How We Work

The Solar Commons governing board believes that, for the next decade, its mission of stewarding and developing the Solar Commons Trust Model is best served through collaboration with university and government research partners, private foundations & donors, and BIPOC community groups with shared goals for social equity, reparative justice and climate mitigation. 

Solar Commons research uses a “living lab” methodology that co-designs and builds a Solar Commons prototype with community partners. As the Rocky Mountain Institute’s analyses of the Solar Commons financial model show, the sweet spot for community-derived benefit from a Solar Commons is a 500kW array (larger arrays create administrative costs that change the finances of the business model).  By building 500kW Solar Commons prototypes in community-engaged living labs, university researchers bring their legal and engineering technical and design skills to the project in ways that leave a functioning, enduring economic benefit for the community.  Living labs allow engaged community partners to co-design and assist in monitoring and revising the legal and digital tools they use to peer govern their Solar Commons Trust. Over time, the Solar Commons nonprofit will provide access to the free, debugged legal templates and de-risked digital peer-governance tools that emerge from these living lab prototypes.

As the “trust protector,” the Solar Commons nonprofit assists community partners in trouble-shooting their new form of community-revenue & peer governance. As we further discern the functions of a Solar Commons Trust protector in this new community economy tool, Solar Commons researchers will streamline these functions so that local community partners can eventually take over the function of Solar Commons Trust protector.

The Solar Commons nonprofit is also a platform for Solar Commoning communities to co-create and share the unique public art they make displaying their “deed of equitable title” to the sun’s common wealth. As beneficiaries of a Solar Commons Trust, these communities hold ancient and enduring rights to common wealth. Through public art, they use their social imagination to make visible to themselves and the broader public ideas of fair share, reciprocity, obligation and equity that come with using common wealth. Solar Commons public art educates and celebrates the healthy relationships humans build between earth systems and social systems during this urgent period of energy transition.

To view legal, economic, art-based and technical research work being done with community partners and researchers at the University of Minnesota and University of Arizona in Solar Commons Living Lab sites, please go to the Solar Commons Project website at the Minnesota Design Center.

(The Solar Commons nonprofit is helping to host the Duluth Climate Action Fieldschool 2022 Pilot.