Small solar's best argument on the Hill is local consent

Edward Yim, the clean energy director at Lawyers for Good Government, argues in Utility Dive that community-scale solar and storage carry the one thing utility-scale projects often lack: local consent. Because small projects arrive with less permitting friction and fewer of the delays that stall a utility-scale solar farm, they are, in his telling, both the cheapest megawatt for Congress to defend and the easiest one to stop paying for.

Yim previously helped implement the IRA home energy rebates at the Department of Energy and served as director of state and utility policy at the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. What he asks, whenever lawmakers next revisit the wind and solar tax credits, is that they preserve incentives for distributed community-scale projects even if they conclude that some utility-scale projects no longer require the same federal support. The backdrop he describes is a credit stack already under pressure: the One Big Beautiful Bill ended the longstanding residential solar credit and created new barriers for existing solar and storage credits, while the Environmental Protection Agency terminated Solar for All, a program the op-ed says would have cut electricity bills by more than 20% for a million Americans. A federal judge vacated that termination this month.

Two figures carry his argument: small projects account for at least 20% of all solar installed in the United States, and solar's price has dropped more than 80% over the past 20 years, a decline Yim reads as evidence that many utility-scale projects can quickly generate a profit and may not need financial support. That reading cuts against him. Nothing in the decline distinguishes by project size, which suggests the fiscal case for preserving distributed credits cannot rest on affordability; it rests, as the op-ed says, on local support and on skipping the queue of objections. What distributed generation sells is consent, and consent decides which projects get built. The residential credit is already gone.

This publication has argued that grid permission is the underwriting asset, and that queue positions and interconnection contracts price before electrons. The distributed-credit fight is that thesis arriving at the tax-writing committees, where a credit written by project size would in practice be a credit written by permitting risk. The defensible trade is to stop supporting projects that can clear on their own economics and keep supporting the ones whose binding constraint is local consent — which is not the direction the current stack has moved.

What Yim actually wants is narrower: keep the credit for the tier that arrives with local support attached, and accept that utility-scale projects may no longer need federal help. Any revived credit drafted by project size would settle the question the current one dodges — whether Washington is buying electrons or buying consent.