There’s been a disgusting development in Indiana that… not only harms the environment and national securitybut can cost middle-class homeowners (and voters!) thousands of dollars per household in Indiana.
It’s called net metering, a practice that allows individuals who own rooftop solar to sell extra, unnecessary electricity back to the utility company as credit in their account (with many people getting checks back for the energy they produce). Now, thanks to the oil industry and utility lobbying, Indiana homeowners who install new rooftop solar systems in one of the state’s investor-owned utility areas will no longer be able to sell their power to the grid for what they can afford. would pay for it. which in many cases could seriously hurt the appeal of installing solar on the roof, leading to fewer people choosing to put panels on their roof… and that’s the point.
“Instead of allowing Hoosier homeowners and Indiana-grown small businesses to manage their energy destination by using homemade energy, Indiana is taking a huge step backwards by dropping net metering,” said Zach Schalk, Indiana program director. for Solar United Neighbors. “Solar on the roof is a powerful tool to improve the reliability and resilience of the electricity grid. It makes no sense to eliminate grid metering as grid operators warn of electrical capacity shortages and the threat of progressive blackouts.”
The end of the net measurement is a result of Indiana’s Senate Enrolled Act 309 (or SEA 309). This law, requested by investor-owned utilities and passed in 2017, was eventually signed by Governor Eric Holcomb. The law went into effect on July 1, 2022 for all customers in the service areas of one of the state’s five investor-owned utilities. These include Duke Energy Indiana, Indiana Michigan Power, NIPSCO, CenterPoint (formerly Vectren), and AES Indiana (formerly Indianapolis Power & Light).
What is net metering and how does it affect solar customers?
As we mentioned above, solar grid metering allows customers who make their own electricity to sell it back to the grid as it is produced. If you don’t have battery storage (which is expensive), the power from your solar panels that you don’t need during the day goes back to the neighborhood wires, and your neighbors (including utility customers) eventually use that electricity. Since your neighborhood needs less power, your local utility doesn’t have to make the power, so it seems like a pretty fair trade.
With grid metering you get a credit on your bill for every month in which you give more electricity to the grid than you use (something that happens more often in the summer months). If you’re short, those credits can cover most or possibly all of your utility bill, meaning you’ll pay little or nothing for most of the year. Or, if you’re in a place with a lot of sunlight and a utility company willing to do that, you could get a check from the utility company.
In Indiana, companies are allowed to make several arrangements called “Excess Distributed Generation” policies. This will still give you credits for what you put into the grid for your neighbors (who pay the utility company full price, of course), but they may pay you little or nothing for the electricity, depending on their policy. They may also use unfavorable ‘instantaneous netting’ calculations instead of looking at the energy switched on and off during the month.
“It’s more appropriate to refer to this new method as no netting,” said Ben Inskeep, program director at Citizens Action Coalition. “No-netting is an underhand scheme designed by the investor-owned monopolies to hinder Hoosier consumers who are trying to free themselves from monopoly control and their confiscation and exorbitant energy prices.”
This isn’t technically legal, but it’s still in the courts
If you’re skeptical that the Indiana Senate would be so eager to exterminate people with rooftop solar, then you’re right. SEA 309 didn’t allow a “no-netting” policy that pays people nothing for their power that feeds neighbors, but the subsequent treatment of the law by utility regulators led to policies that are functionally non-net (while, of course, something is Also known as).
Environmental groups and utilities have predictably sued the state and their utilities for doing this, and eventually won on appeal, but the case is now headed to the Indiana Supreme Court. When the state Supreme Court took the case, they vacated (cancelled) the appeals court decision pending their verdict on the case, allowing the new policy to take effect for the time being.
Hearings on this will begin in September, but until then, customers and solar installers are in a bad position. No one knows how the case will end, or if there will be a longer legal battle if the regulators and utilities play more games after a loss.
“We understand that state lawmakers wanted to change how solar customers were credited for excess electricity returned to the grid,” said Laura Ann Arnold, president of Indiana Distributed Energy Alliance (IndianaDG). “But this rewrite of the Indiana statute by the IURC was a blatant decision, which will decimate Indiana’s nascent rooftop solar industry by discouraging Hoosier rate payers looking to install solar to lower their electric bills.”
This is terrible for the grid
Duke Energy utilities, via Facebook.
If you’ve paid attention to power grids and solar energy in recent years, it’s clear that we have a problem with power grids in the United States. They are behind schedule and in urgent need of upgrades and repairs, and in many cases it is difficult to maintain sufficient power production. Distributed power, such as that from rooftop solar energy, can greatly help to make the grid more stable in the event of low power or overloaded transmission lines. If you get power from a neighbor’s roof, it puts less pressure on the longer pipes, for example.
In addition, we are dealing with climate change. The more clean power we can get on the gridthe better we will do in the long run against the same problems (severe weather, heat, drought) that are putting pressure on it just to begin with.
Policies that discourage solar installations, rob people for perfectly good power that they put into the grid, and keep us using fossil fuels is just bad everywhere, but especially bad for Indiana. It’s bad for the environment, it’s bad for customers’ wallets, and it’s bad for the security of the United States against all kinds of threats.
All Americans need to be better prepared for emergencies, including the climate emergency, blackouts and everything else going on right now. This situation in Indiana is wrong in every way.
Featured image by Vijay Govindan, CleanTechnica.
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