The Weekly Newspaper of Manhattan Beach Herald Publications - El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hawthorne, Lawndale, & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - Circulation 30,000 - Readership 60,000 (310) 322-1830 Vol. 10, No. 3 March 3, 2016 Inside This Issue Certified and Licensed Professionals...................6 Classifieds............................2 Community Briefs...............2 Film Review..........................4 Food.......................................6 Looking Up...........................4 Pets........................................5 Real Estate....................... 7-8 Seniors..................................3 Weekend Forecast There is More to Explore from the Shore Rooftop Solar Touches Off Power Struggle See Solar, page 2 Friday, March 4 Partly Cloudy 65˚/57˚ Saturday, March 5 Partly Cloudy 65˚/56˚ Sunday, March 6 Showers 62˚/50˚ A lovely view on a cloudy day. Photo by Peter Thornton. By Rob McCarthy If solar work trucks seem to be everywhere on the road and in South Bay neighborhoods, it’s not your imagination. California is ground zero for the rooftop-solar revolution. Half of the nation’s homes that produce some or all of their electricity from the sun’s rays are in the state. California has the sunshine, the abundant population, and an environmentally friendly Gov. Jerry Brown. Sacramento favors clean energy, and state officials want 1 million solar rooftops by 2018. The federal government offers a home-solar tax credit, which it extended to the delight of the installation companies that feared losing a tax break that homeowners find attractive. Residential solar’s future isn’t crystal clear because of opposition from public-owned utilities. Southern California Edison and their investors stand to lose if California electric customers offset their lower monthly bills using solar power. Households that generate electricity and swap it for bill credit receive preferential treatment, the state’s big utilities argue. They asked the Public Utilities Commission to rewrite the rules so that solar-powered outliers pay more to Edison. The two-year deliberation ended last month in a 3-2 vote, which exposed the friction building between the old guard utilities and the new kid-on-the-block solar. The commissioners in a Solomonic decision gave each side something it wanted, but denied anyone a clear victory. “Our course is not for the rooftop solar industry or for the utilities,” Commission President Michael Picker said after the Jan. 28 meeting. The public utilities asked for and were granted a $75-$150 hookup fee from solarconversion homes in the future, plus additional monthly costs - known as non-bypassable charges - that assist low-income households and fund development programs. The home-solar industry conceded that the additional fees imposed on new and existing home-solar customers were fair. The average power bill for a solar household is expected to jump by $9 per month, up from $82. “We agree that all customers should pay the Public Purpose Program Charges (which fund low-income and clean energy programs), nuclear decommissioning and DWR bond charges,” wrote Sean Gallagher, vice president of state affairs for the Solar Energy Institutes Association, in the days leading up to the Public Utilities Commission vote in San Francisco. The Public Utilities Commission explained that being users of the grid made it only right that home-solar customers pay charges borne by other customers. The commission decided to levy new costs, but not to charge solar customers for the upkeep of transmission lines. The solar industry cheered that change, even as it prompted two commissioners to vote against a decision they said they otherwise would have supported. The non-bypassable charges were small potatoes compared to net-metering. The fears were so great that California might end netmetering in 2016 that 130,000 petitions were delivered in wheelbarrows to the commission’s San Francisco offices in favor of continuing net-metering. By the narrowest of margins, the Public Utilities Commission extended net-metering until 2019, when it will reconsider the contentious payment system consumers favor and utilities dislike. The Jan. 28 decision required Southern California Edison and other utilities to keep paying solar-powered homes and businesses the retail rate that Edison charges its customers. Net-energy is important to home-solar companies because it defrays the costs of buying or leasing a rooftop system. Netmetering households use the electric utility grid like a bank account. They can deposit electricity they don’t use immediately withdraw the same amount later (such as at night) at no net cost. It’s a year-round system, which allows households to build energy credit in summer when days are longer to compensate for shorter, winter days. The three-year reprieve saved Californians who’ve installed rooftop solar panels $4.8 billion and kept the renewable-energy option affordable, according to the Solar Energy Institutes Association. The industry lobbied California utility regulators to retain netmetering, as Colorado, New Mexico, New York and New Jersey have done, to keep rooftop systems affordable. The number of solar homes in the United States is fast approaching 1 million, with 65 percent of residential solar being installed in communities with median incomes below $70,000, according to industry figures. California leads the nation with 479,000 solar homes, and is nearly halfway to the goal of 1 million solar rooftops by 2018 . The utilities lobbied equally hard to sway the commission and its President Michael Picker, even introducing an 11th-hour proposal that critics said would jeopardize the federal tax credit for home solar conversions. The solar industry, which faced an uphill battle with Big Utilities despite strong political support from the governor, criticized the late changes and Big Utility’s tactics. Picker said it had been a “very difficult task” for the agency to keep solar affordable without burdening most Californians with significantly higher costs. He characterized the net-metering program as “a big step forward toward giving California consumers more choice, more control and more responsibility over their energy choices.” Nobody got everything they wanted. Call it a draw. The January net-metering decision won’t end the utilities-vs.-solar struggle. It pushes it down the road to 2019, when the Public Utilities Commission will reconsider net metering once changes to residential electricity rates and grid modernization proceedings take full effect. Even the members of the Public Utilities
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