Climatize Selected for US Dept. of Energy's Community Power Accelerator Program
“The credit goes to my co-founder Alba for building our relationship with the DOE over the past 6 months & for managing this new phase of our partnership, kudos for the hard work.”
Climatize announced it has been selected for the US Dept. of Energy's Community Power Accelerator. Climatize is graduate of Santa Cruz Works Accelerates program and is an investment platform connecting individual investors with renewable energy projects. Climatize operates on a crowdlending business model basis– debt crowdfunding – a community of investors collectively lending money to projects.
The Community Power Accelerator is a competition led by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) National Community Solar Partnership (NCSP) with a $10 million prize fund that aims to “fast-track the efforts of new, emerging, and expanding solar developers and co-developers to learn, participate, and grow their operations to support multiple successful community solar projects.”
The Community Power Accelerator Program aims to identify and expand equitable access to community solar across the U.S. and create new capital sources. An online platform has been developed as part of the program to help “organizations to work together to get more equitable community solar projects financed and deployed”.
Participants in the competition consist of new or established community solar project developers, investors, or co-developers (such as philanthropic organizations) who seek to expand their workforce and operations in order to develop multiple community solar projects.
Prizes are distributed in 3 phases with 25 winners selected per round. Phase 1 of the competition, titled “Ready!”, began on January 19, 2023 and each competitor in phase 1 can win a $50,000 prize. For Phase 2, “Set!”, winners are each awarded $200,000, and phase 3, “Grow!”, awards winners with $150,000 prizes. The winners of phase 1 winners are expected to be announced in April 2023.
What is community solar?
For those who are asking "What in tarnation is community solar?", Will Wiseman provided this explanation:
“The DOE defines it as ‘any solar project or purchasing program, within a geographic area, in which the benefits of a solar project flow to multiple customers such as individuals, businesses, nonprofits, and other groups.’ What this means is you can have fractional ownership of the power generated by a single array. This is especially beneficial for low- to moderate-income (LMI) families or renters who cannot install a system but can still benefit from cheaper & clean energy. At the same time project developers gain economies of scale by building larger projects in the 1MW-10MW range ($800k - $14M). Systems in which a majority of the offtakers are LMI are also able to access an additional 20% tax credit (on top of the existing 30% credit) from the Inflation Reduction Act making these projects more bankable.”
Community solar is not available in California at this time. Check out this article/podcast, “Community solar: Can California get it right this time?” to learn more. The CPUC is currently revising the legislation & we expect community solar to be available in CA by mid-'24.