Duke Aims At Full Monopoly. Just after taking a victory lap for no longer allowing homeowners the ability to put solar on their homes, Duke Energy in South Carolina is giving homeowners that can’t install solar on their homes the ability to join their community solar projects. In this episode of up is down, Duke hopes that solar doesn’t work for people becomes a message that gets homeowners to stop trying to put solar on their homes. Folks in South Carolina, especially solar workers, should be on the phone all day long to their local news outlets and tell the real story, your jobs are on the line. The broader question about public opinion is something that was prompted by BNEF’s Jenny Chase’s tweet. I agree that we do our work but rarely talk about climate change in our work. A
What Michigan Could Have Been. Michigan was the manufacturing leader for solar and the ecosystem of raw materials about 10 years ago. Since then, it has essentially reversed on most of the policies and now is focused on destroying net metering and replace it with something that is nowhere near net metering. Quite the opposite this new policy would result in residential and distributed solar to essentially stop. Politicians should feel a political reality for this kind of policy and those running races should use the issue to make that decision be a bad one politically.
EV Benefits Everyone In Kansas City. KCP&L is making an interesting point about electric vehicles that have a funny similarity to the solar argument. I don’t disagree with KCP&L when they say that they should be able to rate base electric vehicle charging stations because it is a good thing for everyone including the utility shareholders by growing demand. The part that I find intriguing is that solar doesn’t get the same benefit when they argue about net metering and the benefit to all, instead arguing the cost-shift which isn’t real.  
Get Active And Win More. I am bringing this back up for discussion since it is relevant with this data point. Every single solar company should be doing legislative outreach at every level, including the local City and County level. In Riverside County, the utility didn’t want to increase net metering caps even when the County passed a ordinance to do so. Now a local company is helping the company put some pressure to enable the market to grow again which all started with local outreach. Job well done in this case. Are you doing any local outreach that I can highlight?
SEIA Feedback. Nice to see the outreach from many of you about the changes made in SEIA’s C-suite. The general consensus I agree with, why now and what happened. The trade cases and tariffs didn’t happen last week and it seems like an odd time to make the moves but we have to hope that the board has a strategy in mind to meet the strategic vision. As the changes at FERC enable a potential bailout for nuclear and coal plants, maybe the concept is to drive some victory for solar so that more distributed generation can be built at the same time to help the grid stability that FERC could be looking for. I look forward to seeing what’s next for Tom Kimbis and really hope that it is in solar, his voice and advocacy has been great for a long time and hope this continues.

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Yann

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

Last week during Intersolar North America, Duke Carolinas announced it had hit its 2% net metering cap in South Carolina for residential solar installations, meaning anyone that installs after August 1 will be compensated under less generous net metering rules. And low and behold, a week later, Duke Energy opens its first community solar farm in the state. Fancy that. I'm sure you can see my two minds fighting with themselves over here. On the one hand, I'm all about community solar. As someone whose house is not optimally oriented to have solar on my roof, I'm on the email every couple of months or so begging my mayor to start a community program in my home town (Hi Mayor Welo!). On the other hand, it's pretty convenient that the community solar program only starts when most South Carolinians within Duke's service area won't be ABLE to put solar on their roofs for full compensation. Here's a quotation from Kodwo Ghartey-Tagoe, state president for Duke Energy in South Carolina, about the "Shared Solar Program" (Duke South Carolina's community solar program) from the release announcing the program:

This is a great program for any customers who don't own their residence or are unable to put a solar facility on their property. We estimate that residential customers will earn back their initial payment in credits from the solar array in three years. Customers are not only saving on their electric bill, they are directly supporting a renewable energy future in South Carolina for generations to come.

Huh. "Unable to put a solar facility on their property." After the utility (and, in fairness, other utilities in the state) put the kibosh on raising the net metering cap a few months ago, thereby putting a lot of people in the position of being "unable to put a solar facility on their property" because it was no longer financially viable. Now, I'm not suggesting there's some great conspiracy here. It's actually a brilliant business decision, looked at from strictly that perspective. I just feel a bit sorry for the South Carolinians who are now at Duke's mercy when it comes to deciding from where they can buy their solar electricity. More: Duke region hits South Carolina net metering cap

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent

DTE Energy has a love-hate relationship with renewable energy. On the one hand, they've pledged to be coal-free by 2040, at least in part through investments in wind and solar. On the other hand, they've suggested a replacement for retail net metering that has solar advocates screaming "Foul!" from the rooftops. Midwest Energy News reports that DTE Energy has suggested a new reimbursement scheme that would compensate its solar customers at the lower - often significantly lower - wholesale rate of power. In addition, they have discussed imposing fixed fees on solar customers to fulfill the mandate that every utility has to toss up the fake "cost-shift" subterfuge to maintain their membership in the Utility Club. (The Utility Club is not a real thing. But this lie, this ridiculous slander, about the cost shift, is unfortunately all too real.) For those of you who have not heard me rail against this before, here it goes: 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 Berkeley National Laboratory indicates the shift only happens when a state passes the 10% mark for solar-electricity generation. And I should also note that even at more than 10%, the shift is so small you’d need the Berkeley Lab’s $27 million electron microscope to see it. My good friend Becky Stanfield, senior director of western states with Vote Solar, summed it up pretty succinctly for Midwest Energy News, saying:

DTE Energy is clearly using the distributed generation tariff to try to discourage people from going solar. It’s pretty outrageous.

Yes it is, Becky. Yes. It Is. More: Advocates call Michigan utility’s net metering replacement ‘outrageous’

SEIA Makes Big Changes. And they’re not good. I woke up to the news yesterday that SEIA had told longtime executive Tom Kimbis that they are moving forward without him. Tom, if you recall, was the interim president at SEIA when Rhone Resch resigned about 2 years ago. He did such a great job during his tenure that I thought he had earned the credentials to keep the job. In recent months, I was worried that Tom would move on from SEIA and had told people that I hope this wouldn’t happen. So imagine my shock (and it takes a lot) when I heard SEIA had laid him off as well as Christopher Mansour. The changes, according to Abby Hopper, are to better align resources with the strategic vision of SEIA. I’ll have more thoughts about this move soon, hoping to sleep on it a bit. For SEIA’s side of the news, make sure to read our coverage. More to come.
Get My Kids An EV Bus. A couple of points I’d like to make here. First, when I spoke to Proterra’s CEO, Ryan Propple, a few months ago, I never considered the inefficiency of buses idling all day why waiting, stopping and sitting in traffic. I also failed to think through the pollution that kids across America are subjected to while riding the Blue Bird. So it is no surprise to me that electric buses make sense everywhere in America. The second point, I am impressed by the idea that ‘friend of the pod’ Jigar Shah and his team had to do a sale-leaseback with BYD to provide electric buses to jurisdictions the entry into an ’offtake’ agreement. Only one major downfall here, I can’t name a single Chinese mode of transportation that I ride. Not my car, not my plane nor my bicycle. When it comes to moving people from point A to point B, Americans don’t ride Made in China. So I’d like to see Proterra electrify Blue Birds across America in a similar transaction. Many reasons why school buses are a great place to start.
Ballot Fights Continue. In Arizona, the ballot initiative to ask voters about expanding the RPS is being challenged. The challenge isn’t in the form of data or arguments on the issue but instead to attack the ballot initiative by claiming that 75% of the signatures are invalid. This is the stuff that bothers me about the legislative process. Argue the issue, not the process, because we all know that a higher RPS is good for the residents of Arizona but the incumbent utilities just can’t handle so much goodness. The Mr. Burns in them won’t allow it.
Take This To Another Branch. While I admit to have been cheering on the lawsuits against oil companies about their disregard for climate change, specifically their knowledge of it decades ago, an NY judge has politely asked the petitioners to take this to the legislature. Maybe it would have been nice to get to more discovery in the judicial process, the judge is right that the legislature should do its job.
Big Storage Sector. Much has been made around battery prices declining over the next few years but the parts and pieces that make energy storage a system are getting attention. The power conversion, both ac-coupled and dc-coupled, is getting manufacturers to design and build some of those system. This is a nice look inside the future of storage from the system level.

Have a great day!

News

 

Have a great day!
Yann