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Sometime in late 2025, the United States crossed 10 gigawatts of cumulative community solar capacity, a solar milestone to be proud of. The figure was confirmed in a report by Wood Mackenzie in collaboration with the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA) Solartex. Ten gigawatts is not just enough to power millions of American homes. It is the kind of achievement that the global energy transition has chronically struggled to produce: clean energy access that is genuinely available to ordinary people.
The story of how community solar got here, why it works where so many other distributed energy models haven’t, and what it means for countries like India – which has extraordinary solar potential but a fractured access problem is one worth looking at for its sheer potential for impact.
The concept sounds simple enough to be obvious, but clearly not as simple in practice, going by its success outside the US. A community solar project allows multiple participants to share the benefits of a central solar power system. People can buy or subscribe to a portion of the energy produced, receiving credits on their electricity bills based on the energy produced by their share of the solar array. No panels on the roof. No ownership of land. No need to be a homeowner at all.
That last point is the crux of everything. Community solar programs are particularly beneficial for low-income households, tenants, and residents of multifamily buildings who face barriers to installing rooftop solar panels. It allows such individuals to access renewable energy and reduce their electricity bills without the need for personal solar installations. For solar everywhere, this is a crirical gap to fill when it comes to access everywhere, especially in an increasingly urbanising world where apartment living is the norm.
By centralising the location of solar systems , community solar plants create advantages over residential installations: avoiding trees, roof size and configuration limitations, adjacent buildings, the immediate microclimate, and other factors which may reduce power output at the residential location. Most importantly perhaps, larger size allows for economical and proper O&M, a huge issue for solar rooftop owners. 

Community solar did not emerge from a single federal policy. It was built, state by state, through a specific cocktail of legislation, incentives, and market-making that proved surprisingly effective.
The key mechanism is net metering — the practice of crediting solar producers for the electricity they feed into the grid. Community solar extends this logic beyond individual homeowners to shared installations, with subscribers receiving bill credits proportional to their slice of the project’s output. States like New York, Illinois, Maine, and Massachusetts were early movers in creating the legal frameworks for this model, and their markets grew rapidly as a result along with solar growth.
The federal Inflation Reduction Act added enormous fuel. The US Inflation Reduction Act extended a 30% tax credit for solar projects until at least 2035, along with local state tax credits and rebates, expanding solar nationwide in line with goals set for 100% clean electricity by 2035. For community solar developers, looking to typically build projects between 1MW and 20MW in size,  the Investment Tax Credit was transformative, making the economics viable even for projects serving low-income communities where margins are thin.
These are sizes that sit in a productive middle ground – too small to attract the attention of utility-scale developers, too large to be rooftop solar, but perfectly sized to serve distribution-grid needs while delivering consumer benefits. Utilities began prioritising these community-scale resources in their long-term planning because they can be deployed more quickly than larger utility-scale projects and, particularly when paired with storage, can improve grid flexibility and reliability. The result: the community solar segment installed 1,435 MW in 2025 alone, and as of year-end, cumulative community solar installations in the US total 10.1 GW.
For subscribers, the proposition is straightforward but genuinely valuable. Lower electricity bills, no upfront capital cost, no installation hassle, no maintenance and if it comes to that, the flexibility to opt out. The subscription model removes the financial risk that has historically made rooftop solar inaccessible to tenants and lower-income families.
For India, the model has the potential to generate more jobs, stimulate local economies by keeping energy spending within communities, and help participants save on their energy bills.  
In the US states with mature community solar programmes have reserved a significant share of new projects for low-to-moderate income subscribers toi ensure equitable access to cheap solar. New Mexico’s first community solar project, located in Valencia County, reserved half of the project’s energy production to support low-income households. This is not charity but good policy design, spreading the cost of infrastructure across a broad subscriber base while directing the benefits toward those who need them most. Tackling a critical question that has always been raised about solar being accessible to a privileged few, at the cost of others as the burden of fixed charges are spread on a smaller, possibly poorer user base.  
Beyond individual consumers, community solar has delivered something arguably more valuable to the US energy transition: a distributed, resilient solar base that complements utility-scale development.
Solar accounted for 54% of all new electricity-generating capacity added to the US grid in 2025. Combined, solar and storage made up 79% of new capacity in that period. Community solar, while a fraction of that total, plays a qualitatively distinct role — it is solar that is sited close to demand, connected to distribution grids rather than transmission lines, and therefore less vulnerable to the interconnection bottlenecks that plague large-scale projects.
The subscription and platform infrastructure built around community solar has also created a new kind of energy market participant. As of the end of 2025, four major subscription management platforms and vertically integrated developers manage 55% of total operational community solar capacity. This consolidation has brought professional management, customer service, and data analytics to what was once a fragmented sector — improving subscriber experience and project performance alike.
The US community solar story looks more remarkable when you compare it to other advanced solar markets, where distributed, community-based models have lagged despite comparable or even greater solar potential.
In Europe, the structural ambition has been there. As of 2022, there were more than 9,000 energy communities operating in the EU, with approximately 2 million citizens involved, between €6.2 and 11.3 billion of investment, and 7.2–9.9 gigawatts of installed renewable energy across 30 European countries from 2000 to 2021. But scale and speed have been elusive. These communities still face significant barriers, including difficulties in securing financing, navigating licensing and permitting procedures, and developing sustainable business models. As they are often initiated by a group of volunteers, they suffer from limited time and lack of access to technical expertise.
By making it predominantly cooperative and citizen-led, while admirable in its democratic instincts, the EU model has been inherently slow, and difficult to scale. Germany’s energy cooperative model requires significant upfront capital from members, limiting deployment to wealthier communities. The UK only recently cleared the legal hurdles for plug-in solar in rentals, and its first community solar farm, the 5MW Westmill Solar Park near Watchfield, remains a reference point rather than a template for mass rollout.
The contrast with the US is instructive. America’s community solar success was driven not by grassroots cooperatives, but by professional developers operating under clear state-level regulatory frameworks, with federal tax incentives providing the financial backbone. The model is market-driven rather than community-led in the European sense — which made it faster, more scalable, and more accessible to subscribers who want benefits without governance responsibilities.
Australia,  the global leader in rooftop solar per capita — with over 3.92 million PV installations contributing to a combined capacity exceeding 40.7 GW, and rooftop solar accounting for 12.4% of the country’s total energy generation in 2024. has a model that is ownership-driven, benefiting homeowners disproportionately. The community solar gap — serving tenants, apartment dwellers, and lower-income households — remains largely unfilled.
India’s solar story is extraordinary by any global standard. Solar energy capacity has grown from a few megawatts in 2010 to over 150 GW now, making it the third-largest solar capacity country globally. Solar tariffs have fallen by close to 80% from Rs 12/kWh in 2011 to Rs 2.30 and above/kWh in 2025.The country receives an average of 300 sunny days per year. Its manufacturing base is expanding rapidly. But the vast majority of this capacity remains powered by utility-scale, concentrated in solar parks in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and a handful of other states.
The PM-Surya Ghar rooftop scheme targeting 10 million households has achieved over 2.6 million connections, but community solar projects in India are still in the early stages. Notable initiatives include the Dharnai Solar Microgrid in Bihar, Delhi’s Solar Rooftop Program, UP Mini-Grid Projects, Kerala’s Soura Project, and MP’s rooftop solar projects — but these are still in the pilot stage. 
Why hasn’t community solar scaled in India? The barriers are familiar. Community solar in India faces several challenges: policy and regulatory barriers, financial challenges, and a lack of awareness. One of the reasons stalling India’s community solar efforts is the absence of a clear national policy.  Compounding this, the regulatory process for setting up solar projects has been particularly challenging due to slow and inconsistent approval procedures in states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and even Maharashtra, with the process of obtaining approvals from multiple agencies leading to significant delays.
The grid itself is another constraint.  A massive 38 GW of solar capacity was added in 2025, yet curtailment of renewable energy emerged as a key theme of the year, driven by transmission constraints and grid security concerns. Community solar, by connecting to distribution grids closer to demand centres, could actually help address this problem — but only if the regulatory framework enables it.
The US model offers a remarkably transferable blueprint, provided India adapts it to its own context.
First, the subscription model is the key unlock. India has hundreds of millions of tenants, apartment dwellers, and small landholders who cannot install rooftop solar. The shared solar energy model allows residents to subscribe to a community solar array, permitting them to benefit from solar energy without the need to install panels on their properties, making it especially beneficial for tenants, low-income households, and those facing structural issues that prevent rooftop installations. PM-Surya Ghar is a good scheme for homeowners. India needs a complementary scheme for everyone else.
Second, state-level policy must lead. The US did not build 10 GW of community solar through a single federal programme — it built it through a patchwork of state policies that, over time, created a national market. India’s federal structure is similarly suited to this approach. States like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, which already have progressive solar policies, could pioneer community solar frameworks that others then replicate.
Third, professional developers, not just cooperatives. Europe’s experience shows that a purely volunteer-led cooperative model is too slow for the pace India needs. The US model — professional developers, standardised subscription contracts, regulated billing credits — is replicable in India with appropriate DISCOMs (distribution companies) participation and SERC (State Electricity Regulatory Commission) frameworks. Firms like OMC Power have already demonstrated how it can be made to work, albeit with a different business model.
Fourth, prioritise low-income access by design. Community solar has the potential to provide electricity to tribal communities and remote areas that are geographically remote and politically neglected. India’s PVTG electrification programmes and PM JANMAN initiatives already gesture in this direction. Embedding community solar within these frameworks, with reserved capacity for BPL households, would deliver energy equity alongside megawatts. Maharashtra’s SMART scheme could itself be repurposed to ensure faster roll out with a community solar angle.
Fifth, pair it with storage and flexibility. India’s curtailment problem in 2025 is a warning. Community solar projects paired with small-scale battery storage, connected to local distribution grids, can improve grid flexibility precisely where it is most needed — at the last mile. This is the “community-scale” model that US developers are now pivoting toward, and it has particular resonance for India’s grid architecture. 
We are India’s leading B2B media house, reporting full-time on solar energy, wind, battery storage, solar inverters, and electric vehicle (EV)
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