A guide to community solar—and how to get in on it
Renters and apartment dwellers, this one’s for you. By Maddy Lauria
When it comes to decarbonizing our homes, the best one-shot deal around is probably lining your roof with solar panels. But creating a sun-harnessing home isn’t a realistic option for everyone, particularly for people who rent, live in apartments, or are stuck dealing with strict HOAs.
For those folks, community solar projects can provide a taste of decarbonization. Shared solar arrays allow businesses, nonprofits, residences, and more to jointly own or subscribe to a patch of suncatchers in their area. Even a small community solar project can generate enough emissions-free energy to power more than 500 homes for a year, says Spencer Fields, director of insights at EnergySage, a marketplace specializing in comparing solar energy products. That’s like taking more than 900 gasoline-powered cars off the road.
Community solar can also reduce electricity bills for customers, which are often already disproportionately higher for disadvantaged communities. Connecting to community solar can deliver savings anywhere from 5% to 20% a month, Fields estimates.
Electricity users can buy a part of a solar project or subscribe to benefit from the clean energy it generates. When you buy a subscription, you’re buying “credits” for generating renewable energy, and those credits get applied to your utility bill. The savings come in because what you get back is worth more than what you paid. In the simplest math, a 10% discount (which Fields says is about average) would be buying $100 worth of credits for only $90.
Unlike with rooftop solar—in which you’re capturing and using energy directly from atop your home—you’re not buying the specific electrons from a specific patch of solar panels in a community solar project. Rather, you’re helping finance the generation of electricity in that project, which then gets distributed through the local power grid.
Opting to go solar in this way can send a powerful signal to utility companies. “You are directly contributing to the growth of solar and renewable energy because you are voting with your dollars,” says Fields.
And there is an upswing of availability afoot. According to the Department of Energy, the U.S. had more than 3,400 such projects across the country as of June 2024. Those arrays can produce up to 7.87 gigawatts (GW) of juice, enough to power about 1 million American homes per year. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), that capacity is set to double in the next few years, as an additional 300 megawatts of capacity comes online every few months.
Here’s how to know if community solar makes sense for you:
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