Above photo: This Solar Commons mural serves as a “deed to equitable title” for the project.
Energy from the sun is sure one of the most pervasive forms of common wealth. So why not capture and share that wealth more widely with everyone?
That’s the basic idea behind the Solar Commons, a prototype project that uses revenue streams from solar energy and partnerships to build community wealth. The primary vehicle is a Solar Commons trust agreement among diverse community groups and the owner of a solar power array.
The driving force behind this socio-legal innovation has been Kathryn Milun, a community-engaged scholar, writer and energy democracy advocate. Milun is also an anthropology professor at the University of Minnesota, Duluth and research fellow at the university’s Minnesota Design Center. She has spent the past 15 years developing the legal, technical, financial and operational frameworks for the Solar Commons concept.
Four projects are now underway – in Tucson, Arizona two in rural Minnesota, and one in north Minneapolis. They bring together several elements: solar installations, a financial model, a trust agreement, and participatory peer-governance.
It takes many community players working together to make the commons work. In the Minnesota projects, Solar Commons have brought together landowners, community nonprofits, a teaching farm for women, immigrant and new farmers, low-income neighborhoods, and Native American tribes. The trust legal form constitutes a new type of ownership regime for building and sharing solar energy systems.
Milun asserts, “The whole energy transition [to renewable energy] is being slowed down by ownership structures that are in place for electricity.” As she explained in a recent podcast interview with me (Episode #47, Frontiers of Commoning), investor-driven public utilities have their own profit-making priorities when it comes to ownership of the grid and electricity pricing schemes; this, in turn, typically channels the benefits to investors and businesses, and not to small businesses, community groups, and ordinary citizens.
Milun believes that we have to ask, “What are the ownership structures available for this technology? That question is absolutely important and can’t just be ignored.” She says that the advantage of the community trust ownership model is that it helps make solar energy more available and affordable, and its benefits more widely shared.
A trust offers more legal freedom than, say, the legal forms of a corporation, cooperative, or nonprofit, says Milun. “A trust doesn’t need registration or state approval,” she notes, adding that if the project stays “behind the meter” (serving its energy-sharing users only), the project can avoid the complications of integrating with different, larger ownership structures.
These benefits could make the Solar Commons model especially attractive in coming decades as university campuses, manufacturing plants, and big box stores put solar panels on rooftops, and as solar farms further encroach on rural farmland. The Solar Commons model is also appealing because it can help accelerate the rollout of solar energy and decentralize electricity generation, making the grid more resilient.
A further benefit is social equity. “I think of the Solar Commons as a kind of community development bank or a ‘community basic income,’ said Milun. It generates “a solid twenty-year revenue stream” that would not otherwise exist, which can be directed to needier, under-served segments of the community.
To make sure that everyone can see what’s going on with the Solar Commons, the project has developed a “digital dashboard” that reports energy generation, revenue stream, and other data on a real-time basis. The dashboard interface enables community members to transparently monitor and administer the system: an elegant blend of local commoning, environmental stewardship, and socio-economic empowerment.
The sharing of revenues is a particularly powerful tool for building community. Milun told how students at the University of Minnesota have designed a 3 Megawatt Solar Commons project for the university campus. She would love to see similar installations on all five university campuses in Minnesota – which sit on Indigenous lands – and then dedicate annual solar revenues, on the order of $70,000, to Indigenous food sovereignty initiatives. The digital dashboard could be placed in the university library, allowing everyone to see day-by-day how much money is being generated and channeled to Indigenous communities.
The cultural impact of creating a Solar Commons is also significant. As a community comes together to work out practical problems and respective roles, it builds new social connections, solidarity, and trust. It is not so difficult to assemble community partnerships, said Milun, because everyone recognizes the need for solar power and the advantages of pooling resources and sharing benefits.
Still, it does take a lot of work to raise the upfront money and to bring everyone together, from businesses and schools to community groups and needy neighborhoods. Navigating the legal, financial and technical complexities in the first instance has also been challenging — Solar Commons is still a prototype, after all. Fortunately, many legal, technical, and financial solutions have now been identified.
Solar commons is enjoying some tailwinds of support, too. The CEO of Heliene, Inc., the second largest US solar manufacturing plant, based in northern Minnesota, is highly supportive of the Solar Commons concept. The project won first place in a competition hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab, which has given the project some national visibility and recognition. And the esteemed Rocky Mountain Institute has published an admiring report about the Solar Commons model.
In Tucson, Arizona, a beautiful public mural at an elementary school serves as a conspicuous “deed to equitable title” for the Solar Commons project. It declares, “Gathering and Sharing the Sun’s Common Wealth.” Describing such outcomes, Milun glows: “This is what it looks like when we claim common ownership rights in the sun as our right, our commons.”
You can listen to my interview with Kathryn Milun here.