Our Business Model

PPA Evolves into our E-PPA

As a nonprofit social enterprise, SolSolution adapts the for-profit, solar power purchase agreement (PPA) business model to enable large-scale environmental, educational, and economic impact at US schools and their surrounding communities. Our educational power purchase agreement model, the E–PPA, enables schools to save money on electricity payments, adopt economical solar energy, and benefit from the government incentives. Additionally, SolSolution reinvests the profits from the sale of clean renewable electricity to school educational budgets and provides schools with a core educational offering in solar, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, and green entrepreneurship. SolSolution’s powerful new model allows schools to adopt solar energy with no upfront cots, no operations and maintenance costs, and virtually no risk. Our partner schools are able to hedge against rising energy costs and accurately budget for their electricity’s costs for over 20 years.

Economic Viability

SolSolution finances, installs, commissions, operates and maintains the solar facilities at all of our partner schools. To finance the solar systems, SolSolution raises capital from a wide spectrum of investors. From donors and foundations to banks and sophisticated investors, we raise the upfront capital to fund the installation, commissioning, and long-term operations and maintenance of the solar photovoltaic system. Our revenue comes from school electricity payments, federal incentives, state incentive programs, and the sale of renewable energy credits (RECS). These revenue streams enable SolSolution to assemble economically viable solar electricity projects, resulting in significant internal rates of return. We use the income generated by the sale of electricity from these solar PV systems to invest in the educational budgets of low-income schools, fund our educational programs, and maintain SolSolution’s daily operations.

Our Competitive Advantage

Our access to lower-cost capital and our core educational offering result in a significant competitive advantage over other PPA providers in the solar industry. In fact, at scale, SolSolution could offer the most competitive pricing in the industry, beating even our for-profit competitors on price alone. We believe that this competitive advantage, our dedication to the SolSolution mission and the communities we serve, and our business philosophy allow us to offer the highest value solar schools solution in the industry.