WV Legislature & Power Industry Confound Solar Projects

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WV Legislature & Power Industry Confound Solar Projects

Gov. Tomblin can stop attempt to strangle W.Va. solar industry

Letter to the Editor by Bill Howley, Charleston Gazette, March 8, 2015

Things started well. When the West Virginia Legislature repealed the 2009 Alternative and Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard law early in this year’s session, legislators wisely kept the part of the law that authorized the West Virginia Public Service Commission to regulate net metering for retail electric customers who send electricity back through their electric meters.

Net metering is a system used in 44 U.S states that allows small scale solar power producers to get a one-for-one credit for the kilowatt hours they produce to offset electricity they use from a power company. Since 2009, more than 600 residential and small business customers in West Virginia have invested millions of dollars in new electricity generation with the understanding that net metering would be there for the 30-year lives of their systems.

After the Legislature passed House Bill 2001, repealing the 2009 AREPS law and preserving net metering, a bipartisan group of delegates introduced HB2201 to reinsert a definition of net metering into the new net metering law created by HB2001. That’s when the problems started.

Strangely, HB2201 did not use the definition of net metering found in either the Alternative and Renewable Energy Portfolio Standard law or the current Public Service Commission rules. Instead, HB2201, by changing an “or” to an “and,” eliminated a whole category of West Virginia citizens from having access to net metering. Many observers suspected that lobbyists from AEP and FirstEnergy, the two Ohio-based holding companies that control our state’s electrical system, started manipulating HB2201 even before the bill was introduced.

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