Illinois put community solar on a 150-year-old coal mine
SkimNews Take
Pairing community solar with already-disturbed former mine land sidesteps both the land-use controversy and the rooftop-access barrier that limit residential adoption among the same low-income subscribers the projects serve.
Get the Energy newsletter
Daily energy & climate — solar, EVs, oil, the policy fights and tech bets shaping the transition. Free.
- Nexamp and TurningPoint Energy completed two community solar farms on a former Colchester Coal Seam mine site in Woodford County, Illinois, the first Illinois Shines community solar projects in the county.
- The Minonk solar farms together generate 9.8 megawatts across roughly 40 acres using nearly 17,000 US-manufactured panels, feeding directly into ComEd's grid.
- The projects are among the first on ComEd's system to use Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems (DERMS) software for real-time balancing of distributed solar.
- More than 650 participants have subscribed, with one farm serving about 450 residential customers and the other serving around 200 low-income households.
- Rush University Medical Center and the College of DuPage together anchor 40% of the projects' electricity offtake, providing the stable institutional demand that underpins the community subscriber base.
- The reclaimed mine is certified as a brownfield under the Illinois Shines incentive program, qualifying the projects for state incentives that reward putting previously disturbed land back into productive use.
- Nexamp CEO Zaid Ashai framed the projects as pairing affordability with domestic manufacturing and advanced grid tools, calling them a model for Illinois' clean-energy buildout.
Why it matters: For Illinois' coal-belt counties, a brownfield-to-solar pipeline turns 40 acres of legacy mine land into a 9.8 MW asset serving 650 ratepayers — including a dedicated low-income subscription tranche — while pioneering DERMS grid-management software on ComEd's network that utilities will need to integrate more distributed solar without reliability losses.
![ELM MicroGrid installs battery storage in its hometown [video]](https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2026/06/ELM_PEORIA.jpg?quality=82&strip=all&w=1600)