By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: Controversial Kentucky House Bill (HB) 227 passed the House by four votes yesterday. Now the bill moves on to the Senate. It would

• Reduce the amount future Kentucky solar customers are paid under its net metering plan, based on
• A mythical cost shift from solar users to non-solar users (or, as I refer to it, the “lie that won’t die.”

SolarWakeup’s View:  This damn thing again?

If you’ve been paying any attention to the broader solar news cycle, you’ve heard of Kentucky HB 227. It’s the latest attempt by utilities to kill an emerging solar industry before it can compete with their “God-given” (and state endorsed) monopoly.

What are utilities telling the legislators to get them to support this bill? It’s the old “cost-shift” nonsense—a zombie lie that utilities across the country are telling state legislators to scare them into voting for bills like this.

The argument goes like this: Retail-rate net metering, a program under which solar customers are reimbursed for the excess electricity they produce, pushes extra costs on to non-solar customers because solar customers aren’t paying for grid upkeep.

What the utilities don’t want you to notice, of course, is that solar customers also relieve congestion on the grid during peak production times, which saves strain on the transmission and distribution lines. So while they may not be paying for upkeep directly, solar production saves wear and tear, which ultimately saves the utility money in the form of repair costs.

You’re welcome.

I should note here that while there is a minor cost-shift, a study by the Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory indicates the shift only happens when a state passes the 10% mark for solar-electricity generation. You know how much solar Kentucky produces from solar?

0.05%, according to the latest numbers from the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Now I’m lousy at math, but that looks nothing like 10% to me. This bill is just a cash grab by utilities, whose only interest is keeping their profits high.

Here, have a Kentucky legislator demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how solar works. Courtesy of the Associated Press:

“I don’t think anyone out there is forced to buy your excess inventory or excess product and pay you a price that will generate a profit for you. Yet that is what we are really doing,” said [Republican Representative] Jim Gooch, the nincompoop who sponsored the bill.

OK, I’ll admit it: The AP reporter did not call Gooch a nincompoop. But I know that’s what he meant.

Now, the legislation isn’t as bad as it was last week, when the geniuses in the Kentucky legislature were going to apply the new rules to current solar customers. They have now decided to grandfather them under the old rules for 25 years. Small victories, I guess.

The bill also ends the traditional practice of monthly netting and moves to instantaneous netting. Here, have the reaction to that little gem by Kentucky solar installers Matt Partymiller and Steve Ricketts of Solar Energy Solutions, courtesy of their Facebook page (edited only for grammar and clarity):

INSTANTANEOUS NET METERING, a poisoned pill buried in the revised legislation [that] was strongly objected to by many on both sides of the House means what you currently produce from your array while you are at work for use even a hour later or in the evening at 1:1 rates is not yours any more. What you produce is instantaneously netted against what you consume by the minute. The difference belongs to the utilities and is suddenly worth 70% less. Banking solar inside a day, for a cloudy day tomorrow, from month to month or from summer for winter use is dead. HB 227 has been a Trojan horse for this simple ‘end game’ legislative paragraph.

Raise your hand if you think the utilities will pass the savings they will receive under the new netting rules on to their non-solar customers (oh, put your hands down….you and I both know better)?

Fortunately, there’s one more chance to kill the the bill in the Kentucky Senate. So for all our Kentucky readers, get on the phones and tell your Senators and tell them this bill is bad for Kentucky.

There’s still time to show the rest of the country that Kentucky is ready to move beyond its coal-bound past and into a solar future. Let’s make sure that happens.

More

Kentucky House OKs Likely Less Credits for Solar Customers (AP)

Solar customers still get the shaft in latest version of bill pushed by utilities (Lexington Herald-Leader)

Rural Kentuckians support solar (The Sentinel Echo)

A hotly contested bill to curb solar power rises from the dead and passes Kentucky House (Louisville Courier-Journal)

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: The Motley Fool, a stock analysis website, wrote an article with the headline – Solar-Manufacturing Renaissance Already Falling Apart, which then went on to

• Express surprise that the Trump 30% tariffs on solar modules hasn’t had module companies flocking to the United States in droves.
• Come to the shocking (not shocking) conclusion that maybe the tariffs won’t drive an American module renaissance, let alone a manufacturing renaissance.

SolarWakeup’s View:  There’s a larger question here, sparked by the odd headline: Can something fall apart if it was almost entirely mythical to begin with?

When Trump imposed these nonsensical tariffs at the behest of two foreign-owned companies (I have my blood pressure meds at hand this time), there were some in the solar industry who, all evidence to the contrary, insisted this would do just what the Motley Fool is surprised isn’t happening: Bring back solar module manufacturing jobs.

Clearly, that has not happened.

Having had it up to here with an argument that was just increasingly ringing false, I did back-of-an-envelope calculations about five weeks ago comparing concrete job losses and announced job gains, and posted the results on Twitter. Here’s what I concluded;

-9,800 + 829 jobs = -8,971. That’s still a

 huge net loss, and this isn’t the end of the job losses by any stretch (I shudder at what next year’s numbers will look like). Now if we don’t lose another job in the downstream industry and thousands of manufacturing jobs come, I’ll eat crow.

I’m not exactly getting prepping my grill or getting my seasonings ready.

It should also be noted that my figuring assumed JinkoSolar would actually fully staff its new headquarters in Jacksonville, which it has since announced will be barely half of the jobs in initially promised.

So what lesson have we learned here? We’ve learned that tariffs don’t work, so you shouldn’t do them for any companies, let alone two that don’t have the best interests of the United States at heart.

Someone should forward this to Trump before he severely damages the aluminum and steel industries, too (and thereby further damage solar, by the way).

Oh, and tell The Motley Fool guys to stop fooling around.

More 

Solar-Manufacturing Renaissance Already Falling Apart

My Job Math (Via Twitter)

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: If you’ve ever doubted whether utilities fear that solar will put them out of business, read Sammy Roth’s excellent report in The Desert Sun, in which he

• Discovered that a public utility had an “oppo research” department to find dirt on the owner of Renova Energy, an outspoken critic of the utility, and
• Used ratepayer money to hire private investigators for this fishing expedition.

SolarWakeup’s View: Let’s get this out of the way first: If you’re not reading Sammy Roth in The Desert Sun regularly, what the heck is wrong with you? He covers solar in California as well as anyone I know, so bookmark him.

But even I was gobsmacked by his story yesterday, in which he reported that public utility Imperial Irrigation District (a utility about which Sammy wrote a superb series exposing corruption in its ranks – go figure) hired private investigators, using ratepayer funds, to investigate Vincent Battaglia, CEO of Renova Energy, the largest rooftop solar installer in IID’s service area.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Battaglia’s “sin” was to be critical of the utility for abruptly shutting down its net metering program, which of course made solar less attractive to homeowners. In other words, IID launched a direct attack on Battaglia’s – and other solar installers’ – livelihoods.

So…a public utility took the extraordinary step of trying to destroy Battaglia and his company with a concerted effort to dig up dirt on him – using public funds.

It takes a lot to shock me anymore, but this story took my breath away – and it is absolutely worth reading in its entirety (the link is below). But here’s my takeaway: The solar industry has the utilities running scared.

I’m sure many of you in our audience are saying, “Nice insight, Sherlock.” And I admit that’s probably obvious to most of us in the industry. But what’s different here is that the information is now out in the public, and if we can capitalize on this incident to mobilize the public on our side, that will be an enormous boon to the spread of solar to more places. Sammy deserves our thanks for exposing it – keep it up, my friend.

(Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, the private investigators hired by IID was the Baker Street Group, a tribute to the iconic detective’s residence at 221B Baker Street in London.)

(Oh, and if you’re interested in reading about the widespread corruption at IID, I can’t recommend Sammy’s series enough. There’s a link to it in the story below.)

More 

Public agency paid private investigators for ‘opposition research’ on local solar company

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

What Happened: At 10:55 am, Trump Administration officials told assembled reporters that the intelligence community

• Has determined Russia is behind attempts to penetrate our electricity grid and have done so successfully.
• The U.S. is sending an alert to energy companies to raise threat awareness.

SolarWakeup’s View:  It’s not enough that the Russians may have hacked our elections in 2016. Now they’re trying to take down our electrical grid.

The Associated Press first reported the story and is slowly being picked up by other media outlets. The information is scarce at this point, but according to national security officials that spoke to the AP anonymously, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and other intelligence agencies have identified the Russians as being behind a series of hacks into the control centers of our electrical grid.

Officials told the AP the hacks were doing what they called “network reconnaissance” and have been rebuffed. They also told the AP they were sending out warnings to all energy companies to be on the lookout for further hacks.

But if history is any guide, now that the Russians have figured out how to do this, they will be back.

The issue of grid security and its vulnerability to cyberattacks has been in the news for a while now, and numerous reports have indicated the risk is rising. The administration’s announcement today shouldn’t surprise anyone, but it should terrify all Americans.

The chaos the Russians could wreak by causing blackouts around the country would affect nearly every single one of us, given how dependent we are on electricity to live our lives every day. Unfortunately – and frighteningly – these hacks show how woefully underprepared the United States is to defend itself against these attacks.

As we’ve discussed multiple times recently, the U.S. grid is not designed to handle 21st century electricity generation and, apparently, is unable to handle this new type of warfare – one our biggest international threat has gotten quite good at fighting.

That’s why solar is so important to our national security. As I mentioned earlier this week, a distributed generation-ready grid would make it much more difficult for centralized attacks like this to take out all the electricity production around the country at once.

And while I understand that utilities are scared of this next evolution because it could potentially put them out of business, solar is the best distributed generation technology in the electricity game.

The Trump Administration’s comments today are incredibly troubling, and it’s time we got serious about grid security. I maintain that solar is the answer to the question: How do we keep the Russians (or anyone else, for that matter) from interfering in our electrical grid?