MEI earlier this month announced that AT&T would serve as the primary anchor tenant for four community solar sites in Maryland that are expected to generate 12.67 MWh of electricity annually.

MEI has done work in Maryland before, MEI Market Development Director Zachary Muzdakis said, and has had its eyes on the market for some time.

“Maryland is a really interesting community solar market to us. We think that there’s a lot of opportunity with the uncapped program capacity underneath the net metering cap, so about a gigawatt of runway,” Muzdakis said. “The pilot program which these projects are structured under really allowed this opportunity to bring on a larger C&I customer like AT&T that has smaller accounts that are generally in that small commercial classification, to take a large position on a project.”

The four projects range in size from 950 KW to 2.77 MW, Muzdakis said, and two are ground mounted while the other are rooftop arrays. The two rooftop projects are located on C&I companies originating from a developer partner of MEI, Muzdakis said.

Three of the projects, in Baltimore Gas and Electric (BGE) territory located in Baltimore, Glen Burnie and Upper Marlboro are either already operating or expected to be in operation within a month or two. The fourth project, located in Mardela Springs in Delmarva Power & Light (DPL) territory, is a bit further off.

This is the first partnership between the two companies for community solar, Muzdakis said, and MEI negotiated with AT&T’s advisors to finalize a deal that worked for both parties. AT&T gets a discount on the bill credit value, an economic savings for them, for taking an undisclosed “substantial portion of the allocated capacity for these projects,” he said.

Corporate offtake partnerships are key to MEI’s business model, Muzdakis said, and the company builds customer-specific offtake structures rather than a cookie-cutter transaction. Lineage Logistics and Jackson Family Wines are other major C&I partners of MEI.