Kilowatt Commons · Member-owned solar & storage · Thistlewick & the Perch River towns · Chartered 2017
The utility sells you the sun at retail. We bought it wholesale.
Kilowatt Commons is 214 households who own their generation: arrays on member roofs, two ground plants at the old gravel works, and batteries dispatched into the evening peak. The accounts are open, the tariff maths is printed in the annual letter, and the membership window opens four weeks each spring.
The charter
Why a co-op and not a company
Because an installer’s incentive is the invoice and a member’s incentive is the kilowatt-hour, and those two point apart exactly where the shade model stops being checked. The Commons owns its arrays for twenty-five years and reads them nightly — the same skin in the game a good farmer has in a fence post. No salespeople are employed; the charter forbids it, along with expires-Friday pricing.
Generation you own answers to you at a meeting, once a year, with the accounts open. Generation you rent answers to a call centre, for exactly as long as the contract.
Services
What the members own
01
Member rooftop arrays
Shade-modelled, string-or-micro honest, guaranteed to 95% of the modelled year — and owned by you outright from interconnection day, not leased, not power-purchased. The Commons handles the interconnection queue, the permits and the insurance riders; the roof keeps its warranty and gains an asset.
02
The ground plants at the gravel works
Two arrays — 1.1 and 0.9 megawatts — on land the membership bought in 2019, on piers the river cannot reach. They carry the shaded-yard members, the waiting list, and the reserve that underwrites every rooftop guarantee on the register.
03
Community batteries & the evening peak
Four hundred kilowatt-hours of LFP storage dispatched across the five-to-nine tariff, the revenue shared to the members whose roofs charged it. When the grid faults, the same cabinets carry the well pumps, furnace boards and fridge circuits on the outage roster — one ice storm, sixty-one homes, zero flooded basements.
04
The repair bench & second opinions
Any array on the register is read nightly and walked annually; any array anywhere gets an honest second opinion for free. The bench has rescued eleven orphaned systems whose installers vanished — modelled, repaired, and brought onto the register with their history intact.
Roof member
$2.55 / wattowned from day one
- Shade-modelled array on your roof
- String or micro as the roof decides
- 95% production guarantee, reserve-backed
- Nightly monitoring & the June wash
- One vote at the March meeting
The array is yours from interconnection day — the Commons files, insures and reads it.
Yard member
$0.12 / kWhcredits, month-to-month
- Credits from the gravel-works plants
- No panels, no roof, no lease
- Evening-battery revenue share
- Outage-roster eligibility
- One vote at the March meeting
For the lots the oaks won. Cancel any March; the register moves you, not the trees.
Storage member
$1,140once, per seat
- A share of the community cabinets
- Named circuits on the outage roster
- Dispatch revenue, quarterly
- February load sizing at the survey
- Bench service at cost, for life
Co-op storage costs a third of a per-house battery — that is the whole arithmetic.
How it goes
A membership year
The same sequence on every job — the only variable is your project.
The spring window
Survey & the register
Four weeks, once a year: drone flights, shade models, roof or yard decided with the same instruments. The window exists because interconnection queues are annual — joining it means your array is energized before the next one opens.
Early summer
Filed, built, energized
Permits and the utility filing in the Commons’ quarterly block, then two days on the roof: flashed, torqued, photographed against the model page. The June wash crew sets out the same week your array joins the fleet.
Peak season
Dispatch & the readings
The batteries sell the evening peak and the revenue posts quarterly; the bench reads every roof nightly and calls before you notice. A string that drifts is a string we already drove past.
Every March
The true-up meeting
Accounts open, guarantees read aloud against models, the seven-year payback line re-audited, and the register votes on the year’s roofs. Attendance in person or by post; the minutes go to every member either way.
2025 — 2026
The works, photographed for the minutes
Six plates from the annual letter, chosen the way the minutes choose — for what they document, not how they flatter. The full set runs to forty pages and goes to every member.
Fair questions
Asked at every window
The five the register hears each spring, answered the way the minutes record them. Between windows, the Commons line answers seven to five, river time.
What is the actual difference between owning and leasing?
A lease sells you the output at a discount and the finance company keeps the asset, the tax credit and the say. Ownership — what the charter exists for — puts the array on your deed, the credit in your filing and your vote in the register. The payback line is shorter too: seven years median across the fleet, audited and printed, against eleven to fifteen for the lease products quoted in the same towns.
How can the guarantee be reserve-backed?
Every array’s floor — 95% of its modelled year — is underwritten by the gravel-works plants’ revenue, held at the Thistlewick credit union and audited with the annual letter. A payout does not depend on a good quarter for the installer; it depends on a number in an account, which is the only kind of promise that survives weather.
I rent my house. Is there anything for me?
The yard tier: credits from the ground plants, month-to-month after the first year, no panels and no landlord signature required. When you move within the Perch River towns the credits follow the meter — and if you move beyond them, the March true-up closes the account at par.
What if my roof needs replacing in year ten?
The bench decommissions and reinstalls the array at cost — roughly a fifth of the original price, crew and crane — and the guarantee pauses for the months the panels are stacked in the yard rather than voiding. Three roofs have done it; all three arrays beat their models the year after.
Who decides what the batteries do?
The dispatch policy is voted at the March meeting and runs automatically between meetings: sell the evening peak, share the revenue, hold fifteen percent back for the outage roster. It is written in plain language in the letter, and it is the same policy for the secretary’s roof and the newest member’s.
I joined for the bill and stayed for the governance, which is a sentence I did not expect to write about electricity. My roof array beat its model by three percent, my battery seat paid $214 of dispatch revenue last summer, and when the ice storm took the street out for nineteen hours my furnace board never noticed. But the March meeting is the thing: the accounts open, the payback line re-audited, my one vote as loud as the founder’s. The utility never once asked my opinion.
The spring window opens the first Monday of March — the register answers questions all year · (555) 023-9062 · member@kilowattcommons.example
Put your name in the spring window
Roof, yard or storage seat — tell us which and the survey answers the rest with the same instruments. Membership is one vote each, the accounts are open, and between windows the Commons line answers questions about tariffs, trees and lease quotes with suspicious patience. member@kilowattcommons.example