EGN NEWS DESK
Over the previous three years, an unusually broad coalition has come collectively to champion a new approach to finance and construct community-solar-and-battery tasks in California. It consists of photo voltaic corporations, environmental justice activists, client advocates, labor unions, farmers, homebuilder trade teams, and each Democratic and Republican state lawmakers — a uncommon occasion of harmony in a state riven by conflicts over rooftop photo voltaic and utility coverage.
Supporters say the plan, generally known as the Net Value Billing Tariff (NVBT), might allow the constructing of as much as 8 gigawatts of community-solar-battery tasks over the approaching many years, all of which might be related to low-voltage energy grids that promote low-cost energy to subscribing households, companies, and organizations.
But on Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 3–1 to reject the coalition’s plan. Instead, it ordered the state’s main utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric — to restructure a variety of long-running distributed photo voltaic packages which have didn’t spur virtually any tasks within the decade or extra they’ve been in place.
Critics warn that these utility-backed plans gained’t create a workable pathway to increasing a class of solar energy that has change into a main driver of fresh power development in different states and a key focus of the Biden administration’s power fairness coverage.
They additionally concern that the CPUC’s reliance on state and federal subsidies to spice up the financial competitiveness of those current failed community-solar fashions would possibly jeopardize the state’s skill to even qualify for the $250 million in community-solar funding that the Biden administration has provisionally supplied it.
“We are dishonest ourselves out of the advantages of neighborhood photo voltaic and storage with this choice,” stated Derek Chernow, western regional director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA), which represents corporations and nonprofits that advocate for neighborhood photo voltaic.
Since CCSA devised the NVBT in 2021, it has gained “unprecedented bipartisan broad-based assist from stakeholders that don’t usually come collectively and see eye to eye on clear power points,” Chernow stated.
The plan the CPUC cobbled collectively from utility proposals, against this, lacks “any assist — broad-based or in any other case,” he stated.
An outpouring of rage from community-solar supporters
CPUC President Alice Busching Reynolds defended the choice to reject the NVBT at Thursday’s assembly. She pointed to different current California packages that help low-income households and multifamily buildings in acquiring photo voltaic, and famous that the CPUC’s plan will broaden an current community-solar program that gives low-income prospects a 20 p.c discount on their payments.
She stated that the NVBT program was too pricey a approach to convey new solar-and-battery sources to the state, in comparison with the large-scale power tasks being contracted by utilities and neighborhood power suppliers.
“California is basically at an inflection level the place we should use essentially the most cost-effective clear power sources that present reliability worth to the system,” Reynolds stated.
Backers of the NVBT maintain a very totally different view. Since March, when the CPUC unveiled its proposed choice to reject the NVBT, there was broad public outcry. Letters protesting its proposal have flooded into the CPUC from community-solar advocacy teams, environmental organizations, business actual property corporations, farmworker advocacy teams, farming trade associations, and Republican and Democratic state lawmakers.
The CPUC issued a revised proposed choice on Tuesday, forward of Thursday’s vote, which differed little from the preliminary March proposal. The solely main change was the elimination of a authorized argument claiming that the NVBT violates federal legislation — a idea that was met with widespread incredulity and was rebutted by three former chairs of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in letters to the CPUC.
The Utility Reform Network (TURN), a nonprofit that advocates for utility prospects, has warned that the CPUC’s community-solar plan will “favor giant utility corporations by guaranteeing photo voltaic program growth prices are incurred by residence builders, renters, and different photo voltaic neighborhood contributors,” whereas failing to supply lower-income prospects a likelihood to scale back their fast-rising electrical payments by subscribing to lower-cost photo voltaic energy.
And 20 lawmakers who supported AB 2316, the 2022 state legislation that ordered the CPUC to create an equitable and inexpensive community-solar program, have advised the CPUC that its failure to assist the NVBT might imply the state falls quick on its clear power and local weather targets.
“Transmission-scale renewables face important siting, interconnection, and transmission challenges,” creating the chance that utilities gained’t be capable of hit the aggressive clear power procurement targets set by the CPUC, the lawmakers wrote in a September letter. “Small, distribution-sited neighborhood photo voltaic and storage tasks have unbelievable potential as we modernize and broaden our transmission system.”
Speaking at Thursday’s CPUC assembly, Assemblymember Chris Ward, the San Diego Democrat who authored AB 2316, known as the CPUC’s pending choice “a dismissal of California’s want for clear, dependable, and inexpensive power.”
“After agreeing with almost all stakeholders that the state’s current neighborhood renewables packages will not be workable, the proposed choice has opted to repeat these errors by creating an outdated, commercially unworkable program that may end in no new renewable power tasks or power storage,” he advised the CPUC commissioners, all of whom have been appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom (D).
Why California lags on neighborhood photo voltaic
California leads the nation in rooftop photo voltaic and stands behind solely Texas in utility-scale solar-and-battery farms. But its community-solar tasks make up lower than 1 p.c of the 6.2 gigawatts of neighborhood photo voltaic which have been constructed within the 22 states with insurance policies that assist this type of photo voltaic growth. That’s largely as a result of the community-solar packages which have existed in California for greater than a decade have been unattractive to photo voltaic builders, financiers, and would-be subscribers.
The earliest packages, which focused business and industrial prospects, charged a premium over commonplace utility charges, making them undesirable. Later packages created for lower-income and deprived communities have been stymied by limits on what number of megawatts’ value of tasks may be constructed and the scale of particular person tasks, in addition to onerous guidelines that require tasks serving deprived communities to be positioned inside 5 miles of these prospects.
Designed to take away these boundaries, the NVBT was modeled on a community-solar program created by New York that has led to greater than 2 gigawatts of tasks in that state. That construction permits community-solar tasks to earn regular revenues from the facility they produce primarily based on a advanced calculation of advantages. Those advantages embrace serving to to fulfill state local weather targets, bringing clear energy to underserved prospects, and, importantly, serving to to assist utility grids by, for instance, avoiding the price of securing energy throughout the uncommon hours of the 12 months when utility grids face the best stress.
Unlike California’s current community-solar packages, the NVBT would incentivize tasks so as to add batteries to retailer and shift solar energy from when it’s in surplus to when it’s most wanted on the grid.
And beneath AB 2316, any new community-solar-and-battery tasks in California should present no less than 51 p.c of their capability to serve low-income residential prospects at costs that scale back their electrical energy payments — a useful possibility for low-income households, renters, and different utility prospects that may’t entry rooftop photo voltaic.
“We’re very concerned with seeing renters have entry to community-solar tasks,” stated Matt Freedman, a employees lawyer at TURN. “And we’re excited that the California statute requires no less than 51 p.c of the advantages go to low-income prospects. We assume that’s revolutionary — that we’re placing low-income prospects first in line to obtain the advantages of those tasks.”
