Solar systems at a farm in Versailles, Kentucky

From an Article by Dan Gearino, Inside Clean Energy, May 20, 2021

The people in Kentucky’s small rooftop solar industry are used to fighting for their livelihoods against utilities, but they aren’t used to winning. So a ruling last week from the Kentucky Public Service Commission was a surprise and a relief. The commission rejected a proposal from the utility Kentucky Power that would have gutted net metering, the policy that says rooftop solar owners can sell their excess electricity back to the grid.

Kentucky Power customers with rooftop solar have long been able to get the full retail rate for excess electricity. The utility had proposed to cut that rate to 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. The commission ruled that the rate will be 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, much more than the utility wanted and only a little bit less than the current level.

“My initial reaction to this decision was one of relief,” said Matt Partymiller, general manager at Solar Energy Solutions, a solar installer in Lexington and president of the Kentucky Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. But, he added, “that feeling of relief was quickly followed by the realization that this part of a long continued effort that we’re going to have to be fighting against.”

Kentucky’s utilities and many of its elected officials have worked to stop rooftop solar from gaining a foothold, arguing that solar customers do not pay an appropriate share of the costs of maintaining the grid, even though the state has very little rooftop solar. Kentucky ranked 40th in the country in electricity generation from small solar systems in 2020, right behind Arkansas and ahead of Kansas, according to the Energy Information Administration.

A 2019 law, signed by then-Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, said that new solar customers would no longer get the full retail price for excess electricity. Utilities would need to submit proposals for the new rates to the commission. Kentucky Power, a subsidiary of Ohio-based American Electric Power, was the first major utility to propose new rates, making this case the commission’s first opportunity to show how it would interpret the law.

In its ruling, the commission disagreed with Kentucky Power’s arguments and found that the utility was undercounting the financial benefits of rooftop solar for the grid. Also, the commission called attention to how small the problem was that Kentucky Power was trying to solve, noting that there were only 46 households benefiting from net metering in the utility’s territory in 2020.

The utility said those households were getting an unfair subsidy from net metering that added up to about $40,000 per year. The commission responded by saying that this “purported subsidy” amounts to only 24 cents per year for each of the utility’s non-solar customers and is a small fraction of other subsidies embedded in Kentucky Power’s rates.

“It was Kentucky Power’s intent to provide a fair and balanced approach for all customers, not just the net metering customers,” said Cindy Wiseman, a Kentucky Power spokeswoman, in an email in response to a question about the commission’s ruling. “Our regulatory team is still reviewing the order and discussing it to gain a better understanding of the path forward.”

The three-member commission has one member who was appointed by Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, and two who were appointed by Bevin.

Partymiller, whose company has about 35 employees and may be the largest solar installer in the state, was careful not to overstate the significance of the decision, because it just covers one utility, and the commission still needs to rule on other utilities’ plans.

He said the rooftop solar industry has some big challenges in Kentucky even with this ruling. One of the biggest is a law that sets a cap on how much customer-owned electricity generation can come online before there is a drastic cut in net metering rates. This law, which predates the 2019 net metering legislation, will kick in when rooftop solar and other customer-owned resources hit 1 percent of peak electricity demand in each utility’s territory.

Kentucky Power probably is years away from hitting the 1 percent cap, but the mere existence of the cap is a problem because it puts a ceiling on growth for solar companies, Partymiller said.

He said he would like to see the Legislature and governor increase the cap or repeal it, but he also knows that there is a long fight ahead to make that happen.

I have read many decisions by state regulatory commissions about net metering, and the Kentucky ruling stands out for the methodical way it dismantles some common arguments made against rooftop solar about how non-solar customers are heavily subsidizing customers with solar. I would not be surprised to see the Kentucky commission’s findings cited in other states to argue for the benefits of rooftop solar, something I was not expecting, but there it is.

Solar panels are easy to install and supplement our electricity supply

From Appalachian Voices, outreach@appvoices.org, May 30, 2020

Dear Friends and Concerned Citizens:

A special interest group with ties to monopoly utilities filed a petition with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to try to end a fundamental policy that allows solar and wind owners to earn fair credit for the surplus electricity they produce. The deadline to stop this attack is in just a few weeks.

The Southern Environmental Law Center is representing Appalachian Voices at the FERC to help fight against this petition. But we need your input to tell the story of the negative impacts that would occur if FERC puts an end to net metering.

Millions of families and businesses have invested tens of billions of their own dollars in clean energy. As FERC makes decisions about the future of clean energy, it needs to hear from families and businesses in Appalachia and beyond about the negative impacts ending the net metering policy would have.

Clean Energy Survey > Appalachian Voices

Fill out our quick survey to help us protect clean energy!

For a clean energy future,

Chelsea Barnes,
New Economy Program Manager

Gov. Tomblin can stop attempt to strangle W.Va. solar industry

Letter to the Editor by Bill Howley, Charleston Gazette, March 8, 2015

Things started well. When the West Virginia Legislature repealed the 2009 Alternative and Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard law early in this year’s session, legislators wisely kept the part of the law that authorized the West Virginia Public Service Commission to regulate net metering for retail electric customers who send electricity back through their electric meters.

Net metering is a system used in 44 U.S states that allows small scale solar power producers to get a one-for-one credit for the kilowatt hours they produce to offset electricity they use from a power company. Since 2009, more than 600 residential and small business customers in West Virginia have invested millions of dollars in new electricity generation with the understanding that net metering would be there for the 30-year lives of their systems.

After the Legislature passed House Bill 2001, repealing the 2009 AREPS law and preserving net metering, a bipartisan group of delegates introduced HB2201 to reinsert a definition of net metering into the new net metering law created by HB2001. That’s when the problems started.

Strangely, HB2201 did not use the definition of net metering found in either the Alternative and Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard law or the current Public Service Commission rules. Instead, HB2201, by changing an “or” to an “and,” eliminated a whole category of West Virginia citizens from having access to net metering. Many observers suspected that lobbyists from AEP and FirstEnergy, the two Ohio-based holding companies that control our state’s electrical system, started manipulating HB2201 even before the bill was introduced.

And things got worse from there. Each time solar advocates pushed legislators to change HB2201, power company lobbyists inserted more and more attacks on net metering. Just three years ago, both AEP and FirstEnergy agreed to net metering rules at the West Virginia Public Service Commission in a voluntary settlement. Now, with vague and misleading language about “cross-subsidization,” the power companies tried to get the Legislature to dictate new terms to solar power producers. The power companies also pushed many PSC net metering rules into law, removing control of net metering that was passed to the PSC in 2009, and reauthorized in the newly passed HB2001.

The result of all this meddling and manipulation is that HB2201 is now a mess that casts a cloud of regulatory uncertainty over business investment and innovation in West Virginia. Solar installers in West Virginia are already seeing current orders being canceled or postponed as customers fear for the future of their investments. Large installed projects, such as those as American Public University in Jefferson County or the Morgantown Transit Authority, are now looking at much longer payoff periods on their investments of taxpayer funds. Most disturbing of all, Yeager Airport’s planned project to invest $15 million to $20 million in the largest solar power array in the state may not happen.

HB2201, vetoed once by Gov. Tomblin, is back on his desk a second time. The bill is aimed straight at killing West Virginia’s small, but growing, solar power industry. This industry includes residential electric customers, installation companies and large institutions. HB2201 has already cost our state jobs and new business.

Gov. Tomblin simply cannot allow AEP and FirstEnergy, through the West Virginia Legislature, to dictate the direction of West Virginia’s energy future. He needs to veto HB2201 a second time to show that West Virginia means business when it comes to innovation and investment by West Virginians, for West Virginians.

>>> Bill Howley lives on a farm in Chloe, where he shares his net metered solar electricity with his neighbors and edits The Power Line, the View from Calhoun County, a blog about energy issues in West Virginia.