This story, "Utilities wage campaign against rooftop solar", from the Washington Post is fascinating on so many levels. The story has relevance to us in Idaho because the utility industry behavior/strategy the story describes is identical to what we're seeing from Idaho Power. The story reveals:
- A coordinated utility industry effort to attack the economics of small residential distributed energy resources (DER) like solar, wind, etc. Efforts span legislative and public utility commissions. In Idaho, we've witnessed efforts by Idaho Power to push for changes to net metering rules to raise prices for solar customers.
"Three years ago, the nation’s top utility executives gathered at a Colorado resort to hear warnings about a grave new threat to operators of America’s electric grid: not superstorms or cyberattacks, but rooftop solar panels.
If demand for residential solar continued to soar, traditional utilities could soon face serious problems, from “declining retail sales” and a “loss of customers” to “potential obsolescence,” according to a presentation prepared for the group. “Industry must prepare an action plan to address the challenges,” it said.
The warning, delivered to a private meeting of the utility industry’s main trade association, became a call to arms for electricity providers in nearly every corner of the nation. Three years later, the industry and its fossil-fuel supporters are waging a determined campaign to stop a home-solar insurgency that is rattling the boardrooms of the country’s government-regulated electric monopolies.
The campaign’s first phase—an industry push for state laws raising prices for solar customers—failed spectacularly in legislatures around the country, due in part to surprisingly strong support for solar energy from conservatives and evangelicals in traditionally “red states.” But more recently, the battle has shifted to public utility commissions, where industry backers have mounted a more successful push for fee hikes that could put solar panels out of reach for many potential customers..."
- Utility industry strategy to pit ratepayers against ratepayers, by suggesting that low income ratepayers bear increasing fixed costs if other ratepayers install solar. Again, Idaho Power has followed this pattern. In their publicly filed testimony, Idaho Power's paid analyst obediently parrots this viewpoint:
"...This (net metering program) creates a potential inequity between net metering customers and standard service customers, as net metering customers are provided the opportunity to unduly reduce collection of revenue requirement by receiving credit for generation at the full retail rate while standard service customers are left to compensate for the revenue shortfall..."
- Assumed support from conservative political allies failing to meet utility expectations. Fortunately, Idaho Power's efforts to penalize solar customers was not only rejected, but actually resulted in a strong rebuke. Much to Idaho Power's dismay, their request to financially penalize solar customers (raising base charges by 4x) was rejected. The existing cap on net metering capacity was completely lifted. Their request to seize annual excess power production at no cost was denied. Idaho Power's only "win" was to no longer have to pay solar customers directly for excess power (this wasn't requested by Idaho Power, but was a concession by the IPUC). Similarly, the Washington Post story tells of similar utility defeats in conservative states:
"...Most of the (utility supported) bills that have been considered so far have been either rejected or vetoed, with the most-striking defeats coming in Republican strongholds, such as Indiana and Utah. There, anti-solar legislation came under a surprisingly fierce attack from free-market conservatives and even evangelical groups, many of which have installed solar panels on their churches.
“Conservatives support solar — they support it even more than progressives do,” said Bryan Miller, co-chairman of the Alliance for Solar Choice and a vice president of public policy for Sunrun, a California solar provider. “It’s about competition in its most basic form. The idea that you should be forced to buy power from a state-sponsored monopoly and not have an option is about the least conservative thing you can imagine...”
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