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Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Dakota Malone and I co-founded Community Solar Authority. We help large energy users access the community solar program turnkey and we’ve used community solar to unlock our clients access to 35 million plus in future energy savings over the last half decade. In today’s episode, I’m diving into the community solar advantage, how to leverage regional energy production in your sustainability roadmap.
The strategy is centered around the idea of leveraging state legislation and regional energy production to lower utility costs on a zero dollar investment without installing solar on-site. Before we begin, if you’d like a complimentary strategy session to integrate community solar into your business model, you can visit our site communitysolarauthority.com and book a call. Also, I recommend getting our guide to understand community solar as a large energy user.
It’s called Community Solar Rollout Secrets and you can just DM me on LinkedIn and I can send it over. Let me give you an introduction to community solar. It is state-level legislation designed to help clean our energy grids and meet renewable energy commitments.
It involves regional clean energy production from solar farms where developers opt to sell clean energy back to the grid while also benefiting from state and federal incentives. However, in community solar, the energy can only be monetized through subscribers’ utility accounts and the developer needs offtakers to participate in their projects for this to work and this could be comprised of residential, small commercial, and large anchor utility accounts. In exchange for subscribing a utility account to help clean the energy grid and help the developer monetize the energy produced, the subscriber gets bill credits applied to their utility account that reduce costs.
They get to keep a portion of the bill credits and therefore a portion of the savings created, typically 5 to 10 percent of the total bill credit. This means a subscriber can access lower utility costs without making any capital investment and without having to install any solar. The savings per subscriber are based on a snapshot of their energy spend and a community solar project consists of two types of subscribers.
One, mass market including residential, low to moderate income, and small businesses. Two, anchor subscribers or large energy users that typically take up 40 to 50 percent of a total project based on the market we’re talking about. Now I’m going to share how you can leverage this in your energy strategy as a large anchor tenant and I want to talk about the anchor dilemma.
We believe that anchor tenants are an inflection point in making community solar work. They are the crucial financial foundation behind successful projects. Often, it allows for a project to be financed and executed in the first place because of the risk mitigation from subscribing nearly half of a given asset.
Financiers ultimately use anchors to pencil safe bets onto their projects. For over a half decade, our team at Community Solar Authority has specialized in working with anchor tenants to educate their teams, help them execute a community solar rollout, access legitimate projects from the most significant community solar developers, all while enhancing sustainability practices and improving operating profit turnkey. In addition, the anchor helps promote environmental stewardship and more importantly provides the opportunity for residential, LMI, and small business customers to also access community solar.
The problem with community solar isn’t that it’s hard to understand conceptually or that it sounds too good to be true. The problem is community solar projects are finite. It’s unlike energy supply where you can buy whenever you want and once a project is filled you can’t oversubscribe that solar asset.
So for anchor tenants, the dilemma is wanting to participate but needing access to projects before they get subscribed, needing access to proper education on the opportunity, and needing maximized savings from their participation without expenditure of internal resources. This is the gap we fill for our clients with turnkey delivery of community solar access and execution for anchor clients. The good news? Wood Mackenzie predicts a continued surge in community solar capacity allowing you to include community solar in your energy strategy.
The rest of this podcast will dive further into the community solar advantage for anchor tenants and how they can utilize their energy footprint to cut costs using the program. Now I want to talk about enterprise sustainability and the energy landscape. There has traditionally been a quiet stalemate between corporations on whether to spend capex on growing the company or investing in sustainability.
With each year, top-down pressure grows stronger with the push to meet lofty goals, decarbonization targets, and corporate social responsibility plans. This is of course before acknowledging evolving regulatory landscapes, political and infrastructure barriers, etc. Community solar rollouts offer a solution within strategic procurement to overcome some of these implementation barriers and end the stalemate for organizations.
With a zero dollar investment solution producing annual savings, we help our clients understand how they can leverage this to make progress on their sustainability roadmaps. Although poised and aimed at democratizing solar access for those who typically couldn’t benefit, the reality is that these projects don’t work without stable anchor subscribers. This creates favorable conditions for corporate renewable adoption because it seamlessly integrates within broader ESG frameworks.
It addresses environmental targets. It creates positive social impact at a local level. And it demonstrates governance leadership with climate action.
Serving as an anchor tenant on a community solar project means securing predictable lower costs while closing the gap between ambitious sustainability commitments and the implementation of cost-effective solutions. Now let’s dive deeper into the anchor tenant role. As stated previously, the anchor tenant is the large user that subscribes to a majority of any given community solar project.
Similar to commercial real estate, a strip mall center may have an investment-grade anchor like Walmart who takes up a majority of the plaza and the rest of the asset is backfilled with other small businesses. I’ve mentioned some of the importance behind anchor tenants but let me spell it out further for you here. One, they contribute to equitable access to clean energy.
Anchor tenants promote equitable access to solar by participating in community solar projects. Their involvement ensures that solar benefits are distributed more fairly across diverse communities. Two, they help prioritize access to underserved communities.
By supporting community solar, anchor tenants prioritize access for underserved populations. This helps these communities save on energy costs and reduces energy inequality. Three, they mitigate risk and offset subscriber turnover.
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Anchor tenants play a crucial role in mitigating the risk of subscriber turnover. Their commitment to subscribing to a significant share of solar farms provides stability and encourages long-term project viability. Four, they play a critical role in getting projects financed.
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As I’ve mentioned, anchor tenants are instrumental in securing financing for solar projects. Their participation in community solar attracts investors and lenders, making it possible to develop and maintain community solar projects. And lastly, five, they inspire others and display environmental leadership.
Choosing community solar demonstrates environmental stewardship. It’s a straightforward way to showcase commitment to sustainable and clean energy initiatives. Let’s talk about the unique leverage.
Community solar doesn’t work without anchor tenants. It’s the fact that it brings tangible savings on a paper-only transaction when corporations already have these sustainability commitments in mind. Community solar simply provides a way to establish progress on them.
So whether you’re a corporation or a municipality or simply a large energy user, community solar allows you to participate and lower utility costs. Here’s some recent case studies we’ve done in 2025 alone. We helped a Fortune 500 company capture $550,000 a year in savings on average.
We helped a corporate manufacturer capture $137,000 a year in savings on average. We helped a private equity-owned manufacturing company access $150,000 a year in savings on average. We did another Fortune 500 company and helped them unlock $45,000 a year in savings on average.
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And lastly, there was a state school we recently worked with, a smaller footprint, maximized offset, and we helped them unlock $35,000 a year in savings on average. The savings we help our clients maximize are based on their annual spend in qualifying community solar markets. So the more you spend every single year on utilities, the more leverage you have to create savings.
Now let’s talk about the implementation roadmap for anchor tenants. Our clients want to understand the step-by-step process for evaluating community solar opportunities. They want to know any due diligence checklists for potential projects and have an idea of ideal terms for contract negotiations.
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They want to know the timeline from executing a subscription agreement to seeing the bill credits applied to their utility costs. We’ve seen organizations implement community solar differently, but the most efficient path is to utilize our process proven out over a half decade of delivering predictable results for anchor tenants. Depending on the client, they may need to put out some sort of request to meet their purchasing requirements.
We highly recommend an RFQ for a consultant versus an RFP for community solar projects if necessary because of the bolt-on expertise you receive. The problem with traditional RFPs is that community solar projects are finite, so what a developer may submit as a tangible project for you to participate in may be filled by the time you get around to finalizing your RFP, and we’ve seen this multiple times. You also have no way of differentiating the terms and spend internal resources trying to understand which is best for your org.
Our team at Community Solar Authority delivers turnkey access to a community solar rollout in an average of 90 days following this process. We collect your utility bills and financials to determine your approval. We get you fully educated, answer your questions, and deliver estimated savings based on our findings.
We source available projects from our pipeline and can hold them for you while you go through the contracting phase. We negotiate to deliver the best outcomes on terms unique to your organization. We review your winning agreement, go through legal review together, meet with stakeholders, attend board meetings, etc., and then you execute your subscription agreement, the developer countersigns, and you’ll have the project-specific timelines of when you’ll see those savings.
Our clients count on us, our internal systems, and resources to deliver these results. They want to focus on their main priorities, and utilizing us for community solar means a simple path to implementation. We’ve unlocked access to over $35 million in future energy savings for our clients and continue to deliver better results faster using our unique positioning in the market as premier consultants.
Now I want to talk about measuring and reporting impact. Community solar participation comes with a unique brand building value that enhances your identity and improves your sustainability roadmap. However, you need to be careful about how you position your participation to avoid greenwashing and inaccuracies about your work.
By participating in community solar, the clean energy isn’t coming back into your facilities, therefore it’s more of a business sustainability practice than environmental. However, it is also true that through your participation, you’re directly contributing to cleaning local energy grids, supporting local jobs, and making a real impact. We see community solar falling under strategic energy procurement, and the savings metrics are included in efforts to cut overhead energy costs.
Your subscription will be measured in KWDC, and you can directly quantify that based on your subscription size. Some clients want to use their community solar rollout as an internal communication, and almost all of them want to use it for PR and brand building purposes. Customers more than ever want to know that the brands they spend their dollars with are sustainable and considering their environmental impact, and a community solar rollout can point directly to those efforts and create good news stories on how brands are doing their part.
In conclusion, community solar is all about simple sustainability. It’s one of those programs that may sound too good to be true, but it is true. An anchor tenant gets the opportunity to generate bill credits that turn into savings on a zero dollar investment without installing solar.
Due to the nature of the program, anchors are the inflection point to successful community solar projects, so they stand to benefit greatly. Municipalities, corporations, and big businesses that have an energy footprint and markets with community solar availability are missing out if this isn’t a part of their energy strategy. If you want more resources, again, feel free to reach out to me and I can get them over to you, including our deck on community solar rollout secrets, other case studies, and letters of recommendation.
If you’re looking to take the next step and want to talk about how you can integrate community solar into your organization and enhance your sustainability roadmap while lowering and cutting costs, we’d love to have a conversation. You can visit communitysolarauthority.com and book a call today. Again, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com slash in slash Dakota Malone.
Thank you guys so much for tuning into this episode, and we will catch you on the next one.
