Utility lobbyists turn up the heat on rooftop solar

Campaign seeks to end incentives, hike users’ fees

Over the past six years, rooftop solar panel installations have seen explosive growth — as much as 900 percent by one estimate.

That growth has come to a shuddering stop this year, with a projected decline in new installations of 2 percent, according to projections from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

A number of factors are driving the reversal, from saturation in markets like California to financial woes at several top solar panel makers.

But the decline has also coincided with a concerted and well-funded lobbying campaign by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitals across the country to reverse incentives for homeowners to install solar panels. States eyeing policies

Utilities argue that rules allowing private solar customers to sell excess power back to the grid at the retail price — a practice known as net metering — can be unfair to homeowners who do not want or cannot afford their own solar installations.

Prodded in part by the utilities’ campaign, nearly every state in the country is engaged in a review of its solar energy policies. Since 2013, Hawaii, Nevada, Arizona, Maine and Indiana have decided to phase out net metering, crippling programs that spurred explosive growth in the rooftop solar market. (Nevada recently reversed its decision.) Many more states are considering new or higher fees on solar customers.

“We believe it is important to balance the needs of all customers,” Jeffrey Ostermayer of the Edison Electric Institute, the most prominent utility lobbying group, said in a statement.

The same group of investor-owned utilities is poised to sway solar policy at the federal level.

Brian McCormack, a former top executive at the Edison institute, is Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s chief of staff. The Energy Department did not make McCormack available for an interview.

In April, Perry ordered an examination of how renewable energy may be hurting conventional sources like coal, oil and natural gas, a study that environmentalists worry could upend federal policies that have fostered the rapid spread of solar and wind power.

Charged with spearheading the study, due this summer, is McCormack.

“There’s no doubt these utilities are out to kill rooftop solar, and they’re succeeding,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a renewable energy advocacy group. “They’re now driving the agenda.”

Utilities argue that net metering, in place in over 40 states, turns many homeowners into free riders on the grid, giving them an unfair advantage over customers who do not want or cannot afford solar panels. The utilities say that means fewer ratepayers cover the huge costs of traditional power generation. Effects of solar credits

A study released this year by the federal Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, however, concluded that the effects of rooftop solar credits on electricity rates for nonsolar customers would be negligible for the foreseeable future.

Shaylyn Hynes, a spokeswoman for the Energy Department, dismissed the environmentalists’ concerns. “The department has no preconceived notions as to the findings and recommendations that will result from this review,” she said.

McCormack has assigned Travis Fisher, a former economist at the Institute for Energy Research, a nonprofit funded by the Koch family foundations, to be principal author of the study.

Fisher did not respond to requests for comment. In a 2015 study, he called clean energy policies “the single greatest emerging threat” to the electric power grid.