Nautilus Solar’s community solar portfolio continues to grow

Nautilus has made a big push into community solar since being acquired in 2019 by Power Sustainable, a subsidiary of Power Corporation of Canada. The company recently completed community solar portfolios near 30MW of combined capacity in Colorado and Minnesota.

In Colorado, Denver-based Pivot Energy and Nautilus completed a 13MW community solar portfolio, which is made up of seven projects located in Crowley, Weld, and Logan Counties. The installations, now fully operational, provide energy to an estimated 1,700 households and 12 commercial subscribers, including the Town of Breckenridge. The projects are in the Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy utility territories. It is estimated that over the 20-year lifetime of the projects, the portfolio will avoid carbon emissions equivalent to taking nearly 185,000 cars off the road for a year. This is Nautilus’ first entry into Colorado.

The solar subscriptions to the Colorado portfolio are managed through Pivot Energy’s SunCentral platform, which uses proprietary cloud-based software to provide subscribers with seamless bill payments, energy production monitoring, and downloadable financial reports. At this time, Pivot is still accepting subscriber applications from interested parties.

Nautilus also recently announced the acquisition of up to twelve community solar projects in Minnesota totaling 16.8MW of solar capacity, on behalf of its subsidiary Nautilus US Power Holdco, LLC, and Sunrise Energy Ventures. Nautilus is the long-term owner of the projects and responsible for overseeing construction, maintaining their long-term performance, and acquiring and managing customer subscriptions.

The projects, located in Blue Earth, Sherburne, Wabsha, Winona, Sibley, Wright, Pope, and Meeker Counties, are in various stages of development with the first several projects expected to be operational by the end of 2022. Once completed, the projects will provide a clean energy option to 4,200 households in Minnesota within the Xcel Energy electric utility territory. Any residential Xcel Energy utility customer in Minnesota located in the same or adjacent county to a project may subscribe through Nautilus with no upfront cost, no long-term commitment and no cancellation fees,Nautilus reports.

These projects were developed by SEV as part of Xcel Minnesota’s Solar *Rewards Community solar program, which has allowed for more than 825MWac of completed projects since the start of the program.

In related news,  Xcel Energy committed to add 2.5GW of solar by 2030.