By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: Bloomberg looked into southeastern states like Georgia, South Carolina and Florida and discovered, by golly, those states LIKE solar now. In other news, water is wet.

• According to the report, states have been reluctant to add solar because of the cost was too high.
• Bloomberg looked at the recent explosion of solar installations in Florida, Virginia and South Carolina to reach its conclusion (and oddly left out North Carolina for some reason).

SolarWakeup’s View: OK, I know I should let Bloomberg off the hook for this one. After all, they don’t write about solar full time the way I do. But their simplistic analysis of the development of the southeastern states sudden interest in solar just isn’t really news.

Let’s be honest here: Although Bloomberg says the previous reluctance of utilities in places like Georgia, South Carolina and Florida to adopt solar was cost, it’s pretty clear the real reason was that they were afraid of losing their monopolies. After all, if solar is good for the utility, why wouldn’t it be good for its customers in southeastern states? Right, it would be good for them – and the utilities don’t want to cede that power to anyone.

Now price drops have certainly played some part, and if prices continue to fall (in conjunction with concurrent decreases in storage technology prices), you can be utilities in the Southeast will continue to add more solar to their portfolios.

Here’s one note of caution, however: While increasing utility-scale solar plants is a good idea in the short term, it will damage the long-term prospects for the rooftop, distributed-generation market. And it should be noted that while utilities are embracing solar more often for themselves, they are still trying to impose extra charges (penalties) for solar customers who control their own generation.

So while you can applaud the increasing amount of solar in southeastern states, don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security that solar is safe there, especially when the utilities feel their bottom lines are threatened.

More:

Sunny U.S. Southeast Is Finally Becoming a Hot Spot for Solar

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: Yesterday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that homeowners that lease rooftop solar systems do not have to pay state property taxes on that home improvement.

• The court found that since the homeowners don’t own the “electrical generation facilities,” they have earned a state property tax exemption
• It refused, however, to offer an opinion on whether counties could levy property taxes on the solar arrays.
• The case stretches back to 2013, when the state’s Department of Revenue, with the support of APS (the state’s largest utility), decided it could collect property taxes on the arrays.

SolarWakeup’s View:  The Arizona Supreme Court’s decision yesterday to provide a property tax exemption for homeowners who lease their rooftop solar arrays was not only the right decision, but I believe it will go a long way toward restoring a residential rooftop solar market hammered by Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) decisions over the past two years.

As you may or may not recall, the ACC ended a bruising three year battle over net metering in December 2016 by deciding to end retail net metering (a 1:1 exchange for electrons at the retail rate) for all new rooftop solar installations (in fairness, it did eventually grandfather current users, but not without a huge effort on the part of the state’s solar industry).

The state’s rooftop installers worried it would devastate their market, and the ACC’s decision certainly slowed down the market, all while APS started building utility-scale solar at an ever-increasing pace. The utility-scale building could be seen as a direct challenge to the rooftop industry and as a blatant attempt to maintain their monopoly generation power.

Yesterday, the Arizona Supreme Court evened the playing field a bit, at least for companies that lease panels to their customers. Frankly, it would have been a much bigger victory had the rule applied to all rooftop solar installations (like Florida did two years ago for commercial rooftop installations), but right now Arizona rooftop installers will take anything they can get.

Sometimes a small victory can blossom over time into a much bigger one. The Arizona Supreme Court decision yesterday could be the start of just such a process.

More:

Solar customers don’t have to pay some taxes, state Supreme Court rules (AZ Central)

Natural Gas Plans Hit Snag For Arizona Utility