A 40-acre stretch of land in Aurora is doing double duty these days, generating solar power for about 1,200 low-income homes across Colorado while also hosting 20 honey bee colonies on the property. The site, known as the Kacie Peters Community Solar Garden, has been feeding electricity into the grid for almost two years, and its unusual pairing of clean energy and pollinator habitat has put it in the local spotlight.
In 2014, Sentinel Colorado reported an Aurora community solar garden at the northeast corner of East 6th Avenue and Tower Road. Developer Pivot Energy says the five-megawatt facility has been operational for close to two years, with one representative telling Denver7 that “this site has been operational for almost two years now, and the site overall is five megawatts in size.” The power generated there flows directly into Xcel Energy's energy grid, the same Pivot Energy representative said.
CBS News Colorado describes the Aurora garden as a 40-acre solar array.
Who Benefits From the Power
Denver7's reporting put a number on the impact: “we're powering about 1,200 low-income homes across Colorado,” the Pivot Energy representative said. Pivot Energy's own project page offers a somewhat different figure, stating the garden is intended to serve approximately 650 low-income households. The company adds that each subscription is expected to save participating families around $1,000 on their electricity bills.
Beyond the kilowatts, the site has become something of an experiment in cohabitation. Flower Street Farm manages the 20 honey bee colonies on the property. Denver7 reports that this marks Pivot Energy's first solar farm anywhere to host honey bee colonies, a detail the company's representative emphasized while describing the site's dual purpose.
A Bigger Push for Community Solar
Aurora's project is part of a much longer story in Colorado, which opened the nation's first statewide community solar gardens program back in 2010, according to Colorado Public Radio. Under the community solar model, subscribers pay a monthly fee and receive a credit on their utility bills in return, letting renters and others who cannot install rooftop panels still benefit from solar power.
New Rules on the Horizon
The Public Utilities Commission says a formal rulemaking process covering the broader program is expected to launch in summer 2026.
Aurora's garden is a small piece of a much larger land-use picture. Ground-mounted solar projects covered 14,326 acres across 39 Colorado counties at the end of 2024, representing less than 1% of the state's roughly 30.2 million acres of farmland, according to the Colorado Sun. Utility-scale solar alone covered 12,601 acres by that point, with another 6,700 acres added in 2025. Nearly 90% of the state's ground-based solar installations sit in just eight counties, the Sun reports, with 15% concentrated in the Denver metro area.
Not every proposed project has moved forward so smoothly. In Delta County, an 80-megawatt array on 475 acres was blocked by county commissioners until developer Guzman Energy reworked the plan to include grazing sheep and an irrigation system, the Colorado Sun reported. In San Miguel County, opposition on Wright's Mesa proved so strong against a proposed 100-megawatt solar and battery installation on 640 acres that the developer abandoned the plan entirely.
Analysts for the Colorado Energy Office have estimated the state will ultimately need 12,000 megawatts of large-scale solar to meet its 2050 clean energy goals, requiring somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 acres of land, according to the same Colorado Sun analysis. In February 2021, CBS News Colorado reported that SunShare owned and operated the state's then-largest community solar garden, which generated just more than five megawatts DC and supplied power to 450 homes across 13 counties and 40 cities. Measured against that 2021 benchmark, the bee-friendly garden off Tower Road is already punching above its weight in Aurora's corner of the state's solar map.
