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New Hampshire Net Metering Veto Could Crush Rooftop Industry

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

New England is one of the hottest solar areas of the country, with New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts getting all the attention. Unfortunately, New Hampshire may not be joining them after their governor vetoed a bill designed to raise an arbitrary 1 MW cap on net metering.

The Concord (N.H.) Monitor reports on the turmoil into which the veto has thrown the rooftop solar industry. As David Brooks writes:

Not surprisingly, the governor’s veto of a bill to make large solar projects more profitable has put a number of municipal solar projects on hold, or at least up in the air.

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Under current law, any project over 1 MW is not eligible for net metering. The bill would have raised that cap to 5 MW had the governor not vetoed it.

But Governor Chris Sununu vetoed the bill anyway, arguing that net-metering compensation would hurt other non-solar consumers, who would pay for grid upkeep that solar consumers don’t pay for. In other words, it’s the old cost shift argument raised to the level of the governor’s office.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the “cost shift” argument, it is the erroneous lie that solar consumers don’t pay their fair share of costs for grid upkeep. The truth is that the cost shift doesn’t happen until at least 10% of a state’s electricity is generated from solar – currently only the case in five states, of which New Hampshire is not one.

And even in those five states, the cost shift is only only a fraction of a penny per kilowatt-hour. In other words, it’s not even worth talking about.

It’s the one disappointing part of Brooks’ article, which otherwise is quite good. He accepts the cost shift argument without challenge. It’s a common error among the popular press, who aren’t as familiar with the reality of the solar industry as some of the rest of us are.

It’s up to us to point this out in an effort to educate more people about this pernicious lie so that utilities – and their politicians like Sununu – can’t pull the wool over the eyes of the general public.

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Veto of net metering bill puts solar projects on hold

Duke Energy Requests Temporary Retail Net Metering Revival In South Carolina

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

Duke Energy is asking the South Carolina Public Services Commission to reinstate retail net metering until a compromise can be reached on raising the current 2% cap, an issue that has roiled the South Carolina solar industry over the past 12 months.

The utility has joined a group of solar stakeholders to extend the net metering program through March 15, which they allow time for the development of long-term recommendations through the ORS-led collaborative process and for legislative consideration of any consensus recommendations, including any recommendations related to future net metering policies or programs.

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As Duke Energy spokesman Ryan Mosier explains:

We believe this temporary extension of net metering will provide consistency and certainty for customers and the renewable energy industry in South Carolina while Duke Energy and other interested stakeholders develop recommendations for consensus, common-sense policies that are fair and balance the interests of all who call South Carolina home: solar providers, energy companies, and customers who use solar energy – and those who do not.

The list of co-petitioners reads like an all-star list of clean energy advocates in the state: the South Carolina Office of Regulatory Staff, South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, Southern
Alliance for Clean Energy, SunRun, on behalf of the Alliance for Solar Choice, and the South Carolina Solar Business Alliance.

The petition would appear to be something of an about-face for Duke Energy, which consistently has opposed raising the 2% net metering cap that it hit earlier this year, helping to scuttle a compromise bill that had worked its way through the legislature and seemed well on its way to passing until the state’s utilities got involved. Instead of passage, the bill was scuttled using an obscure parliamentary tactic that changed the type of bill it was and thus the vote margin necessary for passage.

As a result, the simple majority that had planned to vote for the bill was no longer enough for the bill to pass, and so the compromise died.

It’s unclear what compromise Duke Energy is seeking, although their comments about protecting “customers who use solar energy – and those who do not. (emphasis added)” indicate there may be some charge suggested to mitigate the mythical cost shift that utilities claim occurs when solar customers don’t pay their fair share of transmission costs.

National studies have concluded that a “cost shift” only happens when solar penetration reached 10% of the total electricity generation (something happening in only five states in the country, and South Carolina isn’t one of them). Even at the 10% level, those same studies peg the cost shift at fractions of a penny per kWh.

Could Utah Solar Be Cratering A Mere Year Before SPI Comes To The State? (No.)

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

Could the Utah solar market be cratering just one year before Solar Power International heads to Salt Lake City.

No. The answer is no.

Despite breathless reporting over the weekend that implied that Utah’s market has hit the skids, most observers believe the market is simply correcting itself after full retail-rate net metering went away in November. And while installations are off 23% so far in 2018, it’s far too early to tell whether the decline will continue as consumers adjust to the new rules.

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As Jasen Lee reported in The Deseret News, Utah’s oldest newspaper, the slide has been attributed by the Public Service Commission’s Administrator to an unusually high spike in installations ahead of the November deadline. Lee also says “observers” have said the 23% drop in installations is the result of fewer Utahns wanting solar on their roofs – but offers no examples of such “observers” in his story.

Instead, he cites Public Service Commission Administrator Gary Widenburg saying just the opposite:

“Some people rushed to get their installations done,” he said. “Now, several months later, things have settled down a little bit. Once that November date, passed, people who were going to have systems installed early did so and others are just planning accordingly.”

He said the decline seemed to be more because of the deadline rather than decreasing overall demand for rooftop solar.

“I think there was an increase in applications and (installation) activity,” he added. “People who were thinking about doing it and were in a position to do so took advantage of that ‘grandfather date’ and jumped in.”

In recent years, Utah has been a solar market on the climb – not near California and Arizona yet, but making its name known as a potential solar boom state. Therefore, to panic in the year following a significant change in net metering laws and declaring the state a solar bust state seems overheated and a bit hysterical. This has happened in solar states before – heck, it’s happened in the COUNTRY before. Once people adjust to the new rules, we would expect Utah to renew its rise as a solar state – just in time for Solar Power International to celebrate it next fall.

More:

After surge before new rules, solar installations in Utah slip 23%

Could EVs Eliminate The Need For Stand-Alone Batteries? Berkeley Says Yes

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

Recently, President Donald J. Trump yet again riffed on how much wind power kills birds and opined that if the wind doesn’t blow (for wind power) or the sun doesn’t shine (for solar power), “we have a problem.”

Well, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, EVs could be the way to solve renewable energy’s intermittency problems at a fraction of the cost of what widespread stationary battery use would cost.

That’s what a report by two writers at the National Resources Defense Council discuss in a fascinating article at the Microgrid Knowledge website. As usual, California is the overriding example of a state that could do it absolutely right.

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As the authors write:

A study recently published by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) shows that the electric vehicles (EVs) expected in California in 2025 could be used to meet the majority of the Golden State’s energy storage mandate that calls for 1.3 gigawatts (GW) of battery capacity by 2024.

The keys from the Berkeley paper are as follows:

Let’s sum up the findings from the paper on how the expected number of California EVs can help to ensure grid stability and fulfill the intent of the storage mandate:

Without hindering drivers’ transportation needs, smart charging or V1G can easily provide 1 GW of storage, or about three-quarters of the 2024 storage mandate.
V1G and V2G combined can offer an astounding 5 GW of storage, dwarfing the storage mandate, and enabling the integration of much higher quantities of renewable energy.
Crucially, while V1G may require a system-wide investment of around $150 million, that’s substantially less than the $1.45-$1.75 billion that equivalent stationary (non-EV) storage would cost. (The paper used stationary storage costs from 2015, the latest available at the time of its writing, but even with the substantially lower storage costs of today, V1G implementation remains far cheaper.)
Using a similar approach, the value of grid services associated with V2G in addressing the “duck curve” is equivalent to $12.8 to $15.4 billion in equivalent stationary storage.

In other words, Tony Seba could well be right when he said at Intersolar North America that if we just electrify everything, we can stabilize the grid and meet 100% of our electrical needs from renewable energy in the next thirty years.

Sorry, President Trump – those are just the facts

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Study: Using EVs Instead of Stationary Batteries Could Save Billions