Developing Legal Structures

While community solar projects are popping up in a few friendly markets around the country, so far no existing model appears to be particularly replicable or scalable for most of the country. That's why we are not only taking inventory of current projects but also designing and implementing new legal, governance, and financial structures for community energy projects.

Existing community energy models often benefit from unique regulatory environments, financing opportunities, wealth of higher income communities, or institutional support that may not be available to most communities. Still, these projects offer valuable experience to learn from and promising elements to be considered, given that they each have had to overcome their own set of challenges.

Building on these examples, we are developing a model that is 1) implementable in a wide variety of contexts, 2) adaptable to the uncertain future of energy regulation, and 3) designed to ensure long-term community control and benefit.

Permanent Community Energy Cooperative

The Permanent Community Energy Cooperative (PCEC) is a model for scaling renewable energy development that accelerates an equitable transition to renewables by enabling widespread grassroots crowd-financing of new energy projects designed for long-term community ownership and control.

The Sustainable Economies Law Center is working to research, develop, and incubate a pilot PCEC with the long term goal of developing resources for others to replicate the model. >> Read more about piloting the PCEC.

3 Steps to Building Just Transition Now with a Permanent Community Energy Cooperative

Based on our research of existing models and legal barriers, we've come up with an energy development and ownership concept called the Permanent Community Energy Cooperative (PCEC), a scalable model that gives communities permanent access to and control over their power. 

Read more here.