What are Commons?

Why Solar Commons? 

State agencies raise capital through taxes; market actors finance private activity through banks. What institutions are available to civic communities to support their community-building work? Solar Commons Trusts function like little community banks. They provide a way to locally own and govern community wealth as “infrastructure for commoning”—legal, economic, and governance tools that support the collective action community members take to help each other. The 21st century needs legal and process infrastructure to build community wealth by locally governing common property assets in ways that will maximize and share the wealth as a local common good. The Solar Commons Community Trust Model (SCCTM) captures the sun’s common wealth (in solar energy) and transforms it into a twenty-plus year revenue stream to support the locally governed, long term work to repair and support the vitality of local communities. The urgent energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy provides an enormous opportunity to more equitably distribute the benefits of energy ownership as we collectively move to protect our climate commons.

Key Concepts of the Model

Current attention to “commoning” can be grounded in the research of Elinor Ostrom whose work on successful, intergenerational modes of governing shared resources (commons) led to her being awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action).  In our current moment of social-ecological insecurity, the adaptation and testing of Ostrom’s work is more needed than ever.   

Ostrom studied local community governance strategies of commons around the world. Her two key findings were 1) the importance of “subsidiarity”: the idea that shared resources should be governed as locally, transparently, and accountably as feasible using locally-shared ideas of justice, flexible modes of managing, rules for communities to change their rules, etc.; and 2) the value of experimenting with the ownership strategy of community trusts: where citizens can use existing tools of civil and customary law to own property/assets on behalf of and for the benefit of their communities. Ostrom’s work is more recently explored by the community economist Kate Raworth. Raworth’s work considers how financial flows using commons solutions interact with market, state and household economy solutions while staying beneath a ceiling given by earth’s boundaries and above a floor of basic social equity.

The Solar Commons Community Trust Model is based on Ostrom’s and Raworth’s ideas of commons and commoning: capturing the common wealth of a shared resource, experimenting with owning it as a community trust, governing it with local rule-making for shared equity and adhering to material limits and regenerative principles of earth systems.  SCCTM takes up the interest, since the dawn of photovoltaic technologies, in forming a true community ownership model of the sun’s common wealth.  This is different than what is often known in the US as “community solar.”  Currently, what is called “community solar” is simply an aggregated way to pass on meaningful but modest electricity savings to individual households.  In contrast, the benefit to low-income and BIPOC communities of owning and governing a share of solar energy as “common wealth” is potentially of far greater significance.  Over the past ten years, the Solar Commons Trust model has been designed, developed and refined.  Today, the opportunity to test the SCCTM with sustainably sized and placed photovoltaics would bring direct benefit to underserved communities.  A fully functioning prototype will provide benefit to the participating community and is also what is needed to develop standards and templates to scale and expand the model for broader benefit.  Like states with their taxes or markets with their banks, communities using a Solar Commons Community Trust would have their own sources of wealth.

Foundational Work on the Model

Significant prior development and testing of SCCTM laid the foundation to deliver a fully functioning prototype. In 2018, the SCCTM was tested as part of the US Department of Energy’s (DoE) Solar In Your Community Challenge. As part of the DoE competition, and with financial support from two Arizona-based charitable foundations and a US Green Building Council Legacy Project award, a small scale (15kW) Solar Commons prototype was built and interconnected to the grid to serve low-income community partners in Tucson AZ. The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the premier US renewable energy research institute, analyzed SCCTM’s financial model and scalability for the competition. RMI’s finding was that there is a positive net present value to using the SCCTM as a community wealth-building tool: it generates more monetary value for a funder than the capital that goes in to building it. This led to the Tucson Solar Commons becoming a finalist in the competition. Also the RMI study found that a 500kW solar array was the sweet spot to maximize the monetary value going to the community trust fund (larger arrays brought more administrative costs). Between $70,000 and $100,000 a year (depending on solar capacity and local net metering rates) can flow to a community trust from a 500kW solar array. Based on the RMI findings and on recent community design process work, the Solar Commons Community Trust Model is now poised to be developed at a 500kW scale and demonstrate its value for community wealth-building to advance economic mobility and strengthen citizen participation in under-served BIPOC communities.

Design Principles of the Model

The Solar Commons Trust framework has the following simple design principles built into the permission to use the name and model during our development phase: the Solar Commons community trust must 1) capture common wealth for low-income community benefit; 2) peer-govern common wealth in local, civic, transparent ways; 3) use common wealth to build further infrastructures for commoning; and 4) follow principles of community repair from historic colonial violence and principles of regenerative ecological health.  The Solar Commons nonprofit works with researchers, communities and funders who employ these four simple design principles.  We believe this is the best way to develop, test, hand over to the public and steward to the next generation the standards, legal templates and peer-governance tools for DIY Solar Commoning. 

Solar Commons Trust Creation Process

We also believe that to make Solar Commons a robust institutional form we must co-create these institutional norms with community partners.   Thus a Solar Commons Trust-creation process engages the knowledge of communities to define their needs; builds on the community assets that exist; co-creates a business plan that can be supported by the two decades of revenue coming from the Solar Commons Trust; writes into the Solar Commons Trust Agreement peer-governance rules that will help the community trustees and beneficiaries work flexibly and transparently together to carry out their plans; and finally, engages public art as a means of “making public” the community’s deed of equitable title to the sun’s common wealth.  Trust law retains ancient, informal ways to rightly share intergenerational common wealth.  Solar Commons public art is part of the creative, dynamic process of holding solar energy benefits in social trust.