Heart Butte Community Solar was selected as a Meaningful Benefit Category Special Recognition winner for Innovation 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: Heart Butte Community Solar
- Location: Heart Butte, Montana
- Project Size: 160.3 kW
- Project Subscribers: 21
- Year Energized: 2021
- Lead Organization: Bonneville Environmental Foundation
- Partner Organizations: Heart Butte School, GRID Alternatives, Glacier Electric Cooperative
- Business Model: Nonprofit developed, owned by Heart Butte School
- State or Utility Program Leveraged: Utility virtual new metering, Tribal Solar Accelerator Fund, and BEF Grant
- Bill Savings: 20%
- LMI Access: 100% of residential subscribers
Meaningful Benefits Best Practices
The Heart Butte Community Solar Project is a partnership between the Heart Butte School, GRID Alternatives, Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF), and Glacier Electric Cooperative (GEC). The Heart Butte School is a K-12 school on the Blackfeet Reservation in northwest Montana. GRID Alternatives led the installation of a 160.3 kW-DC ground-mounted virtually net-metered community solar system at the school, which was placed in service in September 2021. The project was designed to generate meaningful electricity bill savings for low-income Blackfeet households and to build a community asset that could be used as a hands-on learning opportunity and workforce development opportunity for Blackfeet high school and college students.
The Heart Butte School is subscribed to the project, receiving 25% of the generated output. The remaining 75% has been distributed via rotating, no-cost subscriptions to 20 low-income Blackfeet households. These savings are particularly impactful as nearly 40% of all residents on the Blackfeet reservation live in poverty, which is twice the statewide average. BEF’s CE Energy Education Program, which focuses on integrating career-connected renewable energy curriculum into K-12 classrooms, selected Shelby Jones, a science teacher at Heart Butte School, as a Clean Energy Fellow last year and supported her work developing renewable energy engineering challenges for students. She was able to use the installation as a hands-on learning opportunity and her summer students created a podcast about the solar project. This was a unique opportunity to pair the solar installation with K-12 energy education programming, exposing students to the hands-on components of solar installation as well as classroom hours learning about renewable technologies. This enabled students to learn more about what careers in solar and renewable energy could look like. GRID Alternatives also engaged the Heart Butte community by recruiting volunteers to participate in the installation and offering some of those students longer-term job opportunities after the project completed.
Learn more about the Heart Butte Community Solar project or contact BEF at renewable@b-e-f.org.