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Maine Governor Vetoes Solar Compromise Bill

Despite eleventh-hour negotiations, Gov. Paul LePage, R-Maine, vetoed a comprehensive solar policy bill in late April. Bill advocates tried to override his decision not once, but twice, shortly after. However, both attempts fell short.

State lawmakers first announced the legislation, L.D.1649, in February, and it aimed to replace Maine’s net energy metering (NEM) policy with a market-based program. The novel approach was the result of a months-long stakeholder process.

Under NEM, utilities provide billing credits to homeowners and businesses with solar installations for excess energy that the projects add to the grid. The policy continues to be a topic of debate across the U.S., such as in Nevada, but L.D.1649 garnered broad support from Maine solar companies, utilities and community leaders alike.

“Seeing other fights around net metering happening elsewhere in the country, and wanting to get to a place where we could enter a collaborative rather than combative relationship with utilities, we were eager to join this stakeholder process and contribute our thinking,” says Fred Greenhalgh from solar installer ReVision Energy. “We truly believe it was a remarkable and innovative policy - good for Maine, good for solar and good for ratepayers.”

L.D.1649 proposed to swap Maine’s NEM policy with a new program requiring regulated utilities in the state to enter into long-term contracts for solar across several segments, including residential, commercial and grid scale.

The bill originally called for adding 248 MW of solar over the life of the program, which is much more than the state’s current installed solar capacity of about 20 MW. However, lawmakers eventually amended the bill in an effort to gain the two-thirds majority support necessary to override an almost-certain veto from the governor, who had voiced his opposition to the bill from the start.

Among other changes, the amended bill cut down the 248 MW requirement to 196 MW, lessened the program from five years to four and added some more ratepayer protections. According to a document supplied by the Maine State House Majority Office, the bill would have led to 650 more jobs and saved ratepayers $58 million to $110 million.

Although the amended version easily passed in the state Senate, the House of Representatives approved it by 91 to 56 - still short of the two-thirds tally advocates were hoping for.

Before LePage issued his veto, Assistant House Majority Leader Sara Gideon, D-Freeport, met with the governor to try and work on a compromise. She and bill proponents ultimately rejected one of LePage’s three demands, though.

“I was extremely skeptical that these conversations would lead to an agreement. But I’m glad [Gideon] tried,” says Rep. Norman Higgins, R-Dover-Foxcroft - one of the legislators who amended L.D.1649 - in a press release. “We made a good-faith effort to find common ground with the governor and get this law into place together. We agreed to his first two requests, but we have to draw the line when the changes are going to cost us jobs.”

In his veto letter, LePage writes, “The legislation would increase energy costs for those Maine businesses and households that cannot afford expensive solar panels by tens of millions of dollars - picking winners and losers in Maine’s energy mix. The cost of ever-increasing solar mandates in this bill would be borne by ratepayers with no price cap, allowing above-market contracts to be added to stranded costs.

“I tried to negotiate in good faith with Democrats to reach a compromise that would not add to the burden of ratepayers,” he continues. “I requested that the bill include all renewables, return all renewable energy credits to ratepayers and have a cap on the price we pay in long-term contracts. We could not reach an agreement.”

LePage further claims the lawmakers “are not serious about reducing the price of energy for Maine families or job creators.”

In a separate announcement, the Maine State House Majority Office notes that negotiators were open to two of LePage’s requests, but the office maintains that the cap the governor wanted would have been “harmful to nearly all of Maine’s solar installers.”

ReVision Energy’s Greenhalgh comments, “The governor’s refrain has been that Maine’s energy costs are too high and that Maine needs jobs. This bill provided a proposal to create new solar jobs and save ratepayers over $100 million. Yet, it was vetoed by the governor. We are still confused at this apparent inconsistency.”

After LePage’s veto, Maine lawmakers returned to the state capitol to address a number of vetoed bills, including L.D.1649. Advocates of the solar bill vowed to push for an override, and push they did - twice. The House voted to override the solar bill veto in the morning, but according to documents from the state legislature, the 96-52 outcome was just a few votes shy. An Associated Press report says the House took a second vote on the matter later in the day after a legislator requested it. More lawmakers were absent during the redo, and the 93-50 vote was again very close to comprising a two-thirds majority but still not enough. The bill is dead.

Without L.D.1649, the NEM issue will go to the Maine Public Utilities Commission (PUC), which is expected to make a ruling this summer and whose commissioners were appointed by LePage.

“Though there is no net-metering cap in Maine, there is a review that is triggered when solar hits 1 percent grid penetration, as it did last year,” explains Greenhalgh, adding that the commissioners “have a lot of room to make changes to NEM.”

“But even assuming a neutral or positive amendment to NEM, the immediate impact of more months of market uncertainty is bad for business - as the upcoming review will mean some percentage of our potential customers will wait and see what the PUC will do prior to making a solar investment,” he concludes. - Joseph Bebon

 

New Hampshire Doubles Net-Metering Cap

As promised, Gov. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., has signed into law a bill to lift New Hampshire’s cap on net energy metering (NEM). Furthermore, after laying off employees earlier this year, one local solar installer says the new policy certainty will ensure business thrives again.

The bill, H.B.1116, passed in the state House of Representatives in March and in the Senate in early April. The legislation came after New Hampshire utilities started reaching their allocated NEM amounts, which solar companies said slowed or altogether halted installations. Before the new law, the statewide NEM limit was 50 MW. Lawmakers initially proposed raising the cap by 25 MW to 75 MW. However, they eventually passed H.B.1116, which instead lifts the cap to 100 MW and also orders state utility regulators to begin exploring alternative rate structures for NEM.

Hassan, who has been an outspoken supporter of the legislation, says, “Solar and other small-scale clean energy resources are critical to New Hampshire’s growing clean energy economy, which is creating good-paying, high-quality jobs, spurring economic development and helping combat climate change.”

She continues, “Lifting the cap on net metering is essential to the continued success of New Hampshire’s solar industry, and I am proud to sign this bipartisan bill so that our clean energy industry can continue to grow and thrive.”

The legislation is welcome news for SunRay Solar. After New Hampshire’s largest energy provider, Eversource, reached its NEM limit in January, the Concord, N.H.-based solar installer announced it was laying off nine employees.

Michael Fay, managing partner of SunRay Solar, says the company recently rehired those workers. Fay explains that the decision was made after seeing signs during a Senate public hearing that the cap was, indeed, going to be lifted.

“At the hearing, utilities seemed to be really on board and spoke on behalf of lifting the cap,” he says. “That was extremely encouraging. We felt very confident that it would be raised, so we brought back the people we laid off for a couple of months.”

In addition, although SunRay Solar had abandoned plans to add about 20 new workers in January, Fay says this NEM legislation will now allow the company to move ahead with a team expansion.

He expects the cap lift will help support solar development for another year-and-a-half or so, “which gives the public utilities commission enough time to figure out a good path forward.”

Fay says that state legislators “deserve a lot of credit for understanding the benefits of solar” and adds that solar companies and advocates played a big part in making the legislation a reality: “As they say, ‘Public opinion drives the legislative agenda,’ and I think that really was the case.” - Joseph Bebon

 

DOE Launches ‘Orange Button’ Initiative For Solar Sector

It’s the solar industry’s turn: After so-called “button” projects helped other sectors provide better access to standardized information, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced funding to launch the Orange Button initiative. The department, which is providing nearly $4 million to four project partners, says Orange Button will increase market transparency and fair pricing by establishing data standards for the solar industry.

In order to understand the financial risk of solar energy project development, the solar energy community relies on fragmented datasets released by state energy offices and a limited number of private organizations regarding project origination, grid integration, operations and retirement, according to the DOE. These datasets vary widely in format, quality and content - which makes it difficult for potential providers to have an accurate understanding of potential markets.

The Orange Button project will work to standardize this data, making it easier to share and secure. The DOE adds that establishing such standards will reduce the cost of capital for new projects by making information about the potential performance of solar projects more readily available and easy to understand.

In fact, Aaron Smallwood - director of technology operations at the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, one of the four DOE-selected project partners - says, “We believe a reduction in the cost of capital as a result of better access to solar data will reduce risk and could result in savings of nearly $9 billion over the next 10 years to solar users.”

The DOE says the Orange Button project is part of its SunShot Initiative, and it will do for solar what the government-led Green Button and Blue Button projects did for consumer energy use data and health records, respectively.

The DOE funding awardees for Orange Button include the following:

• San Francisco-based kWh Analytics will receive $1 million to develop a data format translation tool that will instantly translate individual data formats into standardized data formats, significantly reducing efforts and time required from data standards adopters.
• The Golden, Colo.-based National Renewable Energy Laboratory will receive $400,000 to develop a platform that will enable data sharing across the solar marketplace in support of consensus-based data standards.
• The Boston-based Smart Grid Interoperability Panel will receive $615,426 to lead a 24-month stakeholder and public engagement effort that will help drive out inefficiencies in data exchanges and thereby reduce non-hardware “soft costs” associated with solar projects.
• The Santa Clara, Calif.-based SunSpec Alliance will receive over $1.6 million to establish an open, commercially embraced solar data exchange system that will enable the free flow of data between commercial software products that addresses all aspects of the solar energy system lifecycle. The data exchange system will consist of uniform data taxonomy, information models, application program interfaces, a compliance test suite and reference software.

The DOE says that after the Orange Button data standards are created and launched, data producers, such as solar companies and utilities, will be able to embed a graphic showing an orange button into their apps, software or websites to show data users, such as consumers or financial professionals, that a given dataset can be downloaded in the established Orange Button format.