Community Solar Circle celebrates grand opening in Camden

Community Solar Circle recently celebrated its education and subscription center Grand Opening at 800 Market Street in Camden. The center opening marks the beginning of its partnership with Camden residents and the first such center in the State of New Jersey.

Government officials, city business leaders, leaders from the solar industry as well as local nonprofits were in attendance.

“This ribbon-cutting ceremony is a culmination of many years of hard work and planning. It’s almost hard to believe that it’s happening until I sit back and think of the team of people I work with that brought us here today. Your passion, your dedication, and your hard work blow me away, so thank you, a big shout out to my team for getting us to this point,” Stephen Renz, president of Community Solar Circle said.

“My team and I are certainly celebrating today, but we also know that this grand opening is not the dream but merely a step towards it. The dream is to bring energy and environmental justice to the city of Camden. And we are going to achieve this by bringing energy savings to residential customers and creating local, sustainable green energy jobs that will go to the residents of this city.”

Community Solar Circle is a solar subscriber organization registered with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities that acquires subscriptions to small pieces of large solar arrays that are being constructed on landfills, brownfields, and large rooftops. The panels that a customer subscribes to will feed power into the electric grid resulting in an energy credit that will lower their electricity bills by at least 20 percent. There is no fee to sign-up, maintain a subscription, and customers can cancel their subscription at any time.

And residents are the ones with the potential to reap the benefits of community solar.

“As if this isn’t enticing enough already, for every new subscriber, we’ll have them choose a
local Camden nonprofit to receive a $100 donation from Community Solar Circle,” Renz said.

“This is an opportunity for our residents…I see an opportunity for our residents to reduce their bills, which helps impact their lives. What you’re [Community Solar Circle] doing today, opening up your business on this corner in this city, is going to be impactful for our residents. We have to get that message out to our residents: that right here you can come to a business that’s offering opportunities to lower and reduce your energy bills,” Carstarphen said.