The Four Main Bottlenecks of Developing Small-Scale Utility Solar in California

July 18, 2024

hink of a wine bottle and how it gets narrower at the spout, slowing down the flow. That narrow area is called the bottleneck, which is also a common engineering expression for project obstacles. A wine bottleneck is a great visualization of what’s happening to small-scale utility and community solar developers in California. While California still leads the nation in solar deployment, project developers face unique bottlenecks that are slowing the flow of meeting the state’s ambitious goal of achieving net zero carbon pollution by 2045. Before we get into our four main bottlenecks, let’s define small-scale utility projects as being between 1 MW (AC) and 20 MW (AC) and located near the communities that they serve. These types of projects can serve California’s Community Choice Aggregators (CCAs), investor-owned utilities (IOUs), as well as future community solar customers. More recently, California passed the Community Renewable Energy Act, finally setting the stage for a viable community solar and energy storage market in the state. Now, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has the challenge of designing the program in a way that attracts both community solar developers and subscribers. But even with a well-designed community solar program, the local solar bottlenecks will remain. In our experience developing over 250MW across 35 small-scale local utility solar projects in California, the following four bottlenecks are slowing down the clean energy flow.