Details vary slightly in the 43 states (including Washington) that have adopted net energy metering, but the basic arrangement works like this: A homeowner installs solar panels on the roof. On sunny days, particularly at midday, those panels can generate more electricity than the home needs. The excess automatically spills back onto the electrical grid and is distributed to nearby homes, causing the solar home\u2019s electricity meter to spin counterclockwise. The electricity generator is credited for providing the power and pays less overall than a traditional utility customer.<\/p>\n
Arizona Public Service, which has 18,000 rooftop solar systems among its 1.1 million electricity customers, estimates solar homes each shift about $1,000 in costs annually to other ratepayers. \u201cThis is not a revenue issue. This is not a profitability issue. This is a shifting-of-costs issue,\u201d said John Hatfield, the company\u2019s vice president of communications. The company will submit a proposal in July to the state\u2019s regulator, the Arizona Corporation Commission, to alter the current system.<\/p>\n
The new technology \u201cis a threat to their business model,\u201d said Carrie Cullen Hitt, SEIA\u2019s senior vice president for state affairs.One possible alternative is to charge solar customers for the right to have the utility\u2019s services available whenever they need it. That \u201cstandby charge\u201d went into effect two years ago in Virginia, where just 833 of Dominion Virginia Power\u2019s 2.3 million customers take part in net metering and only five produce enough power to pay the charge. \u201cThe only reason the utilities are picking this fight is because they know that in the very long term, we\u2019re going to compete with them and we\u2019re going to win,\u201d Fenster said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Net Metering Distributed solar energy is growing at an exponential rate with 80,000 homes in the US installing solar panels last year, raising the total to [\u2026]<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[45,105],"tags":[2173,2243,3744,4782,5710],"class_list":["post-13396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-solar-renewable-energy-greeninvest","category-usa-north-america-world-markets","tag-global-warming","tag-government","tag-net-metering","tag-solar-energy","tag-usa-north-america-world-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iiec-india.org\/greenworld\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}