The Dividends Return Commons Model project was selected as a Meaningful Benefit Category Special Recognition winner for Community Ownership for the Sunny Awards for Equitable Community Solar, an initiative of the National Community Solar Partnership (NCSP).
The NCSP, a program of the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), supports a coalition of stakeholders working to expand access to affordable community solar to every U.S. household and enable communities to realize meaningful benefits, such as greater household savings, low- to moderate-income (LMI) household access, increased resilience, community ownership, and equitable workforce development. NCSP is working toward a 2025 target to enable community solar to power the equivalent of 5 million households and generate a cumulative $1 billion in energy bill savings.
The Sunny Awards were launched in 2022 to recognize community solar projects and programs that employ best practices to increase equitable access to the meaningful benefits of community solar for subscribers and their communities. Meaningful benefits are key outcomes of community solar development identified by the NCSP. These community solar benefits bring positive impacts to the households, organizations, and the surrounding communities where the projects are developed and operate.
Project Overview
- Project Name: Dividends Return Commons Mode
- Location: Oakland, California
- Project Size: 15.82 kW
- Project Subscribers: Residential
- Year Energized: 2019
- Lead Organization: People Power Solar Cooperative
- Partner Organizations: N/A
- Business Model: cooperatively-owned
- State or Utility Program Leveraged: Net Energy Metering 2.0, California Energy Commission EPIC Program, East Bay Community Energy Community Choice Energy Program
- Bill Savings: 20% for the off-taker (Site Host)
- LMI Access: 23% LMI Households
Meaningful Benefits Best Practices
People Power Solar Cooperative is a movement cooperative designed to enable people who cannot go solar to participate in a community solar cooperative and realize the benefit of controlling their energy future. Low-income communities and communities disproportionately impacted by the harms of the fossil fuel economy have historically been excluded from solar ownership and the financial, social, and environmental benefits associated with it. Comprised of mostly renters and low-income homeowners, People Power Solar Cooperative is part of a collective, grassroots effort to address this barrier.
At the core of People Power’s community-led model, and enshrined in its bylaws, is the concept of Project Groups: groups of owners come together to initiate clean energy projects or policy campaigns with support from the Cooperative’s staff, who handle the technical, legal, and administrative aspects of solar development and management. People Power is an umbrella of smaller “Project Groups” within the Cooperative whom the Cooperative’s staff supports in organizing their own local solar projects such as the Dividends Return Commons Model project. This model engages people to build, co-own, and steward their own renewable energy projects in their local neighborhoods.
Members have governance control over their energy projects by designing the flow of benefit of the energy asset with the support from the Cooperative’s staff. The members have control over the entire Cooperative through voting on major decisions and elections of the Board.
For more information on the Dividends Return Commons Model project, visit www.peoplepowersolar.org/projects or contact Crystal Huang at crystal@peoplepowersolar.org.