Community Distributed Generation (CDG), also known as community solar or shared solar, is getting a facelift. A lot has shifted since New York signed one of the most promising and progressive energy laws in 2014, including the state’s renewable...
SunCentral Blog & News
One Bill to Rule Them All Part 3: Does Net Billing Reduce Project Risk?
The most common gripe when discussing community solar is the requirement of a second bill for subscription payments. On average, consumers spend less than 8 minutes thinking about their utility bill each year, so they certainly are not going to...
One Bill to Rule Them All Part 2: How Do We Manage Community Solar Today?
The concept behind a utility consolidated bill is to simplify the subscriber experience in community solar. Before we can explore how utility consolidated billing can disrupt the industry, it is important to understand how community solar billing...
One Bill to Rule Them All(?): Utility Consolidated Billing and the Future of Community Solar
Part 1: Introduction To say that distributed solar has a storied history with utilities might be an understatement. After years of battles over net metering regulations, interconnection practices, and standby charges (to name a few), it would be...
How software services can ease downturn effects on community solar
Community solar was built around the idea of a virtual and offsite clean energy service for its customers. Eliminating the high cost and physical installation of solar panels was primarily intended to open access to solar energy for those unable to...
Two Years Later: What’s New with SunCentral?
Community solar is often a difficult concept for customers to fully understand. The idea of how a “solar subscription” provides clean energy to the grid and savings to the subscriber is a lot to explain. Walking customers through the process...
SunCentral Quickly Growing as Industry Preferred Community Solar Cloud Platform
In November 2018, Pivot Energy expanded our services with the launch of our community solar customer management cloud platform, SunCentral. SunCentral was designed to improve the customer experience for community solar subscribers, and optimize the...
Part 4: The Wild, Wild (Mid)West: ARES and Credit Rates
In the classic Western movie troupe, two men stare down each other at high noon. “This town isn’t big enough for the two of us,” one says to the other. The encounter typically ends poorly for one of the participants.
Part 3: The Wild, Wild (Mid)West: Subscription Rate Design
Rate design and credit offsets are particularly complex in the Illinois market, and without knowing how to set the subscription value, you could be creating a product that customers don’t want or one that crushes the returns for the project… In...
Part 2: The Wild, Wild (Mid)West: Learning the Lessons of a Crowded Energy Market
In part two of “The Wild, Wild (Mid)West: Community Solar in IL”, Kacie Peters, Director of Business Development, discusses how we can learn from past mistakes in the energy market to make community solar a sustainable, long-term energy solution.