The Community Planning for Solar Toolkit: Steps and Resources
The Community Planning for Solar toolkit is designed as a step-by-step progression that guides your municipality (or other jurisdiction) through a planning process that contains the steps of:
- Getting organized and setting goals
- Identifying potential solar development alternatives within your community
- Evaluating solar financing and ownership options for your community
- Assessing your community’s preferences for potential solar development and financing alternatives
- Developing a Community Solar Action Plan to guide solar decision-making and development
The Community Planning for Solar Steps and Resources
These process steps and the downloadable supporting guidance documents are listed below. The documents contain information that can be useful no matter where a community is in its solar planning process: readers should feel free to browse, download, utilize the documents in any order according to their needs. However, when undertaking a comprehensive Community Planning for Solar process, we recommend that you become familiar with the process and documents below – and then follow the steps in this order:
1. Getting organized and setting goals
- This step involves:
- Familiarizing yourself with the Community Planning for Solar toolkit and process
- Identifying solar planning team members
- Identifying key solar planning stakeholders
- Establishing the planning process goals, roles, and timeline
- Resources:
- Guide (TBD): The Community Planning for Solar User Guide
- Fact Sheet (TBD): Forming a Collaborative Community Solar Planning Team
2. Identifying potential solar development alternatives within your community
- This step involves:
- Identifying relevant state solar development regulations and incentives
- Gathering existing town bylaws, zoning requirements, and community planning resources
- Describing existing grid infrastructure in your community
- Characterizing town energy needs, priorities, and relevant infrastructure
- Resources:
- Fact Sheet: The Basics of Grid Infrastructure & Distributed Generation
- Guide: Conducting a Community-Level Solar Resource Technical Assessment
- Template: Solar Resource Assessment Summary Template
3. Evaluating solar financing and ownership options for your community
- This step involves:
- Learning about the different ways that solar developments can be owned and financed
- Evaluating how different solar financing scenarios will impacts local economic benefits, risk, and capital needs
- Modeling financing and cash flow scenarios for different project ownership scenarios
- Resources:
- Guide: Solar Financing and Ownership Options: Benefits, Risks, Challenges
- Fact Sheet: Community Focused Solar Ownership Options: Local Benefits and Risks
- Financial Tool: User-facing Basic Cash Flow and Financial Analysis of Ownership Options
4. Assessing your community’s preferences for potential solar development and financing alternatives
- This step involves:
- Learning about the design, implementation, and analysis of community surveys as a means to assess preferences regarding where, how, and how much solar is developed within your community.
- Identifying community stakeholders
- Assembling community focus groups
- Developing, conducting, and interpreting a community solar survey
- Resources:
- Fact Sheet: Purpose and design of stakeholder engagement
- Guide/Template: Focus Group design, protocols, and discussion questions, examples of interpreting results
- Guide/Template: Community survey design, protocols, and questions, examples of interpreting results
5. Developing a Community Solar Action Plan to guide solar decision-making and development
- This step involves:
- Learning about the elements that go into a final actionable plan for a community to address solar development
- Designing, drafting, evaluating, and finalizing a Community Solar Action Plan
- Promoting and using the Community Solar Action Plan
- Resources:
- Guide: Community Solar Action Plan