A partly sunny compromise on solar energy legislation, hammered out after five months of negotiation, moved favorably Wednesday afternoon from the Massachusetts House to the Senate, where action is scheduled for Thursday.
While some renewable energy advocates support the compromise that the House approved overwhemingly, they caution it’s a short-term fix.
The bill raises caps by 3 percent on the state’s net metering program, allowing homeowners, solar developers and municipal governments to sell excess power they generate back to the electrical grid for credit on their bills.
The compromise between House and Senate leaders to raise the cap on the amount of solar energy that public and private customers can sell back to the grid by 3 percent, also would decrease the value of the incentives for new projects.
It would also allow utility companies to petition the Department of Public Utilities to charge solar-producing customers a minimum bill to cover the cost of maintaining electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure.
Sen. Benjamin Downing, D-Pittsfield, who filed the original solar legislation in the Senate last July, was part of the conference committee negotiations, which he termed “insanely frustrating, to put it mildly.”
“It’s a compromise. It’s not the bill I would have written,” he said. “Given where the bill was that the governor filed, and what the governor was willing to accept … and given what the House passed in November, it’s a significant improvement from both of those.”
Downing said the 3 percent increase on the cap is “critically important” and preserves the full retail rate reimbursement for municipal and public entities. It also requires the Republican Baker administration to establish a new solar incentive program, now that the Solar Renewable Energy Credit (SREC) II program has expired. The program gave tax credits to subsidize the cost of installing solar arrays.
He said a reduction in the overall credit, though not optimum, was a compromise, given that the House called for reducing the credit by more than 70 percent.
“This is not good solar policy and certainly not long -range good solar policy,” said Claire Chang of the Greenfield Solar Store, who has also been vice president of the Mass. Solar advocacy group promoting a lifting of the cap altogether.
“Three percent is only enough to get the projects on the wait-list in National Grid/NStar (territory) built,” she said. “No new projects waiting in the wings will be able to be built. We will hit the cap right away, and the solar industry will be stymied again.”
Chang also warned that the “market” net-metering credit rate would kill low-income and community solar projects, and that only municipal projects will get the full retail rate, which is more attractive.
The Massachusetts Sierra Club urged that the compromise be defeated and called the minimum charge that utilities could file with the DPU for, with no ceiling, “a bait-and-switch for solar customers” that must be fixed.
“While appreciative of all the time and effort put into crafting this bill, we think the negatives clearly outweigh the positives, particularly in terms of who wins and who loses,” the environmental group said in a statement.
Environmental League of Massachusetts President George Bachrach, on the other hand, said his group is urging lawmakers to approve the bill, but he cautioned the new cap will likely be reached before the end of the year and will have to be raised again.
Utilities have said they’re concerned about lifting existing caps, arguing that customers without solar panels are helping foot the bill for those who use net metering. Solar customers, they say, are not helping cover the cost of the wires and poles they are using to send power back to the grid.
Another sticking point in the debate has been the reimbursement rate utilities must offer those who ship excess solar energy to the grid.
The House had pushed for solar developers to be compensated at the lower wholesale rate while the Senate favored a higher retail rate pushed by renewable energy activists. Net metering inaction has halted construction of more than 551 solar projects across Massachusetts — including eight Franklin County projects with a total capacity of 1.4 megawatts. This would be enough to power 224 homes, at a value of $3.6 million, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, an advocacy group that hailed the compromise as a way to continue providing access to “clean, affordable, reliable renewable power.”
Lawmakers have been debating the future of solar incentives for months as clean energy and solar industry advocates have ramped up the pressure to strike a deal, warning that delays were freezing an industry that employs thousands in Massachusetts.
Last year, the average retail reimbursement was around 17 cents per kilowatt hour.
Downing said he has no idea how the governor will react when he is given the measure to sign.
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