Why Community Solar?
Community solar projects deliver clean, local energy to the community. By hosting a community solar project on their land, landowners are helping green the grid, save subscribers money, and earn long-term reliable income.
The Benefits
Environmental
Community solar provides renewable, clean energy to local residents. By adding more clean energy to the grid, community solar reduces dependency on pollution-emitting sources of power, keeping our air and water cleaner.
Energy Equity
Polluting power plants are often located in disadvantaged communities of color. These communities face high rates of pollution as a result. Building clean energy local to where it will be used helps transition the grid to cleaner, more equitable sources of energy.
Energy that Benefits All and Saves on Energy Bills
Community solar increases access to the benefits of solar energy generation – namely energy savings and a cleaner source of energy. With community solar, regardless of credit, income, or owning a home, local residents can save on energy costs with solar.
Income from Lease + Agriculture
Earn income from continuing to farm, graze, or lease the land for farming, while earning an annual solar land lease payment for 20+ years.
Our Holistic Approach
We see solar as not just about energy generation, but as a tool for conservation and
preservation of land and the health of communities.
Land Stewardship
We design solar projects that maximize energy production while preserving agricultural or ecological activity in and around the array. We want landowners to harvest more than just solar.
Whether it is active or fallow farmland, consideration for the surrounding ecology is at the heart of how we design and construct our projects.
We plant pollinator mixes, native shrubs and deep-root grass mixes to promote carbon sequestration and robust food production for the local area.
We also design dual-use systems that allow for rotational grazing and crop growth, which can increase carbon sequestration and improve soil health.
Creating Legacy
Our landowner-centric approach takes into account the financial pressures they may face and their concerns around the longevity and health of their land. We offer solar land leases as a method for landowners to meet financial or environmental goals they have for their land, legacy, and community.
Each Lightstar solar project leaves a clean energy footprint in the community, and in our eyes, makes each neighbor a clean energy pioneer. Together, we’re contributing to cleaner air and water for our children.
Considerations When Siting a Solar Project
Our projects are sited, constructed, and maintained centering the ecology of the surrounding area, the needs of the local community, and advancing progress against climate change. We also prioritize siting solar on brownfields and capped landfills, turning unusable land into a source for clean, renewable energy.
Ecology
Lightstar utilizes management strategies that protect habitat connectivity and natural resources. First seek to preserve, replicate, restore, or improve ecology within the solar siting area. Leverage native plants, grasses, and shrubs to preserve the character of the surrounding area. When necessary and available – consider conservation easements to ensure proper screening and setbacks.
Water
We protect water quality and design projects to prevent current and future erosion. Use stormwater best management practices taking into consideration change climate and extreme weather events. Mitigate potential risk from extreme weather events, therefore contributing to the resiliency of the larger local ecosystem.
Land Productivity
Lightstar is committed to being stewards of the land and will consider the best area of the parcel that will have the least environmental impact, but highest co-locational benefit for the land. This may mean offering a solar design that accommodates both solar and farming in between and around the array.
Soil Compaction
During construction, Lightstar’s team takes care to minimize soil compaction by construction equipment and site staging areas with this mind. Lightstar is familiar with and has implemented Massachusetts and New York solar construction guidelines and partners with subcontractors with vast solar construction experience. We will make sure to leave the construction staging area better than we found it.
Take a look at our most recent community solar project!
Our Commitment to Using Quality Materials
Community solar projects deliver clean, local energy to the community. By hosting a community solar project on their land, landowners are helping green the grid, saving subscribers money, and earning long-term reliable income.
Panels
We select the most efficient panels available to ensure the number of raw materials and balance of equipment is kept to a minimum and we prioritize full due diligence on our solar module manufacturers. To provide confidence in a manufacturer’s longevity, we only use solar panels with a 25-year warranty.
We have a zero-tolerance policy for forced labor and confirm that no polysilicon is sourced from Xinjiang or refined using inhuman labor practices.
Inverters
Solar inverters are the operational heart of the solar project. While they account for just 5 percent of the total system cost, they are responsible for up to 90 percent of plant downtime — highlighting the importance of sourcing top-tier quality equipment. It’s essential that inverters provide top reliability to handle the thermal cycling that happens in the outdoor environment.
Lightstar uses inverters from market leaders that offer a five year or longer warranty and achieve efficiencies of 99 percent or higher.
Storage
Solar energy can only be produced when the sun is shining. By adding storage technology to our projects, we are able to feed electricity into the grid, even when the panels aren’t producing energy. Storing solar energy for later use is essential to incorporating more renewable energy into the grid and helps keep the balance between electricity generation and demand.
With the support of our storage partner, Stem, we deploy and operate battery storage solutions that maximize our solar generation and help build a cleaner, more resilient grid.
Electrcity Grid
The solar energy generated from our projects is fed into the grid and then delivered to local energy users. By building distributed clean energy sources closer to where the energy will be used, we are helping make the grid more resilient and efficient. With the addition of storage capabilities to solar energy systems, utility grid operators can store some of the solar energy for use later, which means that less of the polluting conventional energy sources are needed. Community solar projects provide the added benefit of providing less expensive energy to subscribers through credits on their utility bill and enable utilities to transition away from less environmentally friendly options.
