Solar reform needed

The California Public Utilities Commission’s proposal to reform the state’s rooftop solar subsidy program, net energy metering, is a first step toward ensuring that customers without solar, particularly those on fixed incomes and from disadvantaged communities, don’t continue to pay higher energy bills to subsidize rooftop panels for primarily wealthy homeowners.

For too long, the net energy metering program has fattened the profits of solar companies at the expense of 90% of electricity customers without solar panels who have higher electricity bills to pay for those inflated subsidies.

The plan by the commission recognizes we can grow rooftop solar in California while at the same time taking steps to reduce unfair subsidies that have shifted costs to Californians who don’t have the ability or means to install rooftop solar systems.

Generous subsidies were needed 25 years ago when the program was established and rooftop solar was just getting off the ground. Since then, costs have come down dramatically — by 70% — yet the subsidies keep increasing because they are tied to retail rates for electricity.

The subsidies are so generous that those with rooftop solar panels have nominal and even negative utility bills, which means they aren’t paying to maintain and upgrade the electrical grid, nor are they paying their fair share of the costs of state-mandated programs like the low-income discount that are wrapped into utility bills.

Commissioners should ignore emotional rhetoric from the self-interested solar industry and do what’s right for California electricity customers and our state’s clean energy future.

Hene Kelly, legislative director, California Alliance for Retired Americans, San Francisco