"Solar Garden" coops in Spain.

[skids]

Technically it's just another PV installation (with tracking) but what's interesting is how the financials work on these:

The "solar gardens," as Acciona Solar calls them, are sites that bring together small, individually owned PV installations that take advantage of Spain's renewable energy feed-in rebates. The energy management and performance of the project is optimized because the infrastructure and common services are shared. The electricity produced by each panel is sent to the national grid and is invoiced separately by each owner.

...

This facility is the sixth of its type developed by the Acciona building plot in Navarre. Overall the solar gardens represent a capacity 10.20 MW distributed among 1,673 solar trackers belonging to more than 1000 people. Prior to the Castejon project, solar gardens entered service at Sesma, which has a 1.57 megawatt-peak (MWp) , Arguedas I (0.98 MWp), Arguedas II (2.05 MWp), Rada (1.71 MWp) and Cintruenigo (1.46 MWp).

(EDIT: Whoopsie here's the link http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/story?id=43762)

[Fridays Child]

1. Solar gardens would make money year round...

...here in southern Arizona. Do you have a link for more information?

[phantom power]

2. Link?

[Fridays Child]

4. I found a link...

snip

The trackers on the site will generate around 4.4 million kilowatt-hours per year of clean and renewable electricity, with production equivalent to the consumption of more than 1,400 households. This level of production will avoid the emission of 4,307 tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, with a purifying effect on the air equivalent to that of 215,000 trees through the process of photosynthesis.

snip

More at http://www.acciona-energia.com/site_i/noticias/ficha.asp?id=109

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. I think this is the future of power distribution. I can see a lot of rural

places building up gardens at least to keep themselves powered.

[Fridays Child]

5. I wonder how one would go about investing in this company.

(I know zilch about investing.)

[skids]

8. You'd have to live there...

...what they are doing is taking the incentives they would normally get for installing on their roof, and instead buying panels/tracker from the sponsoring company and placing them on land leased by the company as part of a package deal. So you don't invest so much as you own one or more of the units at the installation, and bill the grid for the power it supplies.

[Fridays Child]

9. I wonder if the parent company, Acciona Energia. is a publicly traded...

..company and whether Americans can trade on foreign stock markets.

[skids]

10. You certainly can hold foreign stock. n/t

[phantom power]

6. So, the idea is...

they start by setting up a PV installation site. If I want to, I can purchase some number of PV panels, which I then "own." I get paid any revenue from the panels I own (minus some fee?). All panel-owners on that site benefit from a common grid-connect infrastructure, which I assume includes things like a shared inverter, so everybody benefits from that particular economy of scale.

Not very different from owning stock in a company that pays dividends. Or, maybe a co-op is a closer model?

[jpak]

7. States with Renewable Portfolio Standards should allow people to do this

Not every US home is optimally oriented or sited to take advantage of solar energy.

Individuals should be allowed to form similar coops here in the US and be eligible for solar rebates....