Expanding solar financing to include third-party ownership would allow more houses and farms to host solar arrays. Photo credit Dirk Franke via Wikimedia Commons.

Most Virginia legislators say they want more renewable energy. They listen to their constituents, they understand the economic opportunities, they support consumer choice, and they think it’s important to diversify our energy supply, even if they aren’t against fossil fuels. But when it comes to voting, only one voice counts with them, and that’s Dominion’s.

And so Dominion Virginia Power once again succeeded in blocking legislation that would have opened the market for wind and solar to greater private investment through third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs), community solar programs, removal of standby charges and the lifting of size caps. (I described most of these bills in a previous post.)

Rather than capitulate publicly, however, the chairs of the Senate and House Commerce and Labor Committees, Senator Frank Wagner and Delegate Terry Kilgore, determined to “carry over” to next year the bulk of the renewable energy bills, assigning them to a new subcommittee to be named later, and which will consider the bills sometime later in the year.

If you are a pessimist, you will notice this means that none of the bills even got a hearing in committee, and all are effectively dead for the year, with no legislators you can hold accountable. You will also have doubts about the likelihood of this subcommittee delivering results favorable to solar and wind advocates, given that Mssrs. Wagner and Kilgore are not known for standing tall against utility interests.

If you are an optimist, however (and what choice do you have?), you will respond with hope that this subcommittee will browbeat the utilities into accepting at least some legislative reforms in the service of the public good. You will point out that legislators’ unwillingness to simply kill bills at the utilities’ behest is progress in itself, driven by an outpouring of constituent support for renewable energy and backed by new lobbying firepower.

In past years, Dominion never gave more than it got, and routinely killed off legislation. And this year, Dominion’s approach to the most important piece of legislation—Delegate Randy Minchew’s HB 1286—followed the utility’s standard operating procedure. Over many weeks Dominion lobbyists met with members of the industry coalition and persuaded them to strip away parts of the legislation—first one provision, then another, all in the name of “compromise.” Eventually the bill was reduced to a single paragraph recognizing the legality of third-party PPAs, with all sides in agreement.

Then two days before the subcommittee hearing on the bill, Dominion reneged and produced substitute language that eliminated authority for all but a narrow subset of PPAs, while suddenly slapping new standby charges on small commercial customers who install renewable energy systems, a provision entirely separate from the PPA issue.

The standby charges were a known poison pill. In 2012 Dominion convinced the solar industry to accept the idea of standby charges in exchange for raising the size limit on residential solar systems from 10 to 20 kW. The industry assumed the charges would be modest at worst, given the value of distributed solar to the grid. But Dominion then persuaded the State Corporation Commission to approve charges so high as to kill the market for the larger systems. Appalachian Power followed suit.

Dominion would dearly love to institute standby charges on more customers, so this year the company is ransacking renewable energy bills looking for opportunities. I’m told that after Delegate Minchew elected to have HB 1286 carried over rather than accede to the standby charge language, Dominion lobbyists went to Senator Richard Stuart and tried to use another pro-renewables bill as the vehicle for standby charges.*

This obnoxious tactic smacks of desperation, and must be as irritating to legislators as it is to renewable energy advocates. We should not be surprised to see it a point of contention later this year when the subcommittee meets. Standby charges may be bogus, but utilities see them as their best tool to prevent the spread of customer-owned generation that threatens utility profits.

*That bill is SB 779, a latecomer filed at the request of Loudoun County farmer and philanthropist Karen Schaufeld. Her new group, Powered by Facts, initiated several pro-solar bills separate from those of the solar industry. Although Stuart’s bill as written includes sweeping reforms for farmers who want to sell excess renewable energy, we hear it was suffering the same death-by-a-thousand-amendments even before the standby charge issue came up. For now, however, the legislative information website continues to show the bill with its original language. It will likely be heard on Monday if it is heard at all; we expect to see it bounced to the new subcommittee.