In a world where the climate-action mantra has shifted to all-electric everything, there are incredible opportunities for an electric utility; think of the new streams of income off just electric cars and buses. Even much-hated PGE in California now is advertising an electric fleet incentive program for trucks.
Idaho Power could be making tons of money by building their own solar and wind farms. Instead, they are spending their time on wresting small streams of pennies difference from residential and small commercial customers who have put solar on their roofs. There has been a proposed settlement in the Idaho Public Utilities case for solar net metering and there are still a few days left to comment on it.
As feared, most small commercial and residential solar panel owners will take the brunt of these changes in net metering starting in January 2020. Instead of being able to make more solar power one day than one uses (sending the rest to the grid), and keep the credit at your same retail rates for another day, you will now get compensated at a lower rate per kWh if you don’t use all the energy you generate that hour. And don’t even get me started with the calculations that are going to go into how that new lower rate is calculated.
“Net Hourlv Billing. At the end of each hour, consumption and exports within the hour will be netted and net hourly exports will be compensated at the Export Credit”. “Methodology to Determine the Export Credit Rate. The Export Credit Rate will be based on the value of exported energy from all solar photovoltaic (“PV”) customers in each class, and will be applicable to all distributed generation (“DG”) resources taking service under Schedule 6 and Schedule 8. Signing Parties recognize the exported energy value may be different for other DG resources. Parties retain the right to advocate for export credit rates specific to other DG resources in future proceedings. The methodology to determine the Export Credit Rate will be: 1. Avoided Energy Value. The energy value will be the two-year levelized energy-weighted average of the Demand Side Management (“DSM”) Altemate Cost obtained from the pricing periods set forth in the most recently acknowledged Integrated Resource Plan (“lRP”) calculated as the summation of the product of hourly energy exports and the DSM price divided by Total Annual Energy Exports for the class.”1
In the scheme of their entire generation portfolio, Idaho Power’s income from this difference is tiny, but they are going to create an accounting nightmare for themselves to track it all while creating hardship for those homeowners who scraped together the funds to put solar on their roofs. Maybe in order to change our utility’s culture to look for the opportunities in clean energy rather than seeing us as the enemy, we need to first look at changing the culture of our Public Utilities Commission, which tells this investor utility what it can do. www.utilitydive.com/news/3-state-commissions-upending-the-way-utilities-do-business/563949/.
Speaking of PGE, there have been more transmission-caused fires in both Northern and Southern California, more preemptive power outages for millions, more lost business, more lost homes, and many displaced families. We can take notes and prepare. www.cbsnews.com/news/after-pg-e-blackouts-california-homeowners-move-to-solar-and-batteries/.
Climate change is affecting not only California, but Idaho as well; we’re not immune to similar scenarios with our transmission grid.
If you’ve missed a column, they are all on my website at: https://tidwellcommissionercampaign.com.
1https://puc.idaho.gov/fileroom/cases/elec/IPC/IPCE1815/20191011Motion%20for%20Settlement%20Agreement.pdf