Electric utility ComEd and its parent company Exelon spoke in a keynote session at the Midwest Solar Expo about why, as utilities, they want growth in the community solar and rooftop solar markets.
Utilities are not known for their support in distributed energy resources (DERs), such as rooftop and community solar. However, Chicago-based utility Exelon and its subsidiary, ComEd, were keynote speakers at the Midwest Solar Expo in Chicago June 9 to June 11.
Calling community solar “a game-changer” in Illinois, Melissa Washington, ComEd senior vice president of customer operations and chief customer officer, said the utility views its role as an enabler for growth. This is largely because, as she pointed out, ComEd does not own generation (utilities are forbidden to by law in Illinois), like many of its utility peers in other states.
In this session alone, utilities actively fought against community solar legislation in states such as Ohio, Connecticut, Montana, Iowa and Missouri, bills that garnered dozens, if not hundreds, of testimony in support, while the utility was among the few to oppose. Utilities also lobbied against net-metering in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine, to name a few.
Without the ability to own generation, the utilities don’t have these same motivations. Sunny Elebua, senior vice president of chief strategy and sustainability officer at Exelon, said, “we don’t really pick and choose. We do what’s best for our customers.”
Both Washington and Elebua said this has enabled them to be more equitable, providing access to the energy transition to those who can’t afford rooftop solar.
But secondly, Elebua said, “it helps with affordability. Part of the challenge we have today is this demand-supply mismatch,” he said. With solar, he said, you can help reduce volatility.
To Elebua, new opportunities come from the ability to make investments in enabling the grid to absorb excess energy.
“Community solar projects, if done correctly and sized appropriately, do not have to go through the interconnection queue challenges,” he said. “If you manage it at the distribution level, you can actually expedite it.”
“And more importantly,” he added, “as we begin to think about this resource adequacy challenge, it’s critical to understand that the demand-side management and the opportunity to put DERs on the system actually helps address that problem,” Elebua added. “It helps significantly with rooftop solar. It helps with community solar. It helps with all forms of generation that actually help on the demand side management.”
“So, we’re all for it,” he said.
Washington added that from even an operational perspective, as a utility, ComEd is required to ensure it provides reliable service. “What we also add to that mix is not just reliable, but resilient, and that’s another attribute that renewable energy provides,” she said. “So, you know, we really do look at it as an all-of-the-above opportunity.”
“We know clean energy projects are there. We want them. We want them connected fast, today, yesterday,” Washington said.
Toward the end of the session, Mike Carberry, outreach director for solar advocacy group Bright Future Iowa, and former elected official, stood up from the audience and said, “Ten years ago, when [Iowa] was a blue state, we had mandatory interconnect. We had all wonderful things for distributed generation and, of course, the investor-owned utilities weren’t happy about it, but they did it,” he said. “When we became a red state, they tried to dismantle everything for [distributed generation].”
Across his 25 years in renewable energy and politics, Carberry said he’s learned “utilities weren’t in the business of making power, unless it was political power,” he said, “and because energy efficiency and distributed generation takes money out of their pocket, they really didn’t want to do it at all.”
Carberry noted that while Exelon and ComEd talk “very nicely” about distributed generation, the two utilities represent mostly blue states. He asked the panelists, “What is your advice to us? To our investor-owned utilities for red states, what should we be asking them to do?”
Across the audience, people gasped. It was the question of the hour, if not the session.
Washington’s advice, she said, is to figure out how to take into consideration the goals of each side. “One goal is ‘how do you drive for these sustainability efforts?’,” she said, “and then on the utility side, they would be very concerned with ‘how can we continue to have consistency of service if you don’t have the ability to invest?’”
“At the end of the day, even with distributed generation and even with everything that we’ve been talking about that we support, there still needs to be stability and reliability in what’s being done,” Washington said.
Under the state’s policy, Illinois utilities spread out investments so that customers are not hit with the investment in one year and the utility has the stability to continue to invest, Washington said. “We’ve done lots of benchmarking and we have found that those that have the most successful programs are figuring out how to match those two things.”
When doing this, Elebua said to try to eliminate the risk for the utility as well. “Energy efficiency means somebody needs to use less power,” Elebua said, but that means they get less money. “But if you decouple both, I can make it an incentive for me to help someone use less it power, but it doesn’t affect my ability to recover my investments,” he said. If you do this, he said, “then both sides will win.”
Among several other endeavors, Washington noted ComEd’s hosting capacity map, which provide greater transparency into whether a distribution grid can host additional DERs. They can also identify where DERs can alleviate or aggravate grid constraints. According to the Department of Energy, 58 utilities and state agencies had published maps in 26 states, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico as of May 2024.
ComEd serves about 3.8 million customers in the Northeastern Chicagoland area. According to ComEd, The electric service total bill rate per kWh of an average ComEd residential customer was 22% below the average residential rate of the top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas.
ComEd hit its personal record last year in adding 356 MW of DERs to the grid. According to the utility, more than 1 GW of DER capacity is interconnected to ComEd’s grid. The utility also said it provided a record $71.6 million in distributed generation rebates to help offset the out-of-pocket costs related to adding new solar energy in residential, commercial and community solar settings. The utility powers all its buildings with clean energy that it either purchases from Constellation or generates from rooftop solar.
To be clear, ComEd does not have an entirely clean slate when it comes from corruption and energy legislation. In 2023, a federal jury found four former ComEd officials including the CEO, known as the “ComEd Four” guilty of conspiring to bribe former Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan as part of the utility’s efforts to get legislation passed. Madigan is set to be sentenced Friday. ComEd also faced scrutiny for launching large public relations stunts to help clean up its image, all of which it passed the costs of onto ratepayers.
Illinois and Minnesota are currently the only two Midwestern states with community solar. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Minnesota had 160.7 W per person of community solar, with 931 MWac total capacity as of Q1 2025, while Illinois had 30.9 W per person, with 393 MWac of total capacity. Nationwide, Maine leads other states per capita, with 666.5 W per person.
