EGN NEWS DESK
California slashed the worth of rooftop photo voltaic for purchasers of its three largest utilities final 12 months — and installations of residential photo voltaic methods within the state have fallen to near-three-year lows since then.
But drawing agency conclusions about how the controversial shift in net-metering coverage will form California’s rooftop photo voltaic market over the long run — and have an effect on the state’s grid-decarbonization and energy-equity targets — is a lot extra difficult than it appears.
Just ask Galen Barbose, employees scientist on the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Last week, he launched a report compiling the most recent knowledge on California’s residential rooftop photo voltaic market, together with the info level displaying a marked drop in installations within the first three months of 2024.
Barbose additionally scrutinized battery-storage attachment charges, the distribution of photo voltaic adopters by geography and revenue, third-party possession, system sizing, pricing, and installer market share. The purpose was to disclose “preliminary empirical insights into how the market has advanced over the previous 12 months, confirming some expectations whereas additionally revealing a number of putting surprises,” he wrote within the report.
But “we now have to watch out about not overreaching from the info over this previous 12 months,” Barbose confused in an interview with Canary Media — as a result of “this was a unusual final 12 months.”
A 12 months of twists and turns for California rooftop photo voltaic
There was a large rush to use for and safe interconnections of rooftop photo voltaic methods to the grid within the runup to April 2023, when the legacy net-metering (NEM) tariff was formally changed by the “net-billing tariff” (NBT) that the California Public Utilities Commission imposed on prospects of Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric.
That prompted installations to spike to file ranges all through the spring and summer season of 2023, as all the initiatives accepted underneath the previous tariff acquired underway. Installations underneath the legacy tariff continued even by the primary quarter of 2024, based on LBNL knowledge.
Backers of the CPUC’s choice to scale back compensation for rooftop photo voltaic argue that California’s photo voltaic market stays strong — simply not as overheated as through the historic soar in installations final 12 months.
“[T]he far more beneficiant compensation for methods put in earlier than April 15 drove a gold rush through the first three and a half months of 2023,” Severin Borenstein, head of the Energy Institute on the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a foe of the state’s earlier net-metering regime, wrote in a weblog submit final month. “Many of these early-2023 consumers would most definitely have been later-2023 consumers have been it not for the push to put in earlier than April 15 and lock in NEM 2.0 guidelines.”
But there’s additionally proof that the far much less profitable economics of the net-billing tariff have severely crimped ongoing prospects for California rooftop photo voltaic installers. The fee of installations underneath the brand new net-billing tariff have lagged historic rooftop photo voltaic set up charges, averaging about 8,000 per 30 days over the primary quarter of 2024. That’s a decrease fee of rooftop photo voltaic set up than in any month underneath internet metering going again to May 2020, based on LBNL’s knowledge.
In November, the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA) reported that month-to-month photo voltaic gross sales — a extra forward-looking knowledge level than installations — fell by 77 to 85 p.c between May and September of final 12 months in comparison with the identical months in 2022.
The commerce group additionally warned that photo voltaic installers anticipated to have to put off almost 17,000 staff, or about 22 p.c of the state’s rooftop photo voltaic workforce — a degree of job losses “harking back to the Great Depression,” based on Bernadette Del Chiaro, CALSSA’s govt director.
LBNL’s report consists of forward-looking knowledge that backs up CALSSA’s dire forecasts. One such metric is “quote exercise” — requests for worth quotes from prospects excited about putting in photo voltaic.
Quote requests from on-line photo voltaic market EnergySage spiked earlier than April 2023, then fell to about 60 p.c of historic ranges from 2019 to 2021. “While the EnergySage market might not completely characterize the California market total, the truth that quote exercise has not meaningfully picked again up is maybe the clearest sign but of a substantial and sustained market contraction,” Barbose wrote in his report.
LBNL additionally highlighted knowledge that seems to assist a key concern of CALSSA — that the brand new net-billing regime is harming smaller photo voltaic installers. According to the report, solely half of the roughly 2,500 firms that put in at the very least one photo voltaic system prior to now 12 months have accomplished a system underneath the brand new tariff construction.
