Ten seasons
The plain, counted at the meter
What we do
What Brightrow builds & pools
Barn & shop-roof arrays
Ballasted on steel, rail on timber, twenty-five to sixty kilowatts on a roof that was already doing nothing but weathering. Snow rails fitted as standard, string inverters sized for the long east-west of a barn ridge, and a production guarantee per roof — the barn’s model, not a brochure map of the county.
The shaded-yard share
Not every member has a roof that earns an array, and the whole point of the Hundred Barns is that they do not need one. A share buys the net-metering credits of a specified barn, allocated monthly on the utility bill, priced below the retail rate and cancellable at any March true-up. Your yard keeps its oaks; your meter keeps the savings.
The battery commons
A shared LFP cabinet at the Corbie Mills meter point, dispatched across the evening tariff for every member’s benefit and standing ready for outage calls — well pumps and furnace boards ride through on a rotating list. Storage at co-op scale costs a third of a per-house battery, which is exactly the arithmetic a commons exists for.
How membership runs
From survey to the annual letter
The same four beats for a barn roof and a shaded-yard share alike — the only variable is which side of the meter you sit on.
Survey & roof file
Drone flight, shade model, rafter reading. Barns get an array proposal; shaded yards get a share allocation — both off the same plain-wide production model.
Permits & interconnection
Utility filings for the whole fleet in quarterly blocks; the co-op’s name goes on the paperwork and the fees come out of operations, not your pocket.
Set & torque
Two days on a barn roof, flashed and torqued to written values. The crew that built the plain’s first array in 2015 still runs its builds.
True-up & the letter
Every member gets the annual letter — their roof or share’s production against model, the fleet figures, and the accounts open at the March meeting.
Arrays & shares
The share card, printed like seed corn
Prices from last season’s plain builds and the current share register. A barn array pays the farm a roof-lease credit against the member’s bill; a share buys specified barn production without a single panel on your property. Both carry the same per-roof guarantee and the same March accounting.
Barn array, member roof$2.35 / watt
Ballasted or rail, 25–60 kW, snow rails, roof-lease credit applied
House array, member roof$18,400 installed
7 kW typical, string or micro as the shade model decides
Shaded-yard share$0.11 / kWh
Specified barn production, credits allocated monthly
Battery commons seat$980 once
Evening dispatch share plus the outage rotation list
Fleet wash & torque, every Juneincluded
The crew that circles all one hundred and three roofs
Arrays, shares & the commons
What the plain pools
2025 — 2026, harvest light
Roofs of the Hundred Barns
Six roofs from the register, photographed in harvest light — the hour the plain’s arrays do their best work on both sides of the meter. Every plate has run in an annual letter; the full sets go to the membership.
Our barn was a wind problem and a tax problem; Brightrow made it the best-performing asset on the farm. Fifty-four kilowatts on the big ridge, a roof-lease credit every month, and their June wash crew is more reliable than my own harvest help. The annual letter reads like a grain elevator receipt — numbers, dates, no adjectives.
Sixty-foot oaks on the south lot killed every rooftop quote I collected — until the shaded-yard share. Our credits come off the Osterhouse barley barn every month, the bill dropped by a third, and not one tree came down. Membership cost less than the survey fees I had already paid the roof-quote people.
The battery commons carried our well pump and furnace board through the February ice storm while the township road was a skating rink. We are on the outage rotation list, we paid nine hundred and eighty dollars once, and I have stopped pricing a per-house battery entirely. Co-op arithmetic beats showroom arithmetic.
What happens to my share if the member’s barn sells?
The array stays with the roof and the share stays with you — the allocation simply moves to another roof in the register, at the same per-kilowatt-hour price, at the next monthly allocation. The register exists so a property changing hands cannot change your bill; it has moved shares eleven times since 2019 without a member noticing.
How can credits cost less than the retail rate?
Because the barn fleet produces at the utility’s wholesale hours and the co-op passes the arithmetic through instead of margining it. You pay $0.11 for a credit the utility would bill you $0.16 to $0.34 for depending on the hour — the difference is the aggregator’s margin in a normal bill, and we are not an aggregator, we are the owners.
Is my roof right for an array, or should I buy a share?
The free survey answers it with a shade model, the same as any rooftop outfit — and if the honest answer is a share, we say so. About one member in four ends up a share-holder rather than a roof-owner, and the annual letter treats both with exactly the same accounting.
Who fixes my roof array if it underperforms?
The guarantee is per roof: year one at 95% of the barn’s own model, the shortfall credited at the net-metering rate, sizing misses fixed in hardware. The fleet monitoring reads every barn nightly, and the June wash crew physically walks all one hundred and three roofs with a torque wrench and a rag.
What does the March meeting actually decide?
The accounts, the share price for the coming year, and which roofs join the register — one member, one vote, roof-owners and share-holders alike. The utility tariff sections are read aloud, which is exactly as entertaining as it sounds and the reason nobody has ever missed two meetings.
Fair questions
Asked at the March meeting
The five the floor hears every year, answered the way the minutes record them. The co-op line at the bottom answers the rest, seven to five, plain time.
SPRING WINDOW OPENS THE FIRST MONDAY OF MARCH — twenty-one roofs joined last year and the register is capped by the interconnection queue, not by us. Surveys free; shares month-to-month after year one; the letter public to all. (555) 021-3358 · barns@brightrowsolar.example
The spring window
Put your roof or your yard in the register
Tell us which side of the meter you sit on. Barns get a shade model and an array proposal; shaded yards get a share allocation off the same plain-wide model — both free, both carrying the per-roof guarantee, and both decided before the March meeting so the minutes carry your name. barns@brightrowsolar.example