Protection of clean energy access, affordability, and added grid value should be focused talking points for industry stakeholders amidst federal uncertainty regarding tax credits and policy reform, experts said at Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA) Community Solar Innovation Summit in Denver on June 26.

Jeff Cramer, president and CEO of CCSA, hosted an executive-level discussion to kick off the summit, joined by Julia Bell, chief investment officer at CleanCapital; Salar Naini, president at TurningPoint Energy; Erica Brinker, chief commercial officer at Chaberton Energy; Kelly Friend, senior vice president of policy and markets at Nexamp; and Mike Marsch, chief development officer at BlueWave.

The panelists discussed ways the industry should advocate for itself and support policy initiatives that will help grow the space. Friend encouraged her colleagues to “step into our power” and make it clear that community solar is invaluable to the country’s efforts for a clean and sustainable energy future.

Friend said the industry should be steadfast in its support of extending the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) program rather than allow for its phasing out.

“No industry willfully gives up tax credits,” Friend said. “I want us to be believers in the market, and I want us to start pushing back.”

Community solar is often blamed for stranded costs tied to electric bills without highlighting that developers pay for interconnection

“Imagine how much more unavoidable those costs would be if they weren’t 100% boarded by us,” Friend said. “We want to partner with utilities, we have to do that, but I think there’s an inflection right now with utilities in saying that ‘they have to deal with us,’ and I can just step into that power. We should be pushing for more and asking for more.”

Marsch and Naini both said that community solar companies need to be nimble in their operations and be open to other revenue models or programmatic structures in the distributed generation space. This is especially important if the ITC is going away quicker than planned.

“Let’s listen, let’s come up with practical solutions, and then let’s take it to the road. And if we have a much bigger toolkit of different types of products and services we can offer, we should be able to get more and more traction,” Naini said.

Brinker said the industry needs to start taking in data that highlights the benefits of community solar and use it to drive conversation with other stakeholders. And Bell said the industry’s messaging shouldn’t be limited to just legislators – the general public needs to know how community solar works as well.

“There are places where the demand and the load growth is so incredible that truly there’s no other way to deploy energy to the grid,” Brinker said. “So, I think as a starting point, data is always a great foundation to get us started and then we can talk about messaging and working with utilities and the regulations.”

Regarding data, Wood MackenzieSenior Analyst Caitlin Connelly provided some data and insights from her firm’s US Community Solar Outlook report released earlier this month.

According to the report, the US is expected to see about 1.5 GW of new community solar capacity installed this year. That would be a decline from the 1.9 GW installed in 2024, which was a record year for the industry, but still an improvement from 2023 and prior years.

Some of this decline is due to the sunsetting of community solar programs, such as Maine, and long interconnection times in other markets such as New York, Delaware, and New Mexico.

“Community solar, more than any other solar sector in the US, is highly dependent on state policy changes,” Connelly said. “However, at a federal level, the impact of the IRA across all solar sectors completely changing solar has been absolutely undeniable.”