New Hampshire’s Public Utilities Commission has issued a decision on the state’s net metering policy that could have ripple effects for the state’s renewable energy industry.Regulators will keep net metering rates the same as they’ve been since 2017, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence to support changing rates one way or another. Those rates demonstrate how small scale renewable energy resources are valued and compensated for the power and the role they provide on the electric grid.The Public Utilities Commission has been looking into the issue of fair compensation for small, local energy resources in New Hampshire for years. In a decision last week, commissioners cast doubt on a state-requested study meant to help determine the value of small renewables on the grid. It calculated the value of small renewables based on their ability to avoid certain costs, like transporting electricity long distances.Commissioners said they had concerns about that study and couldn’t rely on it to determine fair net metering rates. Instead, those regulators are putting forward a separate process to begin new hearings on what a net metering overhaul could look like.The commission also rejected proposals to create a 20-year “legacy period,” which would have provided certainty for energy developers about the lives of their projects. (Contracts for community-scale projects generally last 20 years or more). The current rates are set to expire in 2040.Some advocates and industry leaders say without that legacy period, solar development in New Hampshire could continue to fall behind other New England states.“Without some sort of certainty and some sort of regulatory business assurance that there’s going to be a program in the future, this really is going to amount to sort of a slow strangling of the local renewable energy industry,” said Sam-Evans Brown, executive director of Clean Energy New Hampshire.Dan Weeks, a vice president at Revision Energy, said his industry was prepared for the commissioners to slash net metering rates, so it was encouraging to see the rates kept as they are.But, he said, keeping rates as they are means small renewables are being compensated less than they seem to be worth, according to the study the state commissioned in 2017. And without a legacy period, investors will now need to bet on how officials will decide to handle net metering rates within the next 16 years. That could make it challenging to build larger community scale projects, like the kind that provide up to a megawatt of power, enough to power about 160 homes in New Hampshire.“In the context of a market that is rife with uncertainty, this just adds more uncertainty, which means more reluctance to actually make the investments, to actually put steel in the ground and bring people on,” he said.That uncertainty may not be as impactful for smaller solar customers, like households that want to put an array on their roof. Those systems generally pay for themselve
Lun. Dic 23rd, 2024
