Solar: Rethinking Standby and Fixed Charges
Vote Solar has posted a free on-demand webinar on utilities’ application of standby and fixed cost charges specific to solar PV for customers choosing to go solar through a billing practice called net energy metering (NEM) in an attempt to recover their costs.
Jim Kennerly of the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center Jim presented on his recent paper: Rethinking Standby and Fixed Cost Charges: Regulatory and Rate Design Pathways to Deeper Solar Cost Reductions.
“While solar PV’s impact on utilities has been a hot topic for the past year, little attention has been paid to the potentially damaging risks posed by these solar PV-specific rate designs (often informally referred to as solar ‘fees’ or ‘taxes’) upon the Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative’s efforts to reduce the non-hardware ‘soft’ costs of going solar,” Kennerly says.
View the presentation slides or the recorded webinar.
