>>Nicole Steele: That's what I was just – okay. There. I wanted to make sure that 
everybody knows that we are recording this session, so if you want to come back and re-
listen to some of the good nuggets that Dave and Jenny go through when talking about 
community solar market trends and the modeling around the new National Community 
Solar Partnership target and its pathway to success, you always can go back. And we'll 
make sure to circulate that with everyone. 

So, again, welcome. Really excited to be having this conversation today, sort of as a 
follow-up to our big summit that happened at the end of January. And so, a big thanks for 
those who were able to join that summit and are joining again today. Just to provide a 
little bit of context on sort of where the National Community Solar Partnership sits within 
the Department of Energy – so, the program itself is under the Solar Energy Technologies 
Office and really is run by DOE, the National Renewable Energy Lab in Lawrence 
Berkley National Lab, along with a number of other external strategic partners like 
Sustainable Capital Advisors, NASEO, CSAS, CCSA. We continue to really build that 
alliance and make sure that we're lifting up other organizations that are doing work in this 
space.

And so, really, we are – have spent the last year taking a look at NCSP and providing 
strategic stakeholder engagement, and really spent a lot of time listening to what the 
challenges and barrier and opportunities are in the community solar industry and why 
community solar is such an important element to success for the solar industry at large 
because we have this huge decarbonization goal. And so, obviously we want to 
decarbonize the electricity sector by 2035 and decarbonize the power sector by 2050. So, 
that's what the SETO office has been working on, and NCSP specifically is looking to 
really democratize access and the benefits of clean energy to all Americans. 

And so, some of the other things that the SETO office does is it really focuses on 
technology, really driving down costs and accessibility of that technology, also 
supporting access to the grid and rights to the grid and ensuring that that grid is reliable 
and that there is local community resilience and that we're continuing to work in that 
direction, all with the lens of job growth. So, I know there's been a lot of focus on 
implementation job growth, so like the installers, but also sort of really starting to think 
about what does it look like to have a solar manufacturing workforce in this country as 
well and really lifting up that full circular economy. So, let's go to the next slide.

And I think this might be Anna. Right? So, that's perfect. So, I'm here to just really 
welcome everyone to this conversation and I would say that Anna is your true host here, 
and she will be sort of wrapping up the session after David and Jenny's presentations and 
Q&A. So, we want to make sure that we have plenty of time to talk about Q&A as well. 
So, with that, Anna, it's all yours.

>>Anna Balzar: Great. Thank you, Nicole. And thank you again, everyone, for joining 
us. As Nicole mentioned, the National Community Solar Partnership has been working 
for many years now. It was started in 2015 and funded in FY19 to really address this 
really important challenge of how do we accelerate the deployment of clean energy but in 
a way that makes sure that everyone has access to the benefits of clean energy? 

So, just a broad overview of what the National Community Solar Partnership does. We 
have three main components to the partnership. One is data tracking. We'll be hearing a 
lot about that today as we look through the community solar deployment numbers and 
market tracking efforts. Another big one is collaboration, and we'll be hitting on this a 
couple of times later on in the presentation. We have a peer network and online 
community platform where we have over a thousand members that are community solar 
stakeholders that do a lot of peer-to-peer exchange, resource sharing, highlighting events, 
and a lot of really great work happens on this platform. And then, another major arm of 
the National Community Solar Partnership is our technical assistance program, and I'll be 
speaking a little bit more to that as well. 

So, before I do, I want to sort of ground today's conversation and sort of the importance 
of community solar. So, what we know is that only about half of US households can 
access rooftop solar. There are many reasons for this. It could be inadequate roof size. It 
could be shading. It could be that there's a household that is a renter or doesn't have 
access to roof space. And then, there could be there's just not the financial resources to 
make the upfront investment in a rooftop solar system. So, as we can see, in the general 
solar market right now about ten percent of US electric generation is solar, but a very 
small portion of that is community solar, and an even smaller portion of that is 
community solar that is really serving low- and moderate-income households 
specifically. 

So, we see this at the National Community Solar Partnership as an opportunity to lean in 
and bring the resources of the federal government to this problem and work with this 
really robust community of stakeholders to address the challenges to deploying equitable 
and accessible community solar quickly. And by that, we have set a very ambitious goal 
and target of the next couple of years to enable community solar to power the equivalent 
of five million households by 2025 and generate a billion dollars in savings. And what 
that means is over a 700 percent capacity increase from where we are now with 
community solar and where we'd like to be in 2025 and a dramatic reduction in the bill 
savings or the expenses of energy bills.
 
So, we have set this target. We set it last fall and we're going to be talking a lot today 
about how do we get there? What does this target mean for the community solar 
industry? And what is the National Community Solar Partnership doing to move the 
industry towards this? 

Before we get into some of those data and numbers, I want to talk a little bit about 
something that's very important to us, which is the pathway to success. So, in line with 
setting the new target, the National Community Solar Partnership also developed a 
pathway to success, which is a series of five initiatives that were designed based on 
stakeholder feedback on what the most pressing and persistent barriers to community 
solar were to be able to sort of unlock more community solar deployment and markets. 
So, I'll go over each of these in a little bit of detail, and then we'll hear later from Dave 
Feldman about just what each of these mean and represent in terms of capacity growth 
for community solar. 

So, first is access to technical expertise and capacity building. The National Community 
Solar Partnership has a technical assistance program that has been foundational to the 
program since the beginning, but we are really leaning in on this element of our 
programming and ensuring that we have the resources and capabilities to serve a much 
broader group of technical assistance applicants by doubling our investment and then also 
making this program rolling instead of delivering it in rounds, making it accessible at any 
time to any one of our National Community Solar Partnership members.

The second element on our pathway to success is to address state and regulatory and 
policy environment support. And to do this we have recently launched a state 
collaborative – so, a network of state leaders who are thinking about community solar 
and will be sharing best practices, engaging in peer learning, and receiving direct 
technical assistance and group technical assistance to really think about how do we drive 
community solar market expansion at the state level? 

The third initiative is around access to credit and other financing, and this is our credit-
ready solar initiative. If you are a part of the National Community Solar Partnership 
you've probably heard a lot about this in the last couple of months. This is a program 
that's designed to standardize the approach to lending for community solar and really 
coordinate the delivery of resources, those financial resources, to make access to 
financing more accessible. And this all culminates into a marketplace that brings together 
lenders, philanthropy, and developers to really make those deals more transparent and 
more accessible and make sure that we can bring on all types of community solar, 
including those that are developed by community-based organizations or small 
developers.

The next initiative is our low-income customer acquisition and management support, and 
we are in the process of thinking through an acquisition tool that can help better manage 
customer acquisition, especially in the low- and moderate-income space, and leverage 
some of the programming that already exists at the federal and state level to make the 
acquisition and management of these subscriptions easier and really reduce the barriers to 
entry for low- and moderate-income households to community solar. 

And then, finally is messaging and recognition. This is our Hearts and Minds campaign. 
And for this we are really targeting a couple of different audiences to help have 
standardized messaging about community solar and really standardize the approach to 
providing benefits for community solar. So, at one leave there will be a recognition 
campaign that really targets sort of the state programs, the utility programs, the project 
developers to really incentivize projects that are providing meaningful benefits, and then 
also running a consumer awareness campaign to really broaden the awareness about 
community solar and make sure that households know that it is a product that is for them 
and will provide benefits to them.

So, I will stop there with our overview. As I mentioned, Dave Feldman is going to talk 
more about these initiatives and sort of how they work towards unlocking this goal, this 
new target that we've set. But before we do, I will turn it over to Jenny Heeter to give an 
update on the state of community solar right now. So, Jenny?

>>Jenny Heeter: Great. Thank you, Anna. I'm having some connection issues, so I'm 
going to just stay on audio only and hope that that works okay. So, you can move on to 
the next slide.

So, today I'm going to be talking about the current status of market deployment and 
community solar. This is data that NREL gathers on an ongoing basis from states, 
developers, and other parties that have information about projects that have been 
deployed or are in the queue. So, we'll talk about market status, then we'll talk about 
some policy drivers, and then we'll conclude with pending the community solar 
development that we've been tracking. Next slide. 

All right. So, go ahead to the next one. This is our market status.

But before we move on to market status, we want to talk about what is community solar 
in terms of what we are tracking for this project. The DOE defines "community solar" as 
any solar project or purchasing program within a geographic area in which the benefits of 
that project flow to multiple customers, who could be individuals, businesses, nonprofits, 
or other groups. And for the purposes of our data collection at NREL we have also added 
a criteria which says that those customers must be getting some type of credit for their 
purchase. So, it's not just people paying added to their bill; it's that they're also getting a 
benefit back, a financial benefit back. Next slide, please. 

All right. So, this is our community solar capacity by state. And the bubbles here 
represent individual projects and are scaled according to the size of the project. You can 
see a few key trends here. One is that our number of projects are pretty concentrated in a 
few states. We'll talk about that more as we go along as well. But overall, at the end of 
last year we had about 5.2 gigawatts of capacity installed over about 2000 projects, and 
these projects are located in 40 states and Washington, D.C. Next slide. 

We know also that the growth rate for community solar has been pretty aggressive. So, 
since 2010 annual growth has been about 130 percent year over year. We know that about 
1.8 gigawatts came online last year alone and we expect that number may even be a little 
bit higher since we might not have captured every single project that came online toward 
November and December yet. Next slide.

We also know that the projects that are coming online have tended to be larger than they 
were when the community solar market started. So, back in 2010 our average project size 
was less than a megawatt, while in more recent years it's trended more towards 1.5 
megawatts or even 2 megawatts. Next slide.

All right. The next couple of slides are going to talk about market concentration. So, we 
know that one of the DOE's goals is to provide access across the country. Right now, we 
see a lot of concentration in just a few states. So, Florida has taken the lead in terms of 
installed capacity this year with about 1.6 gigawatts, but following that we have about 92 
percent of cumulative capacity in just 10 states, and about three-quarters of capacity is in 
just 4 states – so, Florida, Minnesota, New York, and Massachusetts really make up a 
large chunk of the market. Next slide, please.

These trends have evolved over time in terms of which states have been leaders. So, 
initially, we saw Colorado as an early state leader, kind of from the 2011 to 2015 time 
frame when they passed one of the first policies to enable community solar. After that, in 
the 2016 to 2019 time frame we saw Massachusetts and Minnesota coming online. And 
then, more recently, we've seen a lot of growth in Florida and New York as well. Next 
slide.

All right. Next, we're going to talk about some of the policy and market drivers across the 
country that are enabling this deployment. Next.

So, we track at NREL the enabling policies at the state level for community solar. As you 
can see on the map, we have 22 states plus Washington, D.C. that have some type of 
enabling legislation. That legislation can vary quite a bit, but generally it allows for 
virtual net metering, which allows basically the credit to get put on the customer's bill. It 
also may require some type of mandate or pilot program be adopted by utilities in that 
state. Next slide.

A lot of these programs, though, are limited in the capacity that's developed. So, we have 
started looking at program caps in the community solar space and we have found that at 
least 18 states and Washington, D.C. have some type of cap. This could be a cap that's 
implemented through legislation or PUC regulation, or in the case of Florida or states 
with voluntarily led utility programs they're capped by the amount of capacity that has 
been proposed and approved by the PUC. Some of these caps are megawatt caps, like 300 
megawatts. Other caps might be financially based, so looking at saying  
"The state has this amount of dollars that will go to projects." Next slide. 

These caps really do vary in terms of their quantity. So, looking at just the capacity caps, 
Massachusetts and New York have the highest at around 3000 megawatts. These are 
multiyear programs with capacity that will come online each year. In the Florida Power 
and Light program their initial program offering was about 1.5 gigawatts. But then, after 
that it really trails off to states that have much smaller programs in terms of their 
capacity. Next slide, please. 

All right. The other big piece we have started to track is status of low- and moderate-
income programs in community solar. So, on the right-hand side you can see that there 
are quite a few states actually – 20 states and D.C. – that have some type of provision 
requiring or incentivizing LMI community solar. And then, on the left-hand side you can 
see the capacity that's been installed to date in blue and the pending capacity in orange. 
So, we have a lot of state activity. Not a lot of capacity that's been developed so far. 
We're at about 65 megawatts and we have about 200 megawatts that's in the queue. So, a 
lot more that will come online, but still pretty limited overall when you consider the 
overall community solar market. Next slide, please. 

We also know that these LMI-focused programs are also capped. So, they are limited to a 
certain set of megawatts or a certain percent of projects that are developed, or they could 
be – like in Illinois – limited by the total amount of funding that's available. So, this can 
be an issue as well as we think about how the market may grow to support LMI 
customers. Next slide.

All right. I have just one more quick section on pending community solar deployment. 
You can move on to the next slide. And this is really our summary of capacities that are 
in the queue. So, these are projects that have been approved in one way or another 
through a utility program or by the state regulator or through an interconnection process. 
Really, the highlight to me on this slide is that we have about six gigawatts in the queue 
in terms of capacity, but if we take that and add it to what we have currently, we're still 
not going to be at the level we need to be to reach the goals of the Department of Energy. 
So, basically, the message is we have a lot of capacity, we are growing quite rapidly, but 
more needs to be done to reach our aggressive goals that the DOE has. 

And with that, I will turn it back over to Anna. Thank you. 

>>Anna Balzar: Thank you, Jenny. That is a great transition point for our next piece of 
the conversation, which will be led by Dave Feldman, also of the National Renewable 
Energy Laboratory, to talk about this disparity, this gap between what we see in the 
queue and the NCSP target to enable community solar to power the equivalent of five 
million households by 2025. So, without further ado, I will turn it over to David.

>>David Feldman: Thanks, Anna. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. So, this next part I'm 
just sort of going to discuss some of the modeling we did, some of the projects and 
services we did to think about sort of opportunities and the challenges in achieving the 
DOE goal. And obviously, with any model the models are always wrong but hopefully 
they – what they do is they provide some information in them to sort of see what type of 
things that have to happen, some – maybe potentially barriers or maybe opportunities that 
have to occur for us to get to where we want to go. So, with that, I'll – and I'll try and be 
brief because I know it would be great if we could get some Q&A on this call as well. So, 
I'm going to be brief. But let's go to the next slide.

So, just a reminder that the goal is for – to accelerate community solar deployment 
growth to five million households by 2025 and achieve a billion in cumulative savings. 
So, we'll go to the next slide. 

Right now – and I should also mention the great work that Jenny did and all the work 
coming from NREL. She has this awesome dataset that's slightly different as far as 
projects and definition from what – the next few slides, which are from Wood Mackenzie 
CS. So, slightly different numbers, but generally similar trends.

So, if we look here, we have about four megawatts of – or, sorry, four gigawatts of 
community solar at the end of 2021. About 80 percent of the community solar energy is 
from anchor tenants, so not necessarily subscribers. And – however, this is changing in 
places like New York and D.C. Residential subscriptions have averaged around three 
kilowatts in size, saving approximately 10 percent off their utility bills. The goal and 
what will make the billion-dollar savings more achievable is to have savings of up to 20 
percent. Also, the goal to note is we're talking about five million equivalent subscribers, 
so I mean, obviously we – a lot of this work is targeting helping consumers, but we're 
really looking to get community solar projects on the ground as well. So – and with the 
target in mind we're assuming a 4-kilowatt average size equivalent subscriber size, so 
that's talking on the order of magnitude of 20 gigawatts of community solar PV by 2020. 
So, if we could go to the next slide?

Jenny talked about this, but just – if you look at what was deployed, where community 
solar has been deployed and where community solar legislation has occurred, very 
correlated. A lot of activity happens – it can't happen outside of those places, but the 
legislation really accelerates the growth, particularly the caps. The places with higher 
caps, I think the New York and Massachusetts and m and the third state, which actually I 
didn't see a cap, and maybe Jenny can speak to this, but it was Minnesota, those three 
states make up a very large part of the community solar deployment to date, and so it's 
not surprising that those places have high caps and [inaudible due to poor audio and 
mumbling]. So, if we go to the next slide.

Also, an issue again, just framing – if you look at where solar is being deployed, at least 
for residential solar adoptions – it's not quite the same thing as community solar, but it's a 
similar kind of – residential solar adoption, the distribution of folks going solar and the 
distribution of folks in the US of LMI customers, a proportional share of where – of the 
population. So, actually achieving more equity in that space is another goal. We can go to 
the next slide. 

So, there's a lot of – outside of community solar there's a lot of energy being spent just to 
increase carbon-free sources with electric generation and decarbonize not only the 
electric grid but the energy sector in the United States. If we look at some of those 
scenarios, in order to do that we'd need a massive amount of PV, and in particular on 
some of the modeling quite a bit of distributed PV as well. So, there was about 75 
gigawatts of PV installed in 2020. By 2025 if we can – if the US decarbonizes – does 
some of the decarbonizing we're targeting more 250 gigawatts and – I'm sorry, I should 
say the distributed – there's a – sorry, there's 75 gigawatts of total PV, and of that, 36 
gigawatts is distributed. So, we're talking distributed PV growing from 36 gigawatts in 
2020 to 100 gigawatts in 2025 and 250 gigawatts in 20e0. So, that would be a massive 
level of growth, and obviously community solar could play a big part in that. 

But if we look, if we go to the next slide, having said that, if you sort of look at 
proportionality of – community solar as a proportion of total distributed generation, if 
that sort of – if the community solar continues to be the same proportion, there would be 
approximately eight gigawatts of PV by 2025. That eight gigawatts is pretty similar to 
what Wood Mackenzie estimates community solar to be by 2025. So, eight gigawatts is 
not – both are not near where we need to get to achieve the DOE of around 20 gigawatts 
of community solar. Could we go to the next slide? 

So, there's a bunch of programs with the community solar _____. And when we modeled 
this we thought at a high level what are some of the impacts that these could have? So, 
for example, access to technical expertise, you could imagine that impacting utilities 
participating in these more outside of an in-state mandate. You could imagine quicker 
ramp-ups for regulatory-_____ states – so, states designing things that will help 
community solar deploy things faster. We can imagine lower system costs – so, less costs 
spent on things that are inefficient. And we can imagine bill savings. 

So, for that, we could – how would we do that? How would we sort of measure, evaluate 
the impact? We could look at the utility demand [audio drops out] community solar – the 
current forecast and how – what would we need if some projects came online early? And 
we could look at things like price elasticity and look at what is the impact of a reduction 
of price on [inaudible due to poor audio and mumbling].

Similar things for the other programs. So, state regulatory and policy environments. We 
can imagine on and off switches. [Audio drops out] access to capital. We can imagine 
quicker ramp out – so, if projects come online earlier and they have cash to stake 
themselves with cash. But you can also imagine lower system costs. [Audio drops out] 
can imagine lowering the system costs and [audio drops out] – 

>>Anna Balzar: David, we're losing your audio a little bit.

[Crosstalk]

>>David Feldman: – costs associated with customer acquisition or _____ customer 
acquisition through [inaudible] of reducing both through [audio drops out] both – you can 
imagine that having a significant impact on utilities getting interested, on states getting – 
putting things together more quickly and lowering system costs by getting more in the 
hands of customers. 

So, those are the sort of – the type of things that we looked at when we sort of said, 
"Okay, this is sort of where business as usual – we're heading. What do we need to get 
where we need to go?" So, if we go to the next slide…

Okay, this is what we looked at and sort of mapped, again, these things, these utility 
demand potential, capacity coming online early, price elasticity, new state demand for 
community solar, and expansion of the existing state demand for community solar. Those 
are the type of things that we were modeling, sort of that impact on the – and then 
assigned some of these programs to those. Obviously, other folks might have other 
opinion on where some of these might fall and there might be other additional drivers, but 
those are the ones – these are the ones we track. So, if we go to the next slide.

So, again, just providing some background on the data, we've done some – we have a lot 
of modeling capacity at NREL and we've done some exercises on the impact of price 
increases or reductions on PV demand and the long-term impact on that. For every ten 
percent decrease in price there's about a ten percent increase in demand. [Inaudible due to 
poor audio and mumbling.]

So, again, as a reminder, this is a look at Wood Mackenzie projections. So, you can see 
by 2025 they estimate 7.5 gigawatts of community solar will be sold in the US and 
another 65 gigawatts of additional DG. This is a bit lower than for the decarbonization 
scenarios are – and community solar represents a larger portion, but you can imagine for 
community solar to get to 20 gigawatts you'd either need a higher proportion or you'd 
need to sort of have all – for there to be the same proportion, just a lot more DG, which 
presents other complications in deployment. But that's the general idea. If we could go to 
the next slide…

So, the first thing one could imagine is expansion of existing state demand for 
community solar. So, if we're looking at the 20 states with existing community solar 
programs, in order to – well, right now their sort of average percent DG of market share 
for community solar, it's about 9 percent. It's a bit higher for some of those states with 
higher caps – so, Massachusetts and Minnesota and New York and states like that have 
percentages more like 25 percent. And actually, Minnesota is more like 80 or 90 percent 
higher. But the point is that on average it's a relatively low percentage. If we could get 
that percentage to 50 percent of DG deployment in the next 5 years, that could add 
another 4, 4.5 gigawatts of growth. Go to the next slide.

If we expand demand from the states without existing community solar programs but 
which were interested in the NSCP State Collaborative – so, think of – so, sort of not 
states that necessarily have active markets but are interested in developing them, if we get 
those to 50 percent, that's another 1.5 gigawatts. So, we're talking about increasing with 
those two things from about 7.5 gigawatts expected to 13 gigawatts. And that would 
entail growing those states from about 4 percent of DG to 50 percent. Obviously, a big 
difference. We can go to the next slide.

So, if we expand demand from the remaining states without existing community solar 
programs but through utility programs – so, Florida is a good example of a state with not 
necessarily a community solar program, but with utility-led demand the community solar, 
as Jenny sort of defined it, if we can get 40 percent of DG in those states to be 
community solar, that's another 1.5 gigawatts. So, that would be about 15 gigawatts 
through all these _____. [Audio drops out].

So, if we get lower costs – so, if we lower costs by 30 percent, that's a – it would translate 
into a 30 percent increase in demand, and that's another 2.5 gigawatts, or 2.8 gigawatts of 
community solar. So, that's talking about 17, 18 gigawatts of community solar PV by 
2025. 

And finally, if we go to the next slide, if we can get community solar projects to come 
online early – so, that was sort of – we had projected out to 2026. If we can move all of 
those 2026 projects early through some of those, some of the initiatives, that's another 1.9 
gigawatts of community solar over the next 5 years to get us to about 20 gigawatts of five 
million equivalent residential community solar subscriptions. So, obviously, that's – that 
would require a bit. That would mean that community solar captures about 40 percent of 
the sort of additional DG capacity coming online early in 25 states and – oh, sorry – 50 
percent, and another 40 percent for projects for the other states that – from utility 
programs. And that would be up ____ percent, up from 35 percent in some of the project 
– states with large capacity and 4 percent from states with – I'm laughing. My three-year-
old, four-year-old son has locked himself in my office and [inaudible due to noises from 
other speakers].

But in addition to all of those things it will require a 30 percent reduction in community 
solar costs. [Child speaks] I'm sorry. I'll be right back. I'm sorry. [Side conversation with 
child] Sorry about that. 

So, all those things would obviously require pretty dramatic changes, and that's why it's 
so important to have this initiative and all the steps and all the participation from across 
the US. If we go to the next slide…

Again, these are judgments. You can assign them differently, but – so, based off of that 
analysis, again, we need to add 12, 12.5 more gigawatts of capacity, additional capacity 
on top of what's already expected. These additional drivers, we think, can push us there 
through that sort of level of achievement, and sort of you can see from the five categories 
of where approximately we can get some of those things _____. State and regulatory 
policies is very important. That's why it's probably the largest. But there's also – there's 
going to be a lot of – a need for all of these things to achieve that goal.

So, happy to answer any questions, but that's where… yeah.

>>Anna Balzar: Great. Thank you so much, David. At this point we have about ten 
minutes to open this up to questions. So, I'm going to stop momentarily sharing the 
screen, but happy to come back to any of these slides as they inform some of the answers 
to these questions. So, for the moment I just want to take a look at our Q&A here and see 
if we have some good questions coming in. So, there's a couple of questions that's coming 
in – that are coming in about specific states where things are moving quickly. So, I'm 
wondering if maybe, Jenny, you could respond to some of these questions about sort of 
what's happening in Florida and New York that's facilitating this growth and sort of how 
we understand the community solar markets in those states.

>>Jenny Heeter: Yep. So, in Florida we've seen Florida Power and Light develop their 
large program, their first round of it already. And they have also gotten approval to 
launch a second round of that program that will be about the same size. So, they're 
basically doubling their very large program that already existed. It does have an LMI 
carveout as well, so a bunch of capacity will come online that will serve low-income 
customers. And then, in New York their framework got settled out, and so we're starting 
to see a lot of the projects that have been selected and approved start to be developed, 
really in the last year. And we expect that capacity to continue to increase. And that is a – 
those products are run by third party developers and typically see savings of 10 to 20 
percent, so we expect that market to continue to grow and see customers subscribe just 
off of the value proposition.

>>Anna Balzar: Jenny, I think there's another good question for you about the trends in 
low- and moderate-income programs. So, sort of how have you seen the trend going for 
low- and moderate-income riders, is the language specifically used in the question, and 
how large do we think the LMI portion will be in the share of this work towards the goal?

>>Jenny Heeter: Yeah. So, we have seen LMI carveouts or incentives, I would say, 
increase over time. So, some of the initial carveouts, we're looking at five percent of 
capacity in Colorado when they started. Now we're seeing more common targets around 
20 or 30 percent of project capacity. I think somebody posted about New Mexico, which 
is opening up pretty soon this year at a 30 percent carveout for LMI. So, definitely those 
percentage targets are increasing.

I think we're also just seeing more experience with subscribing low- and moderate-
income customers and understanding intersections between other efficiency programs or 
other programs that can be paired with community solar to help low- and moderate-
income customers. But certainly, yeah, there's still a long way to go. We have a lot of 
capacity in the queue that should serve LMI customers but still needs to be fully 
developed and subscribed before those benefits are happening.

>>Anna Balzar: Great. Thank you, Jenny. We have a question that I think I'm going to 
give to David from John about what makes up the total solar DG figures and some other 
clarifying questions about what DG stands for, sort of what makes up distributed – the 
DG, the distributed generation portion of what we're looking at.

>>David Feldman: Sure. I mean, some of this stuff – initials – DG is, yeah, is distributed 
generation. So, that typically has a characteristic but sort of distributed is treated as sort 
of things that show up on a customer's bill. So, either onsite or _____ typically, more 
located in the community and often in – either connected to the meter or to the grid and 
then the utility takes the energy and puts credits up on a customer's bill. So, that's made 
up of a lot of different types of solar from residential solar on someone's home to on a big 
box warehouse store, but it also could be community solar projects. And obviously, 
community solar, Jenny's definition is a good one in that it's wide, because there are so 
many different applications of community solar and different ways that customers can 
benefit from solar. So, in some ways some of these larger projects don't exactly fit what 
we traditionally see as distributed generation. But the end market is sort of the same 
because it's sort of – because it's coming from customers' interest in going with solar.

>>Anna Balzar: Thanks, David. Another question came in about the state markets. So, 
kind of – Steven's question. And I'll toss it to Jenny first, but maybe, David, you'll want 
to weigh in too. Sort of what are the emerging markets at this time? Where do we see 
potential for growth in the coming years, specifically by legislative mandate or in other 
ways, thanks to the policies?

>>Jenny Heeter: Yeah. So, we definitely expect to see continued growth in states that 
don't have caps and states where there's a strong value proposition. We know there are a 
few states kind of in the mix and ready to move forward, New Mexico being one of them. 
Also Hawaii, New Jersey, a couple of states where there is enabling legislation and 
they're just rolling out the rules and starting to develop projects. We don't track pending 
legislation comprehensively, but we are aware of a lot of effort in Pennsylvania as well as 
kind of the upper Midwest – so, states like Michigan, Wisconsin, even Ohio. We've seen 
a lot of proposals for new legislation that would open up community solar in those states. 
So, those are kind of on the watch list, I would say, of states that may open up if they do 
have new legislation.

And David, yeah, I don't know if you have more to add on that.

>>David Feldman: No, I don't. I think that's right. I mean, the only thing maybe worth 
mentioning here is I would say the states with a lot of people, you could have more 
ability to have capacity for subscriptions. So, obviously, places like New York or 
California or whatever it's just a lot of people. So, that doesn't mean we assume there's a 
lot of – or necessarily the right regulation that's in – when we're talking about those 
targets, by necessity – five million people, there's just more people in some places than 
others. 

>>Jenny Heeter: Yeah, it looks like we have a few notes in the chat too. Missouri has 
legislation in process. And Virginia, I should have included. So, trying to get rules 
finalized there, which will then see deployment eventually. 

>>Anna Balzar: Terrific. Another question just came in from James, and I think this gets 
back to sort of the definition of community solar and how it's differing broadly by NCSP 
and then specifically for the market tracking purposes. Jenny, I'm wondering if you could 
clarify once again just the distinction between how we sort of define community solar for 
NCSP and then for the data tracking efforts.

You're still on mute.

>>Jenny Heeter: Yeah. Okay. So, for NCSP – so, for DOE there is a definition that is 
based on providing benefits to multiple off-takers for a single project essentially. There's 
no mention of connected to the distribution grid or transmission grid or whether the 
project is in front of the meter or behind the meter. For our data collection work we take 
it one step further to think about how customers are receiving benefit. So, we look at 
subscription structures where a customer is getting a credit on their bill for the share that 
their solar project produced. So, this is the most typical structure you would be aware of 
with community solar, but there certainly are some edge cases where we have to dig in 
and really figure out "How is this bill credit happening?" and really make sense of it 
before we can screen it for community solar versus something else. 

And certainly, states have decided on their own in some cases how they want to define 
community solar. So, some states do have a project size cap where projects can't be larger 
than two or five megawatts, but other states, there's no cap, or in some states with utility-
led programs it's really up to the utility and the regulator and stakeholders to come to 
some agreement about what project size they think is appropriate or how the project 
should be interconnected.

>>Anna Balzar: Great. And I think we have time for just one more question before we 
have some wrap-up items for today. So, I want to point to one from Ray, which is about 
sort of the role that energy storage and resilience might play in the future of community 
solar. I'm wondering if either Jenny or David have thoughts on sort of considering energy 
storage and community solar paired and how that might impact the ultimate market and 
the work towards this goal. 

>>David Feldman: I'll start just to say that energy storage doesn't produce energy. It 
stores energy. So, it's sort of – it has a cost and therefore in order to justify the cost it has 
to have some value. There is a lot of value we see when we model storage can have when 
deploying solar. And so, depending on the market it's sort of – there are certain markets 
where storage has value. And for community solar there's a lot of potential there for – 
typically, I think utilities would be interested in having storage – solar paired with 
storage. And they might be graded more towards the customer, so providing more bill 
credit by having that, and so therefore if there's X amount of storage it would be received 
more – better for everyone. So, it's – typically storage is typically in states right now that 
have a lot of solar already, because the more solar there is the more – the effect is _____. 
But – so, [inaudible] but obviously as solar starts increasing in more places, storage will 
likely become more [inaudible]. 

>>Anna Balzar: Great. Thank you. I know that this was a very quick hour and I want to 
thank everyone. There is some – we have some great questions in the chat. We will do 
our best to synthesize the questions that you were sending in and do our best to respond 
to them outside of this hour. But before we close for the day, I'm just going to bring back 
up the slides just momentarily to talk a little bit about next steps. So, one of our genuine 
asks of this community is that you join the National Community Solar Partnership. We 
are actually as of this week over 1000 partners and over 700 organizations strong, and 
those partners really represent a breadth of the industry. And a lot of the conversations 
and questions that are being brought up in the chat and were brought up in the Q&A 
today are ones that are well-suited for this community. There is an online community 
platform where we have discussions about sort of the needs and the barriers and some of 
these topics that are related to community solar that need more thought and effort and are 
able to coordinate on those through that platform. So, we really encourage you to join the 
National Community Solar Partnership. 

Looking forward, again, stay engaged with us by joining the Community Solar 
Partnership. When you do join, you will have the option of supporting the new 2025 
target of enabling community solar to power the equivalent of five million households. 
And when you do, you'll be featured on a new map that we have on our website that 
highlights the partners that are standing with us and committing to this goal.

We also really encourage you to get involved by applying for technical assistance if you 
are developing community solar or supporting community solar. Joining one of the 
working groups – we have a number of working groups that are informing the initiatives 
on the pathway to success as they're being developed, and we really encourage you to 
think about how you might be able to support those working groups. And then, of course, 
we want to be able to elevate your stories and share the successes of community solar. 
So, again, we encourage you to join the partnership. If you have additional questions, 
please don't hesitate to reach out to us at our community.solar e-mail address. And we 
look forward to continuing to partner with you as we work towards this new target and 
bring clean energy to everyone.

Thank you again so much e for joining. And we hope to connect with you soon. 

>>Jenny Heeter: Thanks, Anna. Bye. 

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Nicole Steele, Anna Balzer, Jenny Heeter, David Feldman

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