TWW’s Doran Miller submitted comments to the Arizona Corporation Commission today highlighting why it makes sense for the ACC to support and explore a docket on competitive community solar policies for Arizona.
Community solar presents an area of tremendous potential growth for solar energy by broadening the potential customer base to 100% of homes and businesses, thereby significantly expanding access to affordable clean energy for residential and commercial customers alike. However, this can only happen if “the right federal, state, and local policies can institute a supportive regulatory environment.”
TWW believes that creating competitive community solar policies will help unlock significant investment in Arizona as evidenced in a market analysis for the potential cumulative investment in the sector:
“According to a 2015 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), nearly 50 percent of households and businesses at that time were unable to host a PV system due to factors like not owning the building or insufficient roof space. NREL estimated that by opening the solar market to these customers via community solar programs, “shared solar could represent 32%–49% of the distributed PV market in 2020, thereby leading to growing cumulative PV deployment growth in 2015–2020 of 5.5–11.0 GW, and representing $8.2–$16.3 billion of cumulative investment.”
Read TWW’s full comments here: https://docket.images.azcc.gov/E000019275.pdf