Let’s say you live in a quiet corner of New England. You’ve got a house and some land. You’re ready to be part of the climate solution, so you want solar on your property. You look into companies offering solar, and find… that you just can’t afford it.
Not because the solar math doesn’t pencil out — you’re confident that building solar on your property will lower your electricity bill and pay for itself within a decade. But even the most affordable solar system — even one that qualifies for the 30% federal tax credit — costs more than you have lying around.
We’ve run into this problem head-on while designing and selling the Kingdom Sunport, our affordable post-and-beam solar carport. From the beginning, we’ve done everything we can to lower the cost: working with local sawmills, designing for scalable production, and refusing to compromise on quality or durability. But even after relentless optimization, a Sunport still costs tens of thousands of dollars. And for many families, that puts it out of reach.
That’s a problem for the planet and its people.
It’s a problem because many of the people most eager to install solar — i.e., rural homeowners with great sun exposure — are the same ones locked out by high upfront costs. Even with tax credits, net metering, and every other trick in the book.
This is a climate justice problem. Rural communities are often at the front lines of the climate crisis — facing extreme weather, rising energy costs, and aging infrastructure. Right here in Vermont, recent years have seen catastrophic flooding from rainstorms juiced up by global warming. But rural communities are also often left behind when new climate solutions roll out, because of the high upfront capital cost of many renewable energy technologies.
That’s why we think something new is needed. Not a new solar product — a new financial tool. Something like:
Patient Green Capital
We didn’t coin this term — “patient green capital” has been used by forward-thinking climate investors, clean energy funds, and local development groups to describe money that’s willing to wait for impact. It’s capital that flows more like infrastructure, not like a tech IPO. And we think it’s exactly what distributed solar needs right now.
Here’s how it could work: Climate-conscious investors (individuals, institutions, maybe even pension funds) put their money into a shared fund. That fund finances solar infrastructure — not in giant desert arrays, but distributed in backyards, farms, and rooftops across rural America.
In other words, this patient green capital would be used to build small-scale systems, which are hosted by homeowners on a lease-to-own basis. The homeowners make monthly payments back into the fund, (mostly) replacing what used to be their utility bill. And thanks to net metering, their total monthly payments for electricity are less than what they were paying before, so the homeowner is simply saving money. Meanwhile, these aggregated solar lease payments generate a reliable return for the patient investors.
This isn’t a wholly new idea. Companies like Sunrun have pioneered similar models for rooftop solar, using third-party ownership and power purchase agreements to reduce upfront costs. But so far, those models haven’t reached far into rural areas, or into projects that include buildings as well as panels. We want to bring that same approach to durable, beautiful, functional structures — like the Kingdom Sunport — and make them accessible to people who want to own them outright in the end.
From the investor’s side, it’s a long-term, fixed-return investment backed by real-world energy production. Not a speculative bet on green tech — a slow, steady contribution to a just energy transition.
And the rural homeowners gain equity in a power-generating asset and a stake in the clean energy future.
This isn’t charity — it’s infrastructure. The kind of thing people used to build together, because they knew they couldn’t afford to do it alone.
What would it take?
A network of trusted installers. A shared legal framework. An entity — maybe Kingdom Sun, maybe a community co-op — to manage maintenance, metering, and payments. It would take trust and patience on the part of the investors.
But most of all, it would take a shift in how we think about affordability. Because “affordable” shouldn’t mean less than the cost of solar. It should mean possible. It should mean doable. It should mean that if you want solar, and it makes sense where you live, there’s a way to say “yes!”
This is what climate justice looks like: making sure the clean energy transition reaches the end of the dirt road.
We think the Kingdom Sunport is ready for that. And we think rural America is too.