Scaling Community Solar in Texas: Barriers, Strategies, and Roadmap

Abstract

This study proposes a roadmap for the development of community shared solar in Texas. Community shared solar (also referred to as “community solar” or “CSS” in this report) represents a promising deployment strategy for solar in Texas that, if scaled, has the potential to create significant local economic and environmental benefits. However, to date, community solar has only been deployed in small pockets of activity in the state (see Appendix for list of Texas CSS projects through 2019). The roadmap developed in this study is based on a detailed analysis of the barriers to CSS and the strategies to overcome these barriers in the near-term through developing the policy, stakeholder, and market-actor ecosystem necessary to activate and scale CSS in Texas for the long-term.