DENVER — Flyers showing up in Xcel Energy customer mailboxes are not from Xcel.
Sue from Arvada, Cathy in Littleton, Tom from Federal Heights and David, Janette and Adrian from Aurora all wanted to know about the flyer that seemed to be from Xcel.
They are not. They are from a company called Neighborhood Sun.
“We are hired by the developers to do the outreach, the management, the customer support, the marketing efforts,” said Neighborhood Sun Chief Revenue Officer Cara Humphrey.
Neighborhood Sun, which is based in Maryland, sent 170,000 mailers in the Denver Metro Area to try to get Xcel customers to sign up for a community solar farm in Sterling.
“There’s plenty of people that just can’t participate or can’t put solar on their house or they’re a renter,” Humphrey said. “This is an option for folks, where they don’t have to spend a lot of money or have equipment on their roof to participate.”
For people who install solar panels on their home, they either rent them from a solar company or buy them with an upfront cost.
In those scenarios, they would likely get the full solar credit from Xcel.
In this community solar project scenario, the customer signs up for the solar farm that someone else paid for, and in return, the customer only gets a small portion of the solar credit.
“Off the credits, 10% represents the savings to the subscriber. Ninety percent goes back to the owner of the solar farm for injecting renewable energy into the grid,” Humphrey said. “They’re typically multi-million-dollar projects.”
Here is an example provided by Neighborhood Sun.
Let us say that your electric bill one month is $150, and you had $100 in solar credits, you would owe Xcel $50.
However, you would owe Neighborhood Sun 90% of the $100 in solar credits. Neighborhood Sun would get $90.
"So, $90 plus $50 is $140, instead of the $150 you would have paid to begin with,” Humphrey said.
Neighborhood Sun does not own the solar farm.
“We partnered with a solar developer called Green Street Power Partners,” Humphrey said. “That 90 percent that goes back to the owner of the solar project for footing the electricity, over the course of 20 years, they’ll make a profit.”
Of the 170,000 mailers sent out, Humphrey said that the solar farm has a capacity for about 5,000 customers.
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