CollectiveSun’s work is supported by mission-driven partner organizations who, like us, are committed to improving their communities through clean energy. By highlighting these partners, we aim to provide nonprofits the tools and support they need to move forward on their solar journeys.
We’re delighted to add to our Partner Spotlight series with the latest spotlight on Concord, which offers compliance management services that take the guesswork out of direct pay filing for nonprofits. But they do much more than that. We caught up with Dennis Stilger, Managing Director of Concord, to learn more about this exciting company.
Concord’s story and mission
Concord’s mission, says Stilger, is to help advance clean energy development by making incentives available to more people.
Since 2009, Concord has been helping organizations monetize rebates and tax incentives, starting with energy efficiency — always a good area to tackle before going solar. Many of these initial customers were involved in municipal renewable energy projects, which historically were not able to take advantage of tax incentives because they’re tax-exempt.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) changed this with direct pay, providing what Stilger considers a transformative opportunity. But Concord quickly realized that the program’s complexity was keeping many organizations from taking advantage of direct pay. To manage that complexity, they developed a software solution that manages all the data, stakeholder, and workflow requirements for compliance around tax credits.
Add to that the company’s deep expertise with tax policy and engineering, and you have a powerful combination.
How Concord helps nonprofits with solar projects
Because Concord uses a powerful software solution, their work is scalable to both large and small projects.
“While we work with some Fortune 100 companies,” says Stilger, “we see our greatest value proposition in the long tail of medium- to small-size projects. We’ve worked on projects you’d recognize if you go to a major American tourist city. But more interesting to me is the community church in rural Missouri that we’re helping get a huge rebate on their solar project. They had no idea that this possibility existed. To me, that’s very cool — we get to help people across the full distribution of stakeholders in this market.”
In the tax-exempt world of nonprofits, many organizations do not have a tax advisor, because they don’t normally file a tax return. That can feel overwhelming to tackle. To address this, Concord has an affiliate company that can file tax returns for an organization, rounding out their comprehensive services.
In guiding projects from conception to completion, Concord identifies the incentives a project is eligible for, determines what it will take to maximize those, and then provides a compliance roadmap to show the different options and requirements.
Concord’s software platform, Concord Caisson, includes not only the available tax incentives and rebates (both federal and local) but also prevailing wage requirements, energy community maps, and brownfield data. They’ve even entered into agreements with some manufacturers to maximize domestic content requirements.
The Concord process ensures substantiation of all tax credit claims. Everything needed to provide evidence of credit eligibility is compiled into one report for easy access, based on the company’s extensive experience with the IRS.
The company is constantly making enhancements to its services. Concord is in the final stages of completing the IRS Assurance Testing System (ATS) process for its software platform. This will allow the organizations they partner with to complete the electronic filing process directly from the Concord platform, providing a single platform for handling the entire compliance management process effectively and efficiently from initial design through filing on behalf of a tax-exempt entity.
In addition, Concord is releasing a version of its platform that solar installers and developers can use to provide their own customers with the same seamless compliance management experience. The platform will help developers and installers identify the available incentives and compliance requirements for the projects they are working on, communicate the requirements and process to their customers in a single location, and help the renewable energy asset owner confidently claim those incentives.
What nonprofits should know about Concord’s services — and about direct pay
“Our guiding principle is that Concord makes it easy,” says Stilger. That means making it easy to navigate a complicated process.
“There are a lot of churches and other nonprofits who see environmental stewardship as part of their core mission,” he adds. “They’re willing to make those investments, and even more so if you can impact those economics with a rebate. But they may not know about these opportunities.”
Stilger advises that nonprofits start on the direct pay process early rather than late. That means identifying the kind of information you’ll need to collect as you go through your solar project, rather than waiting till the end. Concord provides a roadmap for doing that.
“Is this real?” That’s the main question Concord gets from nonprofits, says Stilger. The next question organizations have is why they need to file a tax return, if they’ve never done that before.
Not only is that process new, but many organizations aren’t aware of the available incentives. It’s no wonder the Concord platform, and the incentives themselves, can seem too good to be true! But the incentives are very real, and Concord is ready to help nonprofits benefit from them.
How Concord’s work overlaps with the work of CollectiveSun
Concord is well positioned to help CollectiveSun customers manage a funding stream that will help pay for their solar installations. “What we’re doing is going into the future and capturing future dollars to make the economics of these projects achievable. We’re all trying to make the world a better place by making renewables more economically attractive,” says Stilger.
Both Concord and CollectiveSun are working toward this goal, with Concord focused on the tax incentives part of the equation. We’re both making it easy and simple for nonprofits to go solar!
Concord’s long-term goals
“We want to help everybody we can in America make investments in clean energy and energy efficiency,” says Stilger, “and make those as attractive as possible for them. Our goal is increasing the scale at which we’re executing on our mission.”
Getting in touch with Concord
You can learn more and get in touch with Concord on their website at https://www.concordlp.com/contact.
About Dennis Stilger
Dennis J. Stilger, Jr., is the Founder and Managing Director of Concord Energy Strategies, a national tax credit and incentive advisory firm. Since 2009, Concord has helped clients monetize over $2 billion in energy efficiency and clean energy incentives. The firm works with a wide range of stakeholders — including EPC contractors, solar developers, ESCOs, nonprofits and public agencies — to accelerate the clean energy transition. Supported by a multidisciplinary team and the proprietary Concord Caisson platform, Concord delivers expert, responsive advisory services to organizations of all sizes nationwide.