At an event celebrating the opening of its new Chicago headquarters, leading community solar developer Nexamp highlighted how Illinois is setting a national benchmark by rapidly scaling renewable energy while deeply embedding equity, labor standards, and inclusive workforce development into the core of its clean energy transition.
On June 24, Nexamp, the nation’s largest community solar developer (a consumer-forward IPP, as CEO Zaid Ashai recently calls them), opened its Chicago office, the company’s second headquarters, for an evening co-hosted with the Clean Energy Leadership Institute (CELI). Policymakers, regulators, and advocates filled the room alongside CELI fellows and students from the Nexamp and City Colleges of Chicago renewable energy fellowship. The stated theme was community investment and workforce development. The deeper story is the one worth making the case for: no state is doing more to prove you can build solar, wind, and batteries fast and do it equitably than Illinois.
Plenty of states can deploy renewables. Illinois is deploying them while writing equity, labor standards, and consumer protection into the core of the program, and the results now show up in both megawatts and people.
Nexamp CEO Zaid Ashai set the tone, framing the transition as a choice. Disruption on this scale can build a more decentralized, equitable economy or produce a K-shaped outcome where the value accrues to the few who hold capital. Done right, he argued, clean energy and affordability are not at odds. Distributed solar and storage are the path to price stability for ordinary ratepayers, not a tax on them.
The political backing was in the room. State Representative Marcus C. Evans Jr., Assistant Majority Leader and current president of the National Conference of State Legislatures, put it plainly: infrastructure gets built when government makes a clear decision and stops waffling, and Illinois has made its. Springfield, he said, is lockstep on building a clean energy economy.
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