Daily Freeman: Revised New York State Regulations Let Utilities Charge Fee to Private Solar Electric Producers

CLP's Jennifer Metzger comments on the newly approved regulations that change the way solar customers are compensated for their power. 

Read the full article originally published in the Daily Freeman. 

Jennifer Metzger, director of the group Citizens for Local Power, said it is too early to know whether a replacement system for compensating small electric producers will encourage people to continue to move away from fossil fuels.
“What we were pushing for was for them to not wholesale drop net metering, but have it exist side-by-side with the new proposal so that customers and developers could opt into it to see if it benefited them and test it first,” she said.
“The kind of projects that will be definitely negatively affected are community renewable projects, because they benefit from retail net metering,” Metzger said. “They created these market transition credits that are suppose to reduce the negative impact on rates in the immediate term.”
Metzger said there could be advantages to determining the value of electric production.
“It depends on how they (calculate) it,” she said. “One thing the order does is build in a review process, recognizing that this is a completely incomplete methodology in that they have yet to figure out how value all the benefits to the electric distribution system.”

Read more about the new PSC order here