SF GATE. Posted on Thursday, March 27 at 7:01am | By David R. Baker If you’re a California resident who owns rooftop solar panels, you’ll want to pay close attention to a vote happening this morning in San Francisco. The California Public Utilities Commission is scheduled to vote on extending the rules that compensate solar homeowners and businesses for the excess electricity that they feed onto the grid. The system is called “net energy metering,” and it’s one of the main ways that California has encouraged the growth of the state’s solar industry. It’s also been the source of major friction between solar companies and California’s big electric utilities, who argue that net metering customers aren’t paying their fair share to maintain the grid. So a California law approved last year ordered the utilities commission to come up with a replacement system by the end of 2015. That same law also told the commission to create a transition period for people who already have rooftop arrays. After all, those people were counting on the compensation they’d receive from net metering when they decided to go solar. The compensation, which appears as a credit on utility bills, lets many homeowners slash their monthly utility payments close to zero.
See Original Article
No comments:
Post a Comment