The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is preparing to reconsider the credit rooftop solar consumers receive for the excess energy they produce, and the battle between utilities and the solar industry is in full swing.
California’s three major investor-owner utilities, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), San Diego Gas & Electric Company (SDG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE) submitted a joint proposal to the CPUC on March 15 to alter the state’s net-metering plan and trigger monthly charges for solar customers. The utilities assert that electricity customers without solar systems pay more annually in their electricity bills to “subsidize” rooftop solar customers. To remedy this, the utilities propose adding a monthly grid charge “to ensure solar customers are appropriately contributing to costs for maintaining, operating and improving the grid, and for statewide public purpose programs, such as energy efficiency or programs for lower-income customers,” as well as a monthly customer charge “to pay for costs related to customer service and support such as call center costs, metering and other services benefitting all customers.”
The solar industry stands in firm opposition to utility claims and is asking Gov. Gavin Newsom to expand net metering instead of scrapping it. The industry campaign “Save California Solar” says utilities are only against net metering because it “disrupts the utility monopoly and hurts their profits by allowing renters, schools, homeowners, farmers and others to use the sun for their own energy needs and to share it with their neighbors in exchange for a bill credit.”
CALSSA, the Solar Rights Alliance and the Benenson Strategy Group recently conducted a poll of California voters that found the majority support net metering and want to encourage more rooftop solar power in California.
“California is a solar state thanks to overwhelming support from voters,” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director, CALSSA, in a press release. “Voters want California to actively expand and encourage rooftop solar, not allow utilities to undermine consumer choice.”
Merced Irrigation District charge $65/month for solar panel fee. It is ridiculously high and discouraging people away from clean energy. The likely results:
Existing solar users may have trouble selling their homes.
Very few people will adopt solar in Merced going forward.
Not just that, there is a cap on how much you can produce. This just shows that the these utility companies are above the law just like any other third world countries. I was planning to go Solar myself, but looking at the $65 fee I have dropped this plan for now. Hope the governments take some notice of this.
I’m currently in the solar industry and usually have 3 appointments a day 6 days a week. What I see is that my customers pay about half of what they would pay to PGE. We completely get rid of their PGE bill other than a $10 connection fee saving customers thousand a year. No more rate increases while increasing the value of their home. If anyone were to pay more for solar than they would to their electric company that just means you did business with a very sketchy person or company and should have done your research. This is very sad to see especially from my end where I know how much solar actually helps people here in the state of California.
James, welcome to the world of solar. The disparity isn’t that great, sdge charges from $0.32 to $0.39 a kWh and they buy it back at around $.07 to $0.10 a kWh. But it’s still a scam. They threaten us with brown outs and charge us more for excessive use with tier programs and TOU programs complaining that there isn’t enough electricity to go around but then want to punish us for supplying our own
6 months out of the year I produce a surplus. The other six I don’t. At the end of the year I produce about the same as I use. This month I only got $.06 back for the surplus. The months I don’t have a surplus I pay in the hundreds. So I still have a huge $367 payment to pay at the end of 12 months. So after getting solar, I am paying well over $50 extra a month on average. It was a waste of money to go solar.
I have no problem paying to use the grid. We already pay bond charges, and non by-passable charges. I’d even pay a $10 fee a month for the grid. They get to pocket all the extra energy I produce.
The months you don’t overproduce you pay in the hundreds? You are paying $50 more a month? That makes no sense whatsoever. The disparity between winter and summer generation is not that great that you are over producing in summer months but paying 100s in winter. That just doesn’t make sense unless your usage goes way up in winter and even then solar is still cheaper than the grid unless you way overpaid.
Hi Kelsey, thanks for bringing this ploy by the power companies to our attention. We all need to get the word out that this not OK, and hopefully prevent it from happening.
Something else that should be mentioned, is that residential customers buy power from SDG&E at around $20 per kilowatt hour, but if our solar puts power INTO the grid, SDG&E pays us about $2 a kilowatt hour, a slight difference! What a bunch of scammers.
With my new system (under construction) most of the excess power will go to charging a very large battery array, with as little as possible going to SDG&E, unless they change their policy.