Your Bond Purchase Makes Solar in Wisconsin More Attainable
Jackie Harrison-Jewell, 2/25/19
When was the last time investing made you feel really good? Sure, investing in bonds is a smart thing to do with your money. It’s generally secure and often pays better, more consistent interest than other investments. But do you really know where your money is going? What it’s doing? Do you feel like you’re making a difference?
Investing in Legacy Solar Co-op’s Slice of Sun bond program is different. With LSC’s bonds you know exactly what your money is doing. All funds raised by the sale of Slice of Sun bonds finance Wisconsin-based solar, installed by local vendors and contractors, with local, primarily nonprofit clients, including city and county government institutions, service organizations and faith-based communities.
Contact us if you want to buy a slice of sun for your community.
This year investing in our co-op will help groups like these:
- A very popular youth skills training non-profit is looking to secure financing for their 100 kilowatt (!!) project for their new location here in Madison.
- Three Madison-area churches are vying for support for their solar projects this spring. We’ll give more details once we have tax sponsors lined up.
- Three agricultural businesses through the Wisconsin Farmers Union are looking for support for their projects — you could earn up to 5% and help these businesses grow solar for their operations!
- Two school districts up in northern Wisconsin are looking for material support through the Legacy Solar Co-op. We need to sell a lot of bonds to help them!
- One housing development complex in northern Wisconsin is looking for a tax financing solution and considering LSC’s model for part of their development costs.
- More than one other Wisconsin VFW has voiced interest in building on our success with the Truax-Longmire Post #8483 solar project by adopting projects of their own!
For organizations like these, converting to solar frees up operational funds to use for other vital expenses, at the same time setting an example of good environmental stewardship for their clients, members, students and community.
Nonprofits can’t take advantage of the tax credits available to other organizations, making investing in solar a nearly impossible financial burden without some sort of assistance. Legacy Solar Co-op provides that assistance with our unique approach to solar investing.
Your bond purchases create a pool of money we then lend to help install solar arrays at affordable rates. A tax sponsor finances the installation on a host site, in part through a loan from LSC, and gets the value of the tax credit while selling energy produced by the array to the nonprofit organization “host”. The host pays for the energy with savings made possible from significantly reduced energy bills. The tax sponsor pays back the loan from LSC with the funds collected from the host through energy sales. And finally, LSC pays you, the bond holder, a dependable return on your investment with the interest earned from the loan.
Another unique advantage of the Slice of Sun bond is that you get to decide how much you earn in interest on your support of Wisconsin solar. You can decide to simply get your money back (zero% interest), or anywhere between that and 5% interest over the 12 year principal & interest payment schedule. If you invest over $10,000 in co-op bonds, you can earn up to 6% interest. Your choice. There are only two catches: 1) you must be a resident of the state of Wisconsin: 2) and you must be a member of our co-op in order to participate.
It’s a win-win-win. To date we’ve helped over 30 organizations finance 1097kW of solar. That’s over $850,000 in bond sales. And we are on track to help many more Wisconsin organizations this year.
But we can’t do it without you. Your purchase of Slice of Solar bonds, priced at just $250 a share, enables us to pursue our mission of making solar more accessible for Wisconsin. This is investing that feels good.
Contact us if you want to buy a slice of sun for your community.
