Tips & Resources

Participating in a community solar project can save money on your electric bill and reduce your carbon footprint. Whether you opt for a subscription or purchase plan, there are changes to your electric bill to keep in mind, plus opportunities to pair community solar with other efficient, all-electric technologies to maximize savings.

Here are some helpful resources for customers participating in community solar.

How to Read Your Electric Bill

When you join a community solar project, you will continue receiving a monthly electric bill from the utility. Whether you have consolidated billing, or dual billing, determines whether you’ll receive a second bill from your community solar provider.

Consolidated Billing

Many community solar providers offer consolidated billing, meaning that you’ll receive and pay just one bill for your monthly electricity costs. With consolidated billing, you’ll see the community solar generation credits and any associated charges from the community solar provider combined with your electric utility charges on the same bill.

Dual Billing

Some customers have dual billing with their community solar project, which involves receiving one bill from the electric utility and another from the community solar provider.

Your electric utility bill will summarize your metered electricity usage and utility fees for the billing period, just like before. However, with dual billing, your utility bill will reflect the credits for electricity generated by your share of the community solar project and allocate them toward the cost of the electricity you consumed. The credits appear as a negative value on the electric bill, so you’ll pay the utility for the difference between the cost of electricity for the month minus the dollar value of the credits.

Meanwhile, your community solar bill reflects your share of the renewable power that the project generates for the billing period. How this appears on a bill will depend on your subscription structure.

Some community solar providers offer a fixed discount (e.g., 10%) on the solar energy generated every month, while others have a fixed electricity rate.

With a fixed discount, you’re effectively buying credits for the solar energy that’s generated during the billing period. This means that subscribers will likely be paying for more credits than they need in the summer to bank them for use in the winter when solar generation is lower. In other words, take note that bills from your community solar provider will be higher in summer if the subscription plan follows a fixed discount structure.

If your subscription plan includes a fixed electricity rate, you’re locked in at a specific cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh). You’ll pay your community solar provider for the credits your portion of the project generate at that rate. With this subscription structure, monthly savings depend on how the fixed electricity rate compares to the utility’s current prices.