SEAS and GW Law co-hosted a workshop on community solar projects on February 7 in the Lehman Auditorium. The workshop shed light on the market potential for the adoption of community solar, particularly on accessibility by low and middle income households who have traditionally been unable to access solar power either because of their low income brackets or because they do not have the rooftop to accommodate solar panels. The workshop illuminated an array of multifaceted issues ranging from the absence of standardization, to an assortment of policies, limitations, and complexities of financial mechanisms, to inter-connectivity challenges and the need for consumer education.
More than 40 people attended from the community solar ecosystem, including stakeholders from utilities, multifamily housing developers, policymakers, energy financial advisors, investment managers, and academics. The investigating team from GW includes Ms. Donna Attanasio (Law), Mr. Scott Sklar (Solar Institute and EEMI), Dr. Saniya LeBlanc (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering), Dr. Payman Dehghanian (Electrical and Computer Engineering), and Dr. Ekundayo Shittu of the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering (EMSE). EMSE graduate student and researcher on the project, Dor Hirsh Bar Gai, and Erica Wortham (GW Innovation Center) organized the workshop. The workshop was the third in a trilogy of activities in the project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.