Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists

Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists
The prospect of more customers “fully exiting from the grid,” the group said, “raises the potential for irreparable damages to revenues and growth.”
Since then, the utilities have targeted state solar power incentives, particularly net metering, which
credits solar customers for the electricity they generate but do not use and send back to the grid.
“There’s no doubt these utilities are out to kill rooftop solar,
and they’re succeeding,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a renewable energy advocacy group.
Homeowners with solar panels “avoid paying for use of the grid, even though they use it almost constantly to buy or sell electricity,” read a talking
point prepared by Indiana’s local investor-led utilities group, the Indiana Energy Association, and circulated among Republican state legislators.
A leaked audio recording appeared to reveal that the utility campaign deliberately misled pro-solar
voters into voting for an anti-solar policy, a tactic one consultant called “political jujitsu.”
The latest utility resistance to residential solar in places like Indiana is striking
because those states do not yet have big rooftop solar markets, said Autumn Proudlove, an analyst at the N. C. Clean Energy Technology Center at North Carolina State University.