Solar Commons: A “Commons Option” for the 21st Century

• Date: 01 May 2020
• Author: Kathryn Milun
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12348
• Published date: 01 May 2020

Solar Commons: A “Commons Option” for

the 21st Century

By Kathryn Milun*

abstract. Private ownership of nature’s gifts—water, air, sunlight—stands

in the way of solving the collective problems of the 21st century. In the

case of sunlight, common ownership through community solar trusts can

overcome both the inequities and the inefficiencies of investor-owned

utilities (IOUs) with legal monopolies. Those monopolies function with

the same arrogance as aristocrats did in the past, but now the stakes are

higher: the future of the planet. This essay describes the Solar Commons

Project by which a team of inspired citizens and public scholars joined

to create a form of community-trust solar-energy ownership, in which

multiple stakeholders benefit. The goal is to make this “Solar Common s”

model an iterable, scalable, model of community solar that empowers

low-income neighborhoods in the United States. An integral part of

the project is a process of creating community-engaged public art to

communicate the nature of community ownership. Artistic and theatrical

presentations can help involve the public in dialogues around questions

of utility management that are normally couched in technical language

designed to obfuscate the political power of electric utilities. One role

citizens can play is unmasking utilities when they publicly promote

themselves as providers of clean energy, even when they are actively

engaged in protecting the interests of fossil-fuel companies. Ultimately,

however, creating a Solar Commons involves more than criticizing the

failed institutions of the past. It requires us to think innovatively about

ways to draw upon the history of the commons to design new modes

of sharing sunlight and other common goods to create a more equitable,

sustainable future.

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 79, No. 3 (May, 2020).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12348

© 2020 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

*Associate professor of anthropology and Director of the Center for Social Research,

University of Minnesota, Duluth. Founded and directs the Solar Commons Research

Project, which innovates and prototypes community trust ownership of solar energy for

low-income communities. Her students from the Energy, Culture, Society course run the

annual Duluth Power Dialog, bridging academic research with public policy and citizen

engagement. Email: kmilun@d.umn

1024 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Common wealth, properly organized, provides a way to address the two great-

est flaws in contemporary capitalism—its relentless destruction of nature and

widening of inequality—while still keeping the benefits that markets provide.

… Common wealth—that is, wealth belonging to everyone equally—includes

the gifts of nature, societal creations, and economic synergies. It is immense

and in some cases imperiled, yet it remains invisible to markets because it is

poorly organized and lacks clear property rights. Organizing common wealth

so that markets respect its co-inheritors and co-beneficiaries requires the cre-

ation of common wealth trusts, legally accountable to future generations. These

trusts would have authority to limit usage of threatened ecosystems, charge for

the use of public resources, and pay per capita dividends. Designing and cre-

ating a suite of such trusts would counterbalance profit-seeking activity, slow

the destruction of nature, and reduce inequality. (Barnes 2015)

Introduction

In 2007, I was a new member of the Tomales Bay Institute (TBI) in

northern California. The founder of TBI, Peter Barnes (2006), had just

published a book that laid out the economic argument for building a

“commons” sector of the U.S. economy, geared to managing and equi-

tably distributing common wealth from shared resources, such as the

atmosphere, water, and wildlife—sources of life whose value have been

diminished by market and state-sector management (or lack of manage-

ment). The climate crisis, water pollution, and massive species extinc-

tion provided more than enough evidence to warrant new governance

strategies based on a “common property” status of air and the public

trust status of water and wildlife. Furthermore, the growing disparity in

wealth in the United States called for new economic tools that would

better distribute wealth accumulated from nature’s gifts, such as miner-

als, wind power, and wildlife. Barnes had gathered a diverse group of

activists and public scholars to brainstorm how new uses of trust own-

ership could more sustainably capture and more equitably distribute

common wealth from nature as common property. How could new,

enduring institutions for a commons sector be created, and what experi-

ments were needed to test common wealth trust ownership? These were

the thoughts I took back with me to Arizona, where I was living at the

time, a legal anthropologist newly out of work from the university. With

the sun beating down on my head and my brain emancipated from my

1025Solar Commons

academic discipline, I was free to imagine how solar radiation, with its

distributed abundance and scalable photovoltaic technologies, could be

claimed as common property and inspire a local ownership model to

direct the common wealth benefits of the sun’s energy to those most in

need. With that, the idea of a Solar Commons was born.

It was not until 2018, after 10 years of creative, collaborative, legal,

and financial work as well as pavement pounding for partners and sites,

that the first Solar Commons Project was interconnected to the grid: a

community-trust-inspired model that allowed solar panels on the roof

of a building in one part of Tucson, Arizona to send a 20-year income

stream to weatherize homes in a low-income neighborhood across

town. The community-based research team wanted to make sure that

no Solar Commons Project would recede into the same siloed, techni-

cal, and financial obscurity that has hidden the ownership, equity, and

pollution issues of 20th-century energy infrastructure. As a result, we

were joined by a team of artists who worked with the Solar Commons

beneficiary community to co-create public art that could make visible

how this neighborhood was claiming its common property right to

gather the sun’s common wealth for the well-being of the community.

This essay uses a description of the Solar Commons Project to

demonstrate why commons economic thinking presents a transforma-

tive approach to the ecological and economic inequities of our histor-

ical moment. Imagine a portion of the U.S. electric grid providing a

“commons option” for communities to access their gathering rights to

the sun’s common wealth. Low-income neighborhoods or depressed

rural communities could capture their share of the sun’s energy with

photovoltaic panels, send that electricity directly to the electric grid,

and have grid owners pay for it with deposits into a community trust

fund that would support much needed community programs and proj-

ects. If the panels were installed on the roof of a neighborhood factory

or warehouse, the roof owners would use the electricity on site and

would pay for it with deposits to a community trust fund. The benefi-

ciaries of these solar commons trust funds would be programs support-

ing affordable housing and homeless shelters, sustainable community

agriculture projects, paid internships for low-income high school stu-

dents to work with community newspapers, job training programs, and

much more. In short, Solar Commons would be an economic tool of