Why Is Solar The Bad Guy In CPUC’s Report?

Hey, have you heard about that exhaustive net metering study recently released by the California Public Utilities Commission? Well, you can forget about it. All 319 pages (PDF), and probably the money it cost to fund and write them too.

If you missed its well-circulated headlines, which were alarming, then you didn’t see California’s public energy powerbrokers arguing that utilities customers will be on the hook for a cool billion dollars per year by 2020, all because rooftop solar adopters are decoupling from the grid and generating clean energy at home. It’s a bold claim and a startling number.

But both are wrong.

“This study is about the utilities finding ways to undermine net metering as a policy,” VoteSolar policy advocate Susannah Churchill explained in an interview. (Churchill’s more detailed deconstruction can be read here.) “Utilities helped shape the study methodology to deliver an outcome that supports their argument that net metered solar customers are costing more than they’re paying, which is false. This is the utilities defending their monopoly against a disruptive new distributed model.”

The utilities are crying about cents precisely because net metering’s model makes sense, for power generation and consumption. Home solar users create their own energy and take pressure off of an overstressed, obsolete grid, thanks to climate change’s increasingly expensive extremes. They pay their way, feed excess energy back to the grid, and a viral renewable energy infrastructure sprouts nationwide. One obvious party losing political capital and market share in that green scenario is the utilities monopoly. Hence, the CPUC’s study, which is an equally obvious cry for help.

“There are numerous flaws to the study,” Solar Energy Industries Association VP of communications Ken Johnson explained. “Most notably the inclusion of on-site consumption of solar energy as a program cost. The impact of buying less electricity due to on-site consumption is no different than turning off a light or installing a more efficient appliance. The study appears to recognize this flaw by stating that ‘[T]he all generation scenario included in the attached report likely overestimates the costs that are directly associated with NEM.’”

“The study also only considers short-term values for net metered systems,” Johnson added. “When, in fact, these are systems with lifecycles of more than 20 years, creating considerable long-term savings for the utility.”

The state of California’s long-term renewable power future is the crucial takeaway of the CPUC’s report, yet because of the recent passage of AB 327, the CPUC report is already obsolete. How’s that for enviro irony?

“The passage of AB 327 will usher in a process for new residential rate design components and structures,” Johnson explained. “The cost impacts of the NEM Program, as the study recognizes, is a function of rate design. As a result, any changes to residential rates in the future will render this analysis obsolete.”

Unlike, to be clear, rooftop solar generation, whose net metering will create a smart grid with resilience to withstand climate change’s destabilized new normal. A more important study for California utilities ratepayers to read is the more exhaustive report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warns that we need to, like yesterday, dramatically decrease carbon output to avoid a dystopian future for our children that, in its more likely extremes, could reside outside the bounds of human experience.

Think about that the next time the utilities monopoly asks you to pay it more, for anything.

“Utility pushback is happening because we’ve reached a critical clean energy tipping point,” Churchill told SolarEnergy.Net. “Rooftop solar has become a real, affordable, widespread option for California energy consumers. For the first time in 100 years, customer demand is driving large-scale change in our energy marketplace. It’s exciting! There are traditional powers-that-be who would rather not see this change happen, but we’re confident that rooftop solar is here to stay. Utilities should be finding ways to innovate and serve their customers rather than standing in the way of progress.”

This article appeared at Solar Energy