FLORIDA TO INSTALL 19X MORE SOLAR THAN PAST 5 YEARS, UTILITIES WANT TO STOP THAT FROM HAPPENING11/15/2016 Florida’s utility industry steered more than $26 million of its profits into a failed constitutional amendment to impose new barriers to the expansion of rooftop solar energy generation, but developers say that as the cost of installing solar panels drops, the state could quickly become a leader in private solar energy expansion no matter what the energy giants do.
MIAMI HERALD — The Florida Solar Energy Industry Association estimates that over the next five years, Florida homeowners, businesses and utilities are projected to take advantage of the falling prices and install 2,315 megawatts of solar electric capacity — 19 times more than the amount of solar installed in the last five years. Solar energy is becoming so cheap it's a no-brainer for consumers. “Solar prices are in free-fall, and no one knows where the bottom is,” said Chris Delp, an attorney with the Tampa law office of Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick. Large companies, such as SolarCity, are offering zero down, low-interest loans, and people can also cut their expenses by deducting 30% of their costs under a federal Investment Tax Credit program that was extended last year, he said. “The economics are just going to make these regulatory barriers irrelevant. Florida’s utilities could work with customers to roll out solar or they could work to rule it out.” What approach will Florida’s investor-owned utilities take? Will they encourage homeowners and businesses to install their own solar systems—as utilities in Georgia, California, New York and dozens of others states have done? Or will they ask regulators to stifle rooftop solar expansion—as they attempted to do with Amendment 1—so that they can control the development of solar themselves and limit the hit to their bottom line? According to the Florida Public Service Commission’s 10-year site plan, utilities plan to increase their solar generation, but solar will make up only a tiny fraction of all energy generation supplied by the regulated utilities in the next 10 years. Florida ranks third in the nation for rooftop solar potential, according to SEIA, but is only 14th for cumulative solar capacity that is installed. That could change, Delp said, if the emerging interest in solar installation in Florida, fueled by the drops in prices, results in more people installing their own electricity generation, circumventing utilities. Big utilities’ $26 million scheme... backfired. “I don’t think this was their intent, but what the utilities did with Amendment 1 was bring the discussion of solar energy development in Florida to the forefront,” said Delp, who is working with a company building a 30-megawatt private solar farm in Leesburg. “It’s now a kitchen table issue. There is awareness that there is a lack of solar in Florida and that we lag behind so many other states.” In the last year, the price of installing a solar photovoltaic system has dropped by at least 12 percent, and prices are down 66 percent from 2010, according to the independent Energy Information Institute. Experts say that as the price of solar installation continues to plummet, the cost of installing it will drop no matter what the utilities attempt to do — unless they erect new barriers. Amendment 1 was an attempt to do that by creating legal language intended to force regulators to change the so-called net metering law. Under that law, every Florida electric utility is required to provide customers who have installed solar panels the opportunity to sell their excess energy back to the utility, which is known as “net metering.” The program was intended to make it easier and more affordable for customers to invest in clean renewable energy generation and lower their utility bills. Florida’s two largest utilities, Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy Florida, have said it’s time to change the net metering laws, as utilities have done in other states, and they have already begun asking the Public Service Commission (PSC) to address it. The changes include imposing a monthly service charge on people with solar systems or reducing the net metering rate to reflect the industry’s claim that solar users subsidize other ratepayers. Solar advocates counter that the “subsidy” argument is based on economic studies that do not take into consideration any of the environmental or efficiency benefits from solar installation. When those are calculated, they say, private solar installation produces cost savings for non-solar users. In Nevada last year, the state’s utility regulators changed their net metering law to split solar customers off into a separate rate class and lower the reimbursement rate for excess energy from 11 cents per kilowatt hour to 2.6 cents per kwh. After the change, applications for rooftop solar installations saw a steep drop, several solar installers left the market, and protesters rallied outside the Public Utilities Commission headquarters in Las Vegas. Regulators initially also refused to grandfather in existing solar systems, but after public push-back, they reversed it. “You make rooftop solar power financially unattractive in one of two ways,” said Jeff Prutsman, CEO of American Solar Energy Systems. “You either get rid of net metering or you add surcharges to the electric bills of consumers who own rooftop solar power systems. Either way, you increase the number of years that it takes for a rooftop solar system to pay for itself with utility electric bill savings.” Try as they may, utilities can't seem to stop solar expansion. Meanwhile, as the cost of solar installation falls, Duke Energy Florida is seeing more than 100 residential and business customers a month install solar panels, said Suzanne Barr Grant, Duke Energy spokeswoman. There are now more than 3,800 business and individual customers that have installed solar power, a 400% increase in the last five years, she said. As solar installations increase on their turf, utilities are pushing to reduce net metering rates, or kill the program entirely, to protect their deteriorating monopoly. Empowered by the broad-based group of solar energy supporters who defeated the utility-backed amendment, it’s clear that voters won’t be happy with any delay in solar progress. “If utilities try to do an end run on net metering through the Legislature or the PSC, we will fight that,” said Susan Glickman, Florida director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. Thank you to Mary Ellen Klas our friends at Miami Herald for providing the original article below. Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/election/article114377458.html
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