A bill that could reconfigure compensation for homeowners and businesses whose small-scale solar arrays pump electricity back into the grid advanced out of committee on Monday.
Following nearly two hours of public comment, the Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee voted 4-1 to endorse Senate File 111, “Net metering revisions.” Sen. Brian Boner, a Republican from Douglas cast the lone dissenting vote.
Similar measures have failed in past legislative sessions. But longtime proponent of revising the state’s net-metering policy, Republican Sen. Cale Case of Lander who is the legislation’s lead sponsor, believes this year’s version should temper opposition. Senate File 111 indefinitely grandfathers in those who have solar and other forms of small power generation installed before the law takes effect.
Based on public testimony, however, few minds appeared to have changed in either camp.
Electric utilities and others have long argued that customers without personal solar arrays are forced to subsidize those who can afford to invest in home solar — even if the customer-to-customer cost shift is minuscule. By earning credits from utilities, rooftop solar customers don’t contribute a fair share to systemwide infrastructure costs that they still rely on, utilities and opponents of current net-metering law say. Those systemwide costs fall more on those without rooftop solar. While the volume of rooftop solar in Wyoming is small — accounting for about 0.25% of all retail electric sales in the state, according to one estimate — lawmakers ought to build guardrails against a potential cost shift before home solar proliferates like it has in other states, according to Black Hills Energy Governmental Affairs Manager David Bush.
How Wyoming net-metering works
Net-metering laws apply to residential and small-business customers with 25-kilowatt or smaller solar arrays. According to state law, qualifying residential and small-business net-metering customers must be credited for the excess power they generate, but don’t use, and supply back into the system for other customers to use.
For example, if a customer uses 1,000 kilowatt hours in a month, but generates 1,200 kilowatt hours during the same period, sending a net 200 kilowatt hours of electricity back into the system, the utility must credit that customer for 200 kilowatt hours in the next monthly billing cycle. That kilowatt-hour-for-kilowatt-hour exchange occurs at the retail rate. Unused credits rollover month-to-month.
But, to disincentivize net-metering customers from vastly overbuilding a personal solar array to game the system, any leftover credits at the end of the year are paid out to the customer at the utility’s lower wholesale rate.
“I think the broader problem that we have with the issue of net metering is not that it hurts the utility,” Bush said. “We don’t take it in the shorts at all. We’re not punished … but it is something that I think other states have looked at and decided that it’s something they need to address.”
While utilities might be held harmless under Wyoming’s existing net-metering law, they support the notion that there’s an unfair shift among their customers.
Proponents of maintaining the current net-metering law, however, noted that beyond the negative effects of disincentivizing future investments in rooftop solar, it also hurts homeowners and small businesses that are simply trying to cope with continually rising electric bills.
“I’m here to oppose this bill because I believe it addresses a problem that doesn’t exist,” Fremont County resident Steff Kessler said. “It hurts what I call the little people — the regular Wyoming resident. Residents who want to save money on their escalating electricity bills and exercise energy freedom for their families.”
Several opponents noted that, in addition to families and businesses, Wyoming agricultural producers increasingly see self-owned, small-power generation as a necessary means to make ends meet.
“They’re not profiting [from net metering],” Sheridan-based Powder River Basin Resource Council Renewable Energy Community Organizer Natalie Johansen said. “They’re investing in their own energy security.
“This bill will further discourage solar adoption, putting our 14 solar businesses and over 175 local jobs at risk,” Johansen continued. “We should be expanding, not limiting opportunities for our residents to achieve energy independence.”
Karl Allred of Evanston, who served as interim secretary of state, warned that other states that have revised net-metering compensation have effectively killed the ability for their residents to invest in personal energy savings.
“Solar [adoption] will never be like it is in some of the other states, because we’re probably one of the cheapest states in the country for buying electricity,” Allred said. “Let people do what they can to save some money.”
Though several in favor of net-metering compensation reform hinted it’s a fool’s errand for rooftop solar buyers to think they’re helping “save the planet,” Charles Thomas of the Jackson Hole Climate Collective noted that there is a cost to carbon dioxide emissions, and said the state shouldn’t create roadblocks for those who want to invest in personal power generation to reduce their carbon footprint.
“Folks who generate their own energy don’t pay as much to support the grid as their neighbors do,” Thomas said. “But we feel it’s important to look at the other side of the equation.
“At our current pace [of greenhouse gas emissions],” Thomas continued, “dealing with climate change will cost us about half of our [gross domestic product] toward the end of the century. If left unchecked, it will eventually reach about 50% of our GDP.”
Others noted that electric utility rates are rife with cost-shifting, and at a scale much larger and more consequential than rooftop solar. Rural residents, for example, require much more infrastructure to deliver electrical service in remote areas compared to customers who live in towns — a point that Wyoming Public Service Commission Deputy Chairman Chris Petrie confirmed.
“You can’t have a separate perfect rate for every customer based on their exact characteristics and their exact situation,” Petrie said.
Others noted that SF 111 essentially tasks the PSC with determining whether there’s a cost shift between rooftop solar customers and those without, and adjusting rates to try to level the playing field. But none of those factors are “static,” Shannon Anderson of Solar United Neighbors said, and the heavily bureaucratic PSC is not easy for individuals to participate in.
“It just creates this level of uncertainty where people don’t want to build systems and installers go out of business,” Anderson told WyoFile.
The bill would also put rural electric co-ops in the driver’s seat when it comes to determining net-metering compensation, because most of their business dealings are not under the PSC’s rate regulating authority, she added. That backfired last year when the PSC OK’d a proposal by High Plains Power to bypass month-to-month kilowatt-hour credits at the retail rate and instead compensate customers each month at the wholesale rate, resulting in a major reduction in overall compensation to net-metering customers.
The Wyoming Supreme Court in August ruled against the co-op and agreed with the petitioner in the case, Powder River Basin Resource Council, which argued that small solar array customers “invested in net-metering systems with the understanding the Legislature incentivized them to do so by offering credit or compensation at retail, not lower, rates.”
Leaving it to the PSC to continually adjust net-metering rates, for multiple utilities each year, “is not a good vehicle to actually set a just and reasonable rate,” Anderson told the committee.
Sensing that rooftop solar will only become more popular in Wyoming, SF 111 sponsor Sen. Case urged the committee that the time to reform net metering is now. Otherwise, opposition to it will only grow.
“If we don’t act now, there’ll be more customers enjoying the cost shifting next time,” Case told his fellow committee members. “By the time that other customers finally realize the impact of this on them, it’ll be too late. We’ll never pass it here. So this is the time.”
What did everyone think would happen if every home generated electricity? Plus the grid does get full capacity at times in certain areas. Ain’t nothing “free” folks. After all Al Gore/Bill Gates and others don’t have single solar panel or wind turbine on their home or land.
This bill seems a attack on citizens of Wyoming who want to be free from the grip of corporate big energy. I have solar, for among other reasons, if the power is out, I have no water, and my home is un-liveable at that point. Any excess that I sell to the electric company at the end of the year is sold to them at wholesale, ie about 1/10 of what they sell electricity to the general customer. The big corp is not loosing money especially as I still have to pay for a service connection. It cost me a lot of money, to install solar, and has a long payback time and that expense was entered based on the current net metering rules and regulations, and now 2 or 3 senators/ congressmen want to break that agreement for some extremely tiny benefit Berkshire Hathaway ( owner of Rocky Mountain Power)?
The Wyoming legislature has no business passing bills aimed at harming select individuals who have done nothing wrong by attempting to provide for their own needs under that current laws that existed. Nobody is harmed by someone else having solar, and no citizen of Wyoming benefits by removing net metering.
Wyoming is also having a new nuclear power plant built in Kemmerer, which we as citizens will see absolutely no benefit from as all of the power is going to be used for AI ( artificial intelligence) and we are all going to be put at risk for zero benefit with the only beneficiary being people like Bill Gates who plan on tripling the worlds energy consumption not to benefit people but so the anti-humanist people like Bill Gates can run his MASSIVE energy consumption AI projects.
Please call you congressmen and tell them to vote against this bill.
Sen Cale Case hates solar, but why?…has been in the pockets of “big utility” and every couple of years spouts off in Cheyenne about the QUARTER of ONE PERCENT of us who have installed Rooftop Solar. Even the Black Hills rep quoted in the article says that Rooftop Solar is not causing the utility any harm. Case must get wined and dined (free lunch) for the continuous slam against Rooftop Solar. Work on something more Substantial, Case!
This bill SF111 should not be pass. We had our solar panels installed three years ago. Black Hills zeros out our power bank from our solar panels at the beginning of the year. The amount of money we receive will maybe pay what power that we use off the power grid in February. We do not make a profit off our solar panels. All this bill will do is put solar businesses out of business. This will do nothing to help customers without solar panels, but it will hurt the power companies, solar businesses, and customers that have invested thousands of dollars for their solar panels. we still pay the power company for the electric meter every month. If this bill is passed. Homeowners who have solar panel could have a battery storage backup installed for their solar panel system, have their meter removed. Which would save them more in a year than what they receive went the power company zero out their account each year.
Really, we have a legislature that acts against its citizens. Wake up Wyoming.
I chose to put solar electric panels on my rooftop because it seemed to be the right thing to do: less fossil fuel usage means less greenhouse gasses in the environment. I installed them on my roof knowing at age 79, it would never be cost effective for me. If the utilitiy companies complain they do not receive enought to recover their infrastructure costs, they simply need to adjust their billing to recover their exact costs for infrastructure and the exact cost of fuel. If I need to pay more for them to provide transmission lines and power plants, then reflect that in the bill. I will gladly pay it, because that, too, is the right thing to do.
Residential rooftop solar is energy security. Any effort to diminish the ability of residents to provides their households and families with energy security is a direct attack on your freedom. Do not listen to arguments against full net metering, the proponents of such arguments are dishonest liars.
thanks for this article. People who want to install should be able to do it without financial penalty. Isn’t that the American way, be independent? I have solar panels and love them, I don’t want to be holden to bullies, I want to be financially and energy independent.
These “geniuses” that we send to Cheyenne are worrying about 0.25% of us having rooftop solar? Isn’t that called creating a solution where there’s no problem? Sen. Cole Case obviously hates solar and this isn’t the first time he’s tried to stimmy this alternative form of energy. Speaking of “energy”, maybe Case needs to legislate things that are of importance to the people of Wyoming versus tilting at windmills