Photo voltaic firms, large and small, from native installers to OEMs, united with organizations just like the California Photo voltaic & Storage Affiliation (CALSSA) to combat in opposition to the top of California’s net-energy-metering photo voltaic incentive program. There have been many credible and necessary justifications in opposition to the proposed modifications, corresponding to considerably decreasing California’s residential photo voltaic market, harming California residents’ skill to have a aggressive different to electrical utilities, hurting photo voltaic employment, negatively impacting California’s skill to succeed in its local weather objectives and even damaging the complete photo voltaic trade.
However California went forward with slicing NEM. And whereas CALSSA has stated that it was in a position to stop among the worst components of the speed change from being carried out, most of the warnings nonetheless got here true. In keeping with a survey carried out by CALSSA, “17,000 jobs have or can be misplaced by the top of 2023 due the latest net-metering modifications,” representing “22% of all photo voltaic jobs in California and the most important lack of photo voltaic jobs in U.S. historical past.”
The California Public Utilities Fee (CPUC) has routinely stated that the modifications to NEM have been supposed to incentivize photo voltaic + storage installations. However no such incentives have materialized and the charges inform a special story. In keeping with CPUC’s export charges, there are only some hours in the complete yr when there’s a monetary incentive to promote vitality again to the grid.
Credit score: Enphase
This screenshot of the PGE export charges for 2023 demonstrates that NEM 3.0 is web metering in title solely. Studying from the profitable destruction of NEM in California, utilities in different states try to maneuver to time-of-use (ToU) charges. As an example, there was latest information of Maine, Minnesota and Missouri asserting plans to transition to ToU. So, is ToU the following battlefront for clear vitality? Ought to photo voltaic lobbying be centered on implementing ToU charges that really help distributed vitality as a substitute of preserving NEM?
ToU charges might be useful to each utilities and vitality customers alike, however usually this price construction is carried out in a manner that solely advantages utilities and turns into simply one other price hike for customers. If there usually are not insurance policies to advertise know-how for true demand-side administration, then customers normally find yourself paying extra for a similar precise service as a result of behavioral modifications are too troublesome and even inconceivable. If utilities need to scale back demand and electrical community congestion throughout peak hours, a pre-condition of shifting to ToU charges ought to be a binding plan to incentivize DERs for his or her clients and deployment of centralized DERMs platforms, like VPPs. In any other case, all they’re doing is surcharging.
Whereas as a group, we should always nonetheless be combating for NEM, particularly in areas the place the penetration charges of photo voltaic stay low, we have to concurrently construct our second line of protection for the equitable implementation of ToU. In any other case, the distributed and democratized vitality can be in grave hazard.
Jessica Fishman is a strategic advertising and marketing chief with almost 20 years’ expertise, together with seven years as head of worldwide public and media relations at inverter maker SolarEdge. Captivated with addressing local weather change by accelerating the clear vitality transition, she has labored at main renewables firms, constructing advertising and marketing and communications departments.
