If you wonder why America’s utilities are rattled by the explosive
growth in rooftop solar — and are pushing back — William Walker has a
story for you. A flip-flop wearing Walker stands in his driveway pointing to a
ubiquitous neighborhood feature — solar panels on the roofs of five of
six houses nearby. He lives in Ewa Beach, a development on the sultry
leeward coast of the Hawaiian island of Oahu built on land cleared of
sugar cane fields.
Shade is scarce and residents here call their homes
“hot boxes,” requiring almost round-the-clock air conditioning. Hawaii,
which imports pricey oil to power its electricity grid, has the highest
utility rates in the nation — at 37 cents a kilowatt-hour, they’re more
than double California and triple the national average. With bills for 1,600 square foot houses like these
running as high as $400 a month, solar is seen as less a green statement
than an economic no-brainer given state and federal tax credits for as
much as 65 percent of installation costs. Almost every day since Walker
and his wife Mi Chong moved in last April, solar installers came rapping
on the door, hawking a rooftop system.
They finally bought one: an 18-panel, $35,000
installation producing 5.9 kilowatts of power financed for $305 a month.
It would be connected to the grid under a system known as net metering
that essentially lets residents deduct the value of their solar-produced
electricity from their power bill and even be paid for electricity in
excess of that.
Paying for Itself
Walker estimates his bill would have dropped most
months to an $18 service charge — offsetting that $305 loan payment.
Anticipating his power bills would continue to rise, he figured the
system could pay for itself in as little as five years; his electricity
after that would be free.That is until his utility, a subsidiary of
Honolulu-based Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc., told the Walkers they
couldn’t connect their system to the grid. They aren’t alone. Solar
installers here estimate that hundreds if not thousands of the state’s
residents are being put in solar limbo by a virtual moratorium on new
connections in many parts of the company’s service area.
The reason, according to the Hawaiian Electric Co.: so
many Hawaiians are stampeding to solar that circuits may become over saturated, causing voltage spikes, damaging appliances, electronics
and even the utility’s equipment. The company needs more time to study
the matter. The Walkers, who say they got no advance notice of the
shutdown, are now paying both their power bill and their monthly
rooftop loan. HECO, as the utility is known, recently told them they
will eventually be allowed to join the grid without having to pay for
expensive equipment upgrades. It still can’t say when.
‘Profit Motivation’
“Everyone is on board with getting solar and HECO has
now put up a wall,” Walker said. “The only thing we can see is profit
motivation.” Spurred by a drop in panel prices, robust government
subsidies and a technology that no longer appears experimental to
mainstream America, rooftop photovoltaic solar is bursting out
everywhere. About 200,000 U.S. homes and businesses added rooftop solar
in the past two years alone — about 3 gigawatts of power and enough to
replace four or five conventionally-sized coal plants. The U.S. set a single-quarter record with 31,000
residential rooftop installations in the three months through Sept. 30.
Solar represented 72 percent of all power added in the U.S. in October.
Connection Slowdown
Utilities, seeing a threat to about $360 billion a
year in power sales and a challenge to the hegemony of the conventional
grid, are feeling the heat and fighting back. HECO, despite criticism
from Hawaii’s solar industry, denies the moratorium is anything more
than an honest effort to address the technical challenges of integrating
the solar flooding onto its grid.The slowdown comes in a state where 9 percent of the
utility’s residential customers on Oahu are already generating most of
their power from the sun and where connections have doubled yearly since
2008.
In California, where solar already powers the
equivalent of 626,000 homes, utilities continue to aggressively push for
grid fees that would add about $120 a year to rooftop users’ bills and,
solar advocates say, slow down solar adoptions.
Similar skirmishes have broken out in as many as a
dozen of the 43 states that have adopted net-metering policies as part
of their push to promote renewable energy. In Colorado, Xcel Energy Inc.
has proposed cutting the payments it makes for excess power generated
by customers by about half, because it says higher payouts result in an
unfair subsidy to solar users.
The original article was published on Renewable Energy World
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