Opt-out Community Solar

High Impact Clean Energy Leadership for Municipalities

Easily enroll your residents in Community Solar – help the environment and your constituents' wallets!

Bring renewable energy to your town

Participating in Community Solar is simple. Subscribers see credits applied to their utility bill and may cancel without penalty. Unlike rooftop solar, there is nothing to install or maintain with Community Solar.

Save your constituents real money

Community Solar provides a cost savings guarantee. There are no teaser rates or fine print to interpret. Every subscriber benefits from Community Solar savings, with particular focus on low-to-moderate income (LMI) residents.

Be recognized as a green leader

Opt-out Community Solar is a straightforward municipal solution for taking climate action. Demonstrate your municipal leadership on the environment while saving residents money on electricity.

Created and supported by the state of New York

Municipalities have played a key role in New York's Community Solar program, part of NY-Sun, since it was established in 2016. NYSERDA now recognizes an opt-out program as a Clean Energy Communities action item, earning points toward your town’s climate leadership designation. The program places specific emphasis on low-to-moderate income residents, as a means of financial relief for those most affected by rising energy costs.

How the Ampion Opt-out Community Solar Program works

Set up your Municipal Program

Ampion starts by educating your municipality’s leaders about New York’s Community Solar program and the opt-out model. Ampion will lead the process of setting up your program and finding a solar farm(s) for your entire community.

Engage and educate your Community

Ampion runs an educational outreach campaign to engage your community, making sure residents are aware of the initiative (and excited about it!). We’ll host information sessions, conduct local ad campaigns, and send physical mail to your residents, providing more detail about savings, the environmental benefits, and instructions on how to opt out.

Energize the Solar Farm

Leave the details to us. We work with the local utilities to onboard customers and exclude those who opt out. Ampion manages all of the complexities of subscriber eligibility and solar farm allocation requirements.

Ampion remains involved for the life of the project, managing the subscriber experience on an ongoing basis. Our role is to ensure that your residents receive the bill credits correctly and that we provide top notch customer support for as long as residents are enrolled.

Get in touch

What to expect with Opt-out Community Solar?

Automatic enrollment

Residents don’t need to go through a sign-up process, saving them time spent researching and enrolling.

Guaranteed savings

With the fixed discount on solar credits, residents’ annual electricity costs will always be lower than they would be without Community Solar.

No change in utility

Residents will continue to receive a single bill from their utility – the only difference they’ll see is a solar credit on their invoice highlighting the savings from their Community Solar subscription.

Climate-friendly energy

This state program enables honest-to-goodness climate action by funding solar farm development and delivering renewable energy to the grid.

How is this different from a traditional CCA (Community Choice Aggregation)?

Traditional CCAs allow municipal leaders to sign their residents up with a retail energy supplier. Opt-out Community Solar relies on the same municipal authority, but the product they sign up for is climate-friendly Community Solar.

What is Community Solar, you ask?? Community Solar gives communities easy access to locally-produced, money-saving solar energy – no installations or rooftops required!

Learn more here

Why Ampion?

Ampion is uniquely positioned to manage the Opt-out Community Solar program for you, given our experience as a leading Community Solar administrator in New York.

Trailblazers in Community Solar

Ampion pioneered the Opt-out Community Solar concept, having established and managed the very first Community Solar CCA (Community Choice Aggregation) program in the nation right in New York.

Long History of Municipal Partnerships

We’ve worked extensively with New York municipalities over the years. Our existing work with opt-in Community Solar has given our team a strong understanding of municipal needs.

Custom Technology, Experienced Team

Ampion’s advanced, one-of-a-kind technology platform is pivotal to running the program efficiently. Our systems integrate with the solar farm and the utility, with data connections spanning solar farm production, the residents’ energy use and the utility’s billing systems. This 360-degree view allows Ampion to provide rich insights to residents and town leadership, while continuously adjusting the sizes of residents’ solar farm shares and maximizing savings.

We work with some of the largest and most well-established solar farm developers in the industry, providing the stability and confidence your municipality deserves.

Ampion is the most experienced partner to ensure the long-term success of municipal Community Solar programs, and we look forward to connecting more New York municipalities to affordable clean energy.