Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists<br />The prospect of more customers “fully exiting from the grid,” the group said, “raises the potential for irreparable damages to revenues and growth.”<br />Since then, the utilities have targeted state solar power incentives, particularly net metering, which<br />credits solar customers for the electricity they generate but do not use and send back to the grid.<br />“There’s no doubt these utilities are out to kill rooftop solar,<br />and they’re succeeding,” said David Pomerantz, executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute, a renewable energy advocacy group.<br />A leaked audio recording appeared to reveal that the utility campaign deliberately misled pro-solar<br />voters into voting for an anti-solar policy, a tactic one consultant called “political jujitsu.”<br />The latest utility resistance to residential solar in places like Indiana is striking<br />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.<br />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<br />point prepared by Indiana’s local investor-led utilities group, the Indiana Energy Association, and circulated among Republican state legislators.
