Commercial solar may appear straightforward — solar for businesses rather than residential solar for homes. However, commercial solar encompasses a variety of different types of customers and projects. In addition to businesses of different sizes, from large corporations to local small businesses, “commercial” solar customers can also include governments, schools and universities, and even nonprofits.
Commercial solar projects usually takes the proper execution of rooftop arrays on buildings or ground mounts, and can range widely in size from kilowatts to megawatts. In accordance with Joe Naroditsky, Director, Solar & Operations at the Community Purchasing Alliance (CPA), an organization that connects nonprofits with solar bids, the C&I solar projects his organization facilitates can range in dimensions from 50 kilowatts (kW) for small churches and synagogues to 300-400 kW for large schools.
Commercial Solar Opportunity
With the help of Aurora solar software, researchers at UC Davis have examined the real-world solar potential of a few of the largest commercial buildings in the United States.
Their review of the greatest commercial building in the U.S., a Texas-based aerospace company with 770,000 square meters of rooftop, found that it could generate 88 million kilowatt hours (kWh) of clean energy! As explained in the Washington Post, “That's enough to power nearly 5,200 homes for per year, offset 47,800 metric a great deal of CO2, and spare around 388 acres of land.”
Obviously, this is actually the extreme end of the spectrum, where building rooftops rival the scale of utility-scale projects, and this site hasn't been developed with solar. However, it serves to illustrate the variation in potential project sizes in a sector where the buildings and customers differ widely. Constraints on the Commercial Solar Market
As you begin to read through to the commercial solar sector, among the common refrains you'll see is this market has not grown nearly as rapidly as residential or utility-scale solar. As noted in PV Magazine, “The commercial and industrial (C&I) solar markets have already been a member of family challenge for solar developers to exploit.” Cost of Commercial Electricity vs Residential
There are a number of factors that have contributed to C&I lagging behind residential solar. For one, commercial electricity prices are historically lower, that may make the economics of solar a little trickier.
As Mark Berger explains in PV Magazine: “The C&I sector has trouble competing against an average 15% or more cheap per kilowatt-hour rate than residential electricity prices, in line with the U.S. Energy Information Agency. ”
In line with the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in February of 2021 the common cost of electricity for U.S. residential customers was 13.3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), while the fee for commercial customers was 11.9 cents per kWh. For more details check out Solar Panels Bakersfield CA.