Community Solar Site Acquisition: One Owner, One Feeder, One Window

A man owns 60 acres of hay along a county road. A three-phase line runs past his gate. In one month he gets three letters from three solar companies he has never heard of, all asking about the same field.

That field sits on a feeder with room left on it. In a growing number of utility territories, every developer can look at the same map of where that room is.

Community solar site acquisition is getting a lease or option on a single parcel, usually 15 to 40 acres, close to distribution lines with spare capacity. The project has to fit under the state program's size cap, most often 1 to 5 MW. And the land has to be signed before that program's capacity runs out. It differs from utility-scale in four ways. One owner carries the whole project. The grid picks the parcel, and your competitors are reading the same grid. A state program window sets the deadline. And the owner you need has often heard from someone else first.

How big is a community solar site?

Community solar exists because a state wrote a program for it, and the program sets the size.

A Stoel Rives guide for developers says per-project caps "most commonly range from 1 MW to 5 MW." Some current examples:

• Illinois. Illinois Shines capped each community solar project at 5 MW AC, and systems at the same location count as one. For the 2026 to 2027 program year, a new state law raised that cap to 10 MW.
• Maryland. The permanent program that took effect July 1, 2023 limits each project to no more than 5 MW.
• Minnesota. Gardens approved before 2024 were capped at 1 MW. Gardens approved from January 1, 2024 can be up to 5 MW.
• New Jersey. Projects are capped at 5 MW. The permanent program steers them onto rooftops and carports, and onto landfills and contaminated sites.

On the land side, what landowners read online is that 1 MW of solar takes four to eight acres. At that rate a 5 MW project needs roughly 20 to 40 acres. Developer pages say the same thing in their own words: one asks for "typically 30 to 40 acres," another for 15 to 100 acres or larger. When Maine rewrote its community solar rules in 2019, developers there were seeking 15 to 40 acres.

So a capped community solar project usually fits on one farm, and often on part of it.

One owner per project, many owners per list

A utility-scale project is assembled. Trigen, a land services firm, describes one utility project as possibly "thousands of acres and dozens of parcels," pieced together like a jigsaw.

Community solar is the reverse. Each project is usually one parcel and one owner. Your list holds dozens or hundreds of separate small projects spread across a utility territory, and each needs exactly one yes.

That changes what a missed owner costs. On a utility-scale assembly, one holdout is a gap you can sometimes route around. On a community solar project, the owner who never answers is the project. There's no neighbor to swap in unless the neighbor also sits on the same line with the same room.

The owners are smaller and more varied than on a utility list. Family farms, hobby farms, a business with an empty back lot, a commercial building owner with a flat roof in New Jersey. And the usual problems come with them: the parcel held by an LLC whose mail goes to a registered agent, the owner who died with heirs in three states.

The feeder picks the parcel, and everyone has the same map

Community solar projects connect to the utility's distribution system, not to a big transmission line. The Stoel guide points to size caps and rules about where subscribers must live. Together they mean "certain locations that are both suitable for solar development and proximate to potential customers are highly sought after." It describes "sometimes intense competition for suitable land meeting all of the applicable program requirements," and long queues at "optimally located substations."

Developer pages tell landowners the same thing in plainer words. One says the parcel needs "existing transmission or distribution utility lines running through or next to it." Another tells owners to look for three-phase power lines, "the wooden phone or utility poles with three lines you usually see along roads."

Utilities now publish where the room is. Xcel Energy in Minnesota released a hosting capacity map built from 1,047 feeder models, where red means a project "may not be feasible without major upgrades." That map is public. So is the parcel data.

Put those together and the result is predictable. Every developer in the territory filters to the same green feeders, pulls the same parcels within reach of them, and mails the same owners. When Maine rewrote its community solar rules in 2019, a local paper described developers "cold-calling landowners, sending emails and letters." They were trying "to claim an early spot in line," with 85 proposed solar farms already waiting on one utility's distribution system.

Plenty of developers can pull the same parcels you did. What you control is how fast the owner starts talking to you.

The program window sets the clock

Utility-scale timelines are set by the interconnection queue and the offtaker. Community solar adds a third clock: the state program's capacity.

In Illinois, new blocks of capacity open at the start of each program year. When a block fills, later projects go on a waitlist. To keep that place, "demonstration of continuous site control will be required." The 2026 to 2027 program year opened in the first week of June 2026, with 1,000 MW across six project categories.

Minnesota's newer program caps new capacity at 100 MW a year for 2024 through 2026, then 80 MW a year from 2027. New Jersey approves projects first come, first served.

The Stoel guide calls the effect of "time and capacity-limited incentives" an ongoing "boom and bust" cycle. For the land team, that means site control has to exist before the window opens, and your option has to outlast a waitlist. A signature that arrives two months after the block fills can be worth a year of waiting.

What this means for first contact

Assume he has heard from someone else

On a feeder with room, your letter is rarely the first one he's opened. He's comparing. Tell him in the first line why his parcel and not the field two roads over. The power line along his road, with room left on it, is a reason he can see from his porch.

Answer in hours, not mail cycles

If he replies on a Tuesday and your team calls the following Monday, another developer may have called him on Wednesday. On community solar, the developer who calls second is often calling an owner who already has an offer, because the competitor holds the same list and the same map.

Know who can sign before the window opens

An LLC owner or a set of heirs can take weeks to sort out. Do that work before the program year opens, not after the owner says yes.

Tell him why it takes years and only part of his land

Developer pages walk owners through the order of events. One lists a letter of intent, then due diligence, then an option, with the lease finalized "when interconnection is approved." One Maryland developer tells owners to expect 12 to 48 months of study after signing. Owners also see rates. Developer pages quote $1,000 to $5,000 per acre, and up to $1,600 per acre per year in Maryland. An owner who reads that and then gets a letter for 25 of his 60 acres wants to know why. Say so before he asks. Our post on the questions landowners ask before they reply covers the rest.

The owners on your list nobody has reached

Community solar developers often believe their problem is land. Usually it isn't. The feeders are mapped, the parcels are pulled, and the right owners are already on the list.

The owners they miss are the ones mail doesn't reach. The LLC address that goes to an accountant. The heir who never opens the family envelope. The owner who threw away the first three letters because they all looked the same. On a community solar list, each of those is a whole project.

On one campaign for a developer in Georgia, 1 in 9 parcels wanted to talk about a lease once their owners were reached another way. Across six campaigns, 214 parcels did. The developer's own team took every call.

If you want a rough sense of how many owners on your community solar list your mail never reached, put your parcel count into the calculator.