NPM MARKET DATA: Community Solar State Spotlight - Minnesota
SunShare, a Colorado-based community solar development company that has made Minnesota one of its bread-and-butter markets.
This NPM State Spotlight is the first in a new report series highlighting the rapidly evolving Community Solar development landscape across the country. All accompanying charts are produced using the extensive community solar data recently added to the NPM platform.
Minnesota, for years the premier state for community solar development, could be overtaken soon thanks to the ban on co-location, glacial interconnection rates and more states starting programs in the hopes of getting in on the action.
The state’s community solar application program launched in 2014 and, as of August this year, had seen 811 MW brought online. But other states are catching up.
SunShare, a Colorado-based community solar development company that has made Minnesota one of its bread-and-butter markets since 2014, announced last month it plans to expand into new states in the Midwest and Northeast as state legislatures weigh new community solar programs. The announcement was made in conjunction with SunShare locking in USD 30m in fresh equity capital from Ember Infrastructure.
“(The Minnesota) market has really slowed down. We built over 58 MW in that market, subscribed them, too, with over 50% residential subscribers, signed up maybe over 10,000 customers there for our community solar farms,” SunShare Founder and CEO David Amster-Olszewski said in an interview with NPM. “But in the last couple of years, that's really shrunk, largely because of the program size reduction down to one megawatt. But also because of interconnection challenges with Xcel.”
Xcel was fined USD 1m by the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission in January for exceeding a maximum number of customer service complaints as a result of significant delays in its processing of interconnection requests and backlog issues have persisted, according to a recent news report.
Since starting work in the state, SunShare is one of the largest community solar developers in Minnesota, competing with firms such as NextEra, Nautilus, Clearway, SolarStone, TerraForm Power, National Grid Renewables, and New Energy Equity, according to NPM Market Data.
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