Nevada Solar/Grid Legislation

[TheTalkingMule]

Massive news out of Nevada last week as the state legislature has put the final touches on a complete 180 for residential solar in the state. Germany tells the story of the current global solar renaissance, but IMO Nevada tells the story of residential solar in the US.

Not long ago Nevada's Buffett-owned monopoly utility NV Energy leveraged their connections within the state legislature, state utility commission and governor's mansion to essentially sabotage the entire residential solar market. By eliminating net metering(even for existing solar customers), adding fixed fees, and proposing a payback rate of 3 cents per kWh, NVEnergy instantly made solar a massive financial risk. SolarCity operations ground to a halt and state-wide installs shrank to nothing.

Fast-forward to the 2016 election cycle where the people of Nevada passed a ballot initiative to deregulate from their existing monopoly. It'll take another vote in 2018 to fully implement, but it appears the message got across.

Nevada Senate passed both SB65 and SB204 unanimously

SB 204 directs the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to decide by Oct. 1, 2018 whether it should set biennial goals for the integration of battery storage by utilities, to reach the following specific goals, which are outlined in the legislation itself:

• the integration of renewable energy resources into the transmission and distribution grid;
• the improvement in the reliability of the electric grid;
• a reduction in the emission of 9 greenhouse gases; and
• certain other purposes.

What makes the legislation most interesting, however, is its requirement that the PUC consider all known and measurable benefits and costs, without limitation. For solar installers who have complained that state regulations often don’t take into account the environmental and grid-relief costs of solar, SB 204 clearly opens the door for the PUC to consider them – and in fact requires them to do so.

SB 65 requires the PUC to give preferential treatment energy sources “that provide the greatest economic and environmental benefits to the State, as well as those that provide for diverse electricity supply portfolios and which reduce customer exposure to [the] price volatility 18 of fossil fuels and the potential costs of carbon” when considering utilities’ Integrated Resource Plans (IRP).

 

[SageBrush]

I love your optimism, but I'll wait for the current louses in the NV to be kicked out and residential PV to bloom again before I celebrate.

 

[TheTalkingMule]

That's the crazy thing, a lot of these are the same players. This is the same governor who was lead council for NV Energy before being placed in the governor's mansion.

I could have sworn I also saw a proposed schedule for compensation. A step down scheme from net metering to certain percentages of retail price depending on solar's % of peak supply. Sounds very similar to Germany's wildly successful feed-in-tariff.

This has passed the Senate unanimously, can't imagine the state House would be able to stop it considering the amount of jobs at stake. We shall see!