believe that that would eliminate or wipe out a lot of the nimbyism that exists because ultimately folks just want to be included and they want to feel like they have a choice and they want to feel like they are part of something versus like, Hey, I got to deal with all the negative externalities, which for solo, there really aren’t a lot of negative externalities, but the perceived negative externalities are enough sometimes to stop projects. And if you get folks that are really hell bent in stopping a project, it’ll get stopped one way or another. So I think we’re an antidote to that, and we’ve been lucky to participate in two rounds of what’s called energizing rural communities. It’s a prize program through the DOE, and we actually won two phases of that based on our message that we can change how rural people feel about solar projects. So I think our model works. I think it’s replicable, and I think even if folks aren’t going to replicate our model, they should replicate our intent, which is to include as many rural people in the value that’s generated from your projects.

John Farrell:
This is wonderful to hear about. I love that anecdote about the farmer who, as you described it, I can picture him sitting there with his arms crossed and what an opportunity to, instead of having to debate with him about the facts on Facebook or whatever, and facts is probably a loose term, as you mentioned, the fossil fuel industry that is investing in that misinformation is providing information, but facts I don’t think are often applied, but the ability to turn him into somebody who is all of a sudden interested in it, like, oh, there is something in this for me, I just think that’s beautiful. I love that anecdote. Share that more because I think people really need to appreciate that how much this is like you said about being passed over or the perception that there’s no benefit for them. And I think this model really is an antidote to that.

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, I can just add on one last thing about that. And I grew up in rural area. My dad worked in a factory growing up and stuff like that. And so there is this sentiment in rural areas that we work. We toil for the benefit of others that we’ve been passed on. And ultimately I think that sentiment needs to end, and I think we need to focus on how do we work together. Having this renewable energy in a rural area does benefit other people in the cities. It helps the kids who have a coal fired power plant in their backyard. It helps them breathe cleaner air. It helps them have cleaner water, and we all benefit from that air and water because we share the same resources ultimately. So this cooperative model, it’s in the heart of rural America. Farmers couldn’t get things done if they didn’t have their neighbors.
We couldn’t get all the harvesting done if we didn’t have our neighbors to help us. We couldn’t find our cow if our neighbors didn’t help us find it sometimes. So it’s important to focus back on that ethic, which I think to a certain extent has been lost in America sometimes that we do depend on each other, but we don’t really realize it. And there’s so much division that we forget that we do depend on each other and we need each other. So I do think that we need to kind of get that ethos back going, and if you lead with that ethos that, Hey, I’m counting on you, or I need you, and I’ll be there for you if you need me. It just changes the whole conversation altogether.

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John Farrell:
We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask Cory about the governance structure of SolarShare and how member investors and contractors share leadership. I ask whether there are policies that can improve the prospects for cooperative community solar and how to get information about replicating this model in other states. You’re listening to a Local Energy Rules podcast with Cory Neeley, executive director of the SolarShare, Wisconsin Cooperative.

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John Farrell:
I think this is a good segue to asking you about the governance structure of SolarShare.
So you’re a cooperative, that means members are owners, but you interestingly have two kinds of members. You have the investors, could be someone like me who’s just saying, I want to put in a thousand dollars to help build this local solar project. But then you also have the contractors that are building the solar arrays, which I thought was fascinating. Can you talk about how these different memberships function? Is anybody who’s a member, whether investor or contractor gets a vote, is it different? How is everybody involved in the decision-making process? And I’d also just love you to talk a little bit more about why did you decide to include contractors in your co-op membership?

Cory Neeley:
Part of our initial push to do this was to actually help grow Wisconsin solar industry, which for various reasons behind other states, either because we don’t have certain legislation that enables these one to five megawatt projects to get built, but really we want to support the growth of an industry, which ultimately it’s about good paying jobs in our communities. It’s about making sure that our businesses are strong and that if projects are getting built, they should be built With Wisconsin Labor, we want to have that robust kind of a solar contractor ecosystem. So this is one way we do that. So our member contractors, which are Class A members, they have two seats on our board as representation. So our member contractors within themselves, they vote for who will have those two seats, and then there’s five seats available for our member investors, which are class B members.
So ultimately, everybody’s represented to a different degree for the member contractors. And ultimately those member contractors, they’re the ones that bring us projects to invest in. So if they have projects that need investment, and we’re actually going through a fundraise right now for a member loan to one of our member contractors that allows them to get access to capital when they need it in a more flexible terms and they could get from traditional capital. And really that’s the goal of our co-op is to help our members achieve while also helping our members earn an acceptable rate of return. Some folks that aren’t used to cooperatives are like, well, this seems self-dealing. It’s like, well, the point of the co-op is to help all our members, so why wouldn’t we self deal? Why wouldn’t we help ourselves? And the great thing about it is we’re not just helping ourselves, we’re helping our communities, we’re helping other things.
When we focus on education or we focus on concern for our community, it’s because those are our community members, those are our neighbors. We care about them. So our structure really was determined by our articles incorporation, and I’ve shared those articles incorporation in our board documents with quite a few folks shout out to Cooperative Energy Futures, who actually gave us a lot of the bones of our cooperative structure from their own work. So just like we would be happy to pass on stuff, we’ve been blessed to have that information passed to us. And I know you’ve interviewed Timothy Diner or Thomas before in the past. What a great model that they have up at Cooperative Energy Futures, and we’re just happy to be a part of something similar to that.

John Farrell:
I’m so glad you mentioned Cooperative Energy Futures. And I also, I seem to recall from doing some of our previous research on cooperatives, there are those seven cooperative principles and helping other cooperatives is right in there. I love just the way that you put that about the accusation of self-dealing, and it’s like that’s exactly what a cooperative is. The whole point is we’re coming together to do this for ourselves. Of course. I just think it’s a wonderful example of the power of cooperatives. Let me just ask you, so from your website, it looks like you have three projects that are completed. I’m just curious how many investors you’ve engaged so far across those three projects.

Cory Neeley:
So we have about 190 members, and of that we’ve had 98 individual investments. So some of our members have invested multiple times, but for the three projects that we did, we have about 98 individual investment purchases or share purchases. So in the beginning when we started out, we bought land for our first two projects, so Lemon Weir and Webster Creek, which are both feeding into Oakdale electric cooperatives distribution system. We own the land for those two projects. Likewise, we own the land for our Lake Halle project. And ultimately in the beginning of our co-op, we wanted to invest in land because it backed our original investors’ investments with real assets. These are real things that, let’s say solar ends tomorrow, but we still own that land. We own the leases for that land. We’re going to continue to get money. It just might change how we pay out our members at the end of the day.
So the risk for the initial investors is that we didn’t do any projects past the first three and that we stop, right? Well, we’ve already gotten to that point. We have a pipeline of other projects that we want to invest in. Now it’s just a matter of getting more members to invest and getting more members to join us each day. And it is a struggle. We’re peer-to-peer kind of organization where we bring folks in that way. We haven’t been out there advertising a ton. I think we did one major ad buy with Wisconsin Public Radio, which was helpful, but maybe it doesn’t really get to the core person that we’re looking for all the time. And ultimately we want to get as many people to invest as possible. We want to get as many projects built as possible because we believe the work we’re doing has a huge impact in Wisconsin and we want to grow that impact year over year.

John Farrell:
One of the things that I was curious about is that the nice thing about your model, about the cooperative investment model is that it sidesteps some of the policy needs for traditional community solar, like having an official program or virtual net metering coming up with a way to do the bill credits. But are there policies states could pass that would make it easier to expand your cooperative model? Are there things that you run into where it’s like, oh, if we did have this kind of program, it would make our lives easier?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, I mean, we don’t need community solar legislation to operate. Now, that being said, if community solar legislation did happen, it might actually improve our position because I think that we’re really easy for utilities to work with and that our model, if it was Community Solar was going to allow our model. And this is something I’ve had to advocate on our behalf that like, Hey, this is Community Solar still. This doesn’t look like what you think it should look like, but it still is community solar, it’s community investment, it’s local investment, and we’re still returning money to our members. But I think that if states were looking at, well, I think the first thing they could do is probably help with permitting and make sure that permitting is easier, making sure that local folks have a voice, but that voice isn’t the only voice that matters.
Everybody should have a piece of this and everybody should have an opportunity to have a conversation around it. But I think ultimately we need folks that aren’t trying to stick the proverbial stick in the wheel at all times. The folks that are just saying, Hey, we got to shut this down. We can’t have this because it’s bad for our interests. Well, we all have an interest. And I think when we look at communities, I’m a council person in my local community, there is no Republicans or Democrats at the city council. We’re all together. It’s such a small community that there’s local issues, there aren’t Republican issues, they’re not democrat issues here. These are local issues. And so when we focus on our local community and we talk about clean energy and things like that, you could have folks from other sides of the spectrum offering opinions and maybe agreeing or disagreeing on certain things where it’s because it’s local, it isn’t about the broader political conversations that we’re having at the national level.
So yeah, it’s a long way of saying I think there’s policies out there. I think our model could work in all other places. Wisconsin actually was, I think the first state to have cooperative law on its books. And I was talking with another friend in the cooperative space recently. We were given a presentation and she brought up that the first cooperative was formed in Wisconsin by a female dairy farmer over in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, which is really interesting. She was tired of dealing with folks that were harming her, either costing her money or something like that. So she started her own co-op and more power tours. So that’s the model that I think people realize when we want to solve problems, cooperatives are there to fix that problem. You just have to get people together. And ultimately that’s our struggle nowadays. How do we get people together to solve a problem when we have all dissent and these conflicts in our lives? So yeah, that’s something we work on a daily basis to bring folks around a shared mission to solve the problem that’s facing us right now.

John Farrell:
So what do you have in the pipeline for solar sharing? I know we’ve got other projects in Wisconsin. Is there a possibility to expand to other states?

Cory Neeley:
We won’t expand to other states, and that’s because our cooperative charter only allows us to function within Wisconsin. So our members have to be from Wisconsin and we have to invest more or less directly in Wisconsin. And that being said, we have the member loan I talked about, which is actually going to allow our members to build projects across three states. But because that member loan is focusing on just their work, we don’t have any issues with investing in it. And 12 of those projects are going to be in Wisconsin. We have a potential to invest in another project next year, which I’m not able to talk directly about that because the permitting hasn’t been done yet. But I think that’s an opportunity for us to get involved in a different manner. In the past, we’ve invested in the land. Our focus in this round is getting an equity in the capital stack, which is more lucrative.
It’s a little more risky, but we think we’re matured to the point where we can be a little more risky in our investment. And ultimately you got to risk it for the biscuit. As they say, little more risk means a little bit more money back to your members. And ultimately that’s what our members want us to do. They want to get more returns, they want to be able to invest in more projects down the line. That’s what we’re excited about in the next few years. It’ll be interesting to see how the new administration views these types of developments and whether or not they create obstacles or not. For us, I think utilities are already on board. Utilities see renewable energy and solar specifically as the lowest cost resource for their energy resource portfolios. So it makes compelling arguments for us to say, Hey, we’ve got a project. We can offer you a good deal on this. Do you want it? And we hope that they’re going to continue to say yes over the next 10, 15, 20 years.

John Farrell:
You’ve kind of alluded to this already, and I guess just wanted to make sure that I broadly didn’t miss anything, that you have multiple layers of local benefits that you’re offering. So you have investors who are local in Wisconsin to these projects who are earning a return. You have member contractors who are earning the business of doing this and often benefiting from the structure of the cooperative maybe to support them in growing their business. So you’ve got the job creation, presumably. You mentioned using Wisconsin labor through these contractors or others. Are there other benefits that you think of from this investment model that are accruing to local economies that we didn’t talk about yet?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, actually I didn’t really talk about farmers. And ultimately they’re a big focus of us as well. Likeable takes, and I dunno if you’ve talked much about takes is essentially dual use farming or farming within solar farms. And so our projects which aren’t huge in scale might fit really well into small scale agriculture. So if you think of folks that are going to be at your farmer’s markets and those folks tend to struggle with access to land. If you’re a smaller farmer, you’re farming because you don’t have enough land to do the bigger commodity farming. Or maybe you just only want to focus on that. And if you think about the folks that have traditionally struggled with getting access to land, it’s usually bipoc. Folks in Wisconsin, a lot of Hmong farmers, Hmong farmers struggle with getting access to land because they don’t have the network, so don’t, maybe there’s a language barrier, things like that.
One of the things we’ve been talking about, and especially with Lake Halle, is if Voltaic isn’t allowed within our project, can we buy land next to our project? And then those farmers get the benefits of co-signing their project right next to 30 or 40 acres of pollinator planting. All of our projects have pollinator planting or some sort of a prairie or shortgrass prairie right now. Is there an opportunity to provide value to those folks? And so we’ve worked with Wisconsin Farmers Union to talk about ways we can set up a model that incorporates agriculture in each of our projects. And then we’ve also, through some of the money that we got from our prize winnings are started working on a K through 12 bowl, takes curriculum that we want to make statewide. And Voltaic in itself is another one of those anti nimbyism, or it’s the grease that skids the projects sometimes for folks like, oh, well, I don’t want to see all this farmland being used up in solar.
And they’re like, well, what if we’re growing stuff inside there? Or what if we’re allowing farmers to do stuff there? We have some solar honey or honey that was produced next to our Webster Creek project and we’ve been given it to our members as they invest this year, which it sweetens the pot, but it’s also, it’s just visual representation of like, Hey, there’s other things that benefits to just having solar. There’s the habitat. There’s also protecting pollinators, which the newsflash pollinators are dying at an alarming rate. And if we don’t have pollinators, we don’t have food. One out of every three pieces of food that goes in your mouth is coming from pollinated food or the benefits of that. So these are things that we want to focus on as well. And because we’re a cooperative and because we focus on need versus greed, we can focus and go down those paths that maybe don’t have a huge impact on our bottom lines, but have a huge impact on our communities. So yeah, I would say the farmers would be the other thing that I mistakenly left out to this point, but they’re really critical to our future plans.

John Farrell:
What advice would you offer to listeners who might want to try to replicate this model other places?

Cory Neeley:
Yeah, I would say reach out to me and I will give you all of our bounding documents for you to be able to use. Like I said, this is kind of pay it forward for us from the help we got from Cooperative Energy Futures, but ultimately, I think this model should be replicated. And for the folks that already reached out to me, I said, Hey, I would be happy to have a conversation with you and tell you what our struggles have been, what our wins have been, how I would do it differently if I was in different state maybe. But for the Midwest, or at least in the Midwest, which has a really strong cooperative ethic or a history of creating cooperatives, I think it just makes too much sense to not do it. And ultimately, I’ve been participating with folks that, especially tribal communities as well in our state, that we’re looking at ways to have some energy sovereignty of sorts to build their own products.
And I said, well, here’s our model. I mean, there’s nothing stopping a bunch of tribes from doing the same investment model that we are. And these are tribes that have been working together with each other through fish stocking or other things like that in the past. Why not focus on energy and working together in that way as well? I’m a person who believes in helping others when they need help because ultimately, at some point in my life, I’m going to need help as well. And I would hope that someone else would help me too. And I also believe that we’re not going to solve this problem by competing with each other. This has got to be about cooperation, and that should be the ethic of the future. We’re going to face some really big, tough problems, and we’re not going to get there by competing with each other. We’re going to get to the solutions by working together.

John Farrell:
Well, Cory, that’s just such a lovely way to wrap up and thank you so much for taking the time to come on and talk about SolarShare. It’s a delight to hear about a model that can work without having to chase down legislation first, even if it would be aided by that. But also just a delight to hear about how you’ve so thoroughly thought through the way to deploy solar in a community for a community’s benefit that I think is so often missing.

Cory Neeley:
Thank you, John. I really appreciate the opportunity to come on here and talk about what we’re doing, and I wish you all the best. To all the listeners out there, let’s work together to build a brighter future for all.

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John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local and Energy Rules with Cory Neeley, executive director of the SolarShare Wisconsin Cooperative. On the show page, look for a link to several related resources, including the SolarShare website and Cory’s op-ed piece about this cooperative community solar model. We’ll also have links to Advantage Local, a report showing the broad financial and economic benefits of locally owned energy, as well as ILSR 2016 report called Beyond Sharing, which explored how cooperative investing overcame barriers to shared investments. I’ll even link a few relevant podcasts, including my interview with Timothy Dun Herder Thomas of Cooperative Energy Futures, and one from the Way Back Machine with Paul Spencer, CEO of Clean Energy Collective, a Colorado Solar company doing a similar investment style model of local solar development. 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.
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