Tag Archives: APCo

How Virginia localities will get to 100% renewable

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Supporters of clean energy gathered in Richmond on April 25 to launch the 100% Virginia Campaign. Photo courtesy of the Sierra Club.

Last week a coalition led by the Sierra Club launched a “100% Virginia” campaign designed in part to encourage more localities to follow the lead of Blacksburg and Floyd in committing to a 100% renewable energy future. For many people this energy transition now feels inevitable, at least in the long run. In the short run, though, it still feels very difficult.

Consider the obstacles we face in Virginia. Most localities have to deal with Dominion Energy Virginia (Dominion) or Appalachian Power (APCo), which have monopolies in their service territories. With few exceptions, customers can’t just sign up with another supplier who will offer a cleaner energy mix. And most local governments themselves buy electricity collectively from Dominion under a contract that gives them an attractive price but constrains their ability to generate power for themselves.

Our utilities themselves show no interest in abandoning fossil fuels. Dominion Energy Virginia’s parent company, Dominion Energy, is heavily invested in natural gas transmission, storage and export. The parent company needs the electric utility it owns to keep burning fracked gas for electricity so it can fill pipelines like its $6 billion Atlantic Coast Pipeline. Dominion has sunk billions of dollars of its customers’ money into new gas generating plants, which it won’t want to close early. And Dominion’s 2017 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) showed the company expected to see its CO2 emissions actually increase over the next 25 years.

For its part, APCo is a subsidiary of Ohio-based American Electric Power (AEP). AEP has reduced its use of coal in recent years and plans major investments in renewable energy, but it won’t reach its planned 80% reduction in CO2 emissions until 2050. Meanwhile it is increasing its use of fracked gas.

Both Dominion Energy Virginia and APCo make money by building new infrastructure, so they need customers to use more energy, not less. They oppose mandatory efficiency savings as well as customer-owned and third-party owned solar, both of which would reduce their own sales. One result is Virginia’s abysmal showing on energy efficiency rankings.

Virginia lacks a mandatory renewable portfolio standard (RPS), relying on a weak and voluntary standard. As a result, Dominion Energy Virginia’s energy mix is currently less than 4% renewable energy, none of it from wind or solar. (Dominion does generate a tiny amount of solar energy but sells the renewable energy certificates, so legally it no longer qualifies as energy from solar. This will be an ongoing problem as Dominion builds more solar.) APCo has more wind in its energy mix than Dominion does, but also more coal.

Customers who want to generate their own renewable energy face a long list of policy barriers, and Virginia lacks incentives like tax credits, rebates, or a REC market that would spur private investment. Under pressure from Dominion, APCo and the rural electric cooperatives, the General Assembly routinely defeats proposals that would boost investment in rooftop solar. A recent report gave Virginia an F on solar policy, ranking us among the “10 States Blocking Distributed Solar.”

If the General Assembly is unhelpful, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission (SCC) is actively hostile to renewable energy and energy efficiency. The SCC cares about low rates and not much else.

It’s also hard for local governments to fill the policy gap. Virginia is a Dillon Rule state, meaning local governments have only the power granted to them by state government. A city or county can’t adopt a building code requiring homes to be more energy efficient than called for in the statewide code, or require new buildings to have solar panels or green roofs.

With all these obstacles, the prospects for meaningful change once looked grim. But two trends have converged to change the outlook. First, the economics of electric generation have now shifted decisively in favor of renewable energy and away from fossil fuels (though a lot of people don’t know it yet). And second, customer demand for renewable energy has surged across the political spectrum, with major corporations driving much of the action.

As a result, even in Virginia a number of trends favor renewable energy:

Dominion’s 2017 IRP dropped plans for new baseload gas plants before at least 2025, a sharp change from 2016. That IRP for the first time identified solar as the least cost resource in Virginia, though it proposed a build-out of only 240 MW per year. Dominion’s 2018 IRP, due out May 1, will almost surely call for more than that, in keeping with 2018 legislation, SB 966, putting more than 5,000 MW of wind and solar by 2028 in the public interest.

SB 966 also called for a billion dollars in new spending on energy efficiency programs, and limited the SCC’s ability to reject proposed efficiency programs. Meanwhile, localities are putting in place Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) lending programs that will allow businesses and non-profits to access low-cost financing for both energy efficiency and renewable energy.

Corporate demand has created new solar options, including some from Dominion but also some that don’t involve our utilities. For example, the 500 MW solar farm that will serve Microsoft and others appears to be structured to bypass Dominion entirely. The deal uses what is known as a wholesale power purchase agreement, an option increasingly popular with corporations, institutions, local governments, and other large purchasers of energy. The Northern Virginia Regional Commission is currently working with local governments in its area to do something similar.

Legislation passed in 2017 is also finally producing a solar option for Dominion customers that will likely be available by the end of this year. As proposed, it will offer electricity generated from solar facilities in Virginia at a cost comparable to that of Dominion’s wretched Green Power Program.

Offshore wind has not gotten much attention in Virginia recently, but Dominion’s partnership with the Danish company Orsted, the world’s leading offshore wind developer, puts Virginia’s 12-MW pilot project on track for completion in 2020, with the commercial lease area likely to see the full build-out of 2,000 MW occur during the 2020s.

Finally, the Northam Administration is finalizing new regulations designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by having Virginia utilities trade carbon allowances with those in states that are members of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). It’s not clear yet how much this will incentivize utilities to build wind and solar.

Localities considering a commitment to 100% renewable energy should feel optimistic about these developments. As renewable energy costs continue to tumble, charting a path to 100% also means saving money for taxpayers.

The exact path to 100% may not be clear, but it will likely involve a combination of some or all these options:

  • Prioritizing energy efficiency in both public and private buildings;
  • Investing in large offsite solar (and wind) facilities, and encouraging corporate and institutional customers to participate in similar investments;
  • Putting solar on rooftops and parking lots of municipal buildings and schools, using third-party PPA financing to avoid upfront capital costs;
  • Offering C-PACE financing to businesses for energy efficiency and solar;
  • Sponsoring and promoting “solarize” bulk purchasing programs that make it easier and cheaper for residential and commercial customers to install solar;
  • Promoting utility-sponsored renewable energy purchase options for residents and businesses as they become available; and
  • If adequate utility options don’t emerge, using municipal aggregation to purchase renewable electricity from another supplier.

Localities also have to do a better job advocating for clean energy at the General Assembly and with the Governor, where they are currently underrepresented in the energy debate. They need to become squeaky wheels about things like the barriers to customer-owned solar, the paucity of renewable energy options and our substandard residential building code.

But most of all, localities have to begin taking advantage of the efficiency and solar options that already exist. Too many boards of supervisors and city councils waste time dithering and second-guessing and deferring to unmotivated staff and wondering if, gee, maybe it would be better to wait for someone else to go first.

Getting to 100% may not be easy, but it’s impossible if you never start.

Virginia hearing examiner says renewable energy PPAs are legal, but will the ruling stick?

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A third-party PPA made it possible to build this solar facility at the University of Richmond. Appalachian Power Company contends that a project like this would be illegal in its territory.

A third-party PPA made it possible to build this solar facility at the University of Richmond. Appalachian Power Company contends that a project like this would be illegal in its territory.

A hearing examiner for the Virginia State Corporation Commission recommended on August 31 that the SCC reject Appalachian Power Company’s proposed alternative to third-party power purchase agreements (PPAs) for renewable energy, concluding the program is not in the public interest. The parties will have three weeks to comment before the recommendation goes to the Commissioners for a final decision. The case is PUE-2015-00040.

The ruling against APCo’s proposed Rider RGP is less important to customers than the reasoning behind it. In addition to finding a myriad of faults with the proposal, the Hearing Examiner concluded it isn’t needed because PPAs are already legal under the Virginia Code. This is an outcome long sought by the solar industry and environmental groups, and one supported by the Attorney General’s Office of Consumer Counsel.

However, the Hearing Examiner’s report is merely a recommendation. Nothing is final until the Commissioners rule, and they could make a decision about Rider RGP without addressing the current legality of PPAs. Moreover, earlier this year, APCo proposed another program that it clearly hopes will nip in the bud any surge of PPA activity that might result from a decision in the present case. (I’ll get to that in a moment.)

The rejection of Rider RGP won’t disappoint any would-be customers. A long line of witnesses testified at the hearing on September 29, 2015 that APCo’s expensive and convoluted program would find no takers. As the Solar Research Institute summarized it, the proposed Rider RGP “would require a customer interested in a solar PPA to first pay for 100% of their service under the standard tariff, pay for 100% of the solar energy generated, pay a $30 program fee, and receive excess payments back through a Renewable Output Credit.” Oh, and they still wouldn’t be using renewable energy. (Note that although solar energy was the focus of the discussion for participants, the decision applies to other forms of renewable energy as well.)

The SCC staff made some suggestions to improve the program, but the hearing examiner, Deborah Ellenberg, concluded it was really beyond saving. Not only that, but the plain language of the Virginia Code makes third-party PPAs legal in the state already. Thus, there is no need for a utility-sponsored alternative.

Ellenberg pointed to two statutory provisions that support the legality of third-party PPAs. First, Virginia Code §56-577 A 5 provides that customers may purchase renewable energy from third-party sellers if their own utility does not offer a tariff for renewable energy. Specifically, customers may:

[P]urchase electric energy provided 100 percent from renewable energy from any supplier of electric energy licensed to sell retail electric energy within the Commonwealth . . . if the incumbent electric utility serving the exclusive service territory does not offer an approved tariff for electric energy provided 100 percent from renewable energy. . . .

Until now, APCo has offered only a green power program that sells RECs, which the SCC says doesn’t count.

The language of §56-577 sounds clear enough, but APCo and Dominion Power have maintained that this section only allows customers to go elsewhere if the other supplier can provide 100% of their electricity from renewable energy, something that can’t be done with a solar facility or a wind turbine.

This flimsy reading of the statute was the basis on which Dominion challenged a PPA at Washington and Lee University back in 2011. The issue was temporarily resolved two years later when Dominion and the solar industry agreed to a pilot program that now allows a limited number of PPAs in Dominion territory, under tight parameters that exclude residential customers. The program never applied in APCo territory, however—a sore point to customers there. APCo has clung to its reading of §56-577, regardless of the growing clamor for renewable energy in southwestern Virginia.

Ellenberg’s report flatly rejects the utility interpretation. If the SCC adopts her reading, any customer in APCo territory would be free to buy renewable energy from third-party suppliers, until APCo offers a qualifying program.

Ellenberg also cited Virginia’s net metering statute. Virginia Code §56-594 authorizes “customer generators” to enter into behind-the-meter PPAs with third parties that own and operate a renewable facility for the customer. Code §56-594 B defines an eligible customer generator for net metering purposes as “a customer that owns and operates, or contracts with other persons to own or operate, or both, an electrical generating facility that . . . uses as its total source of fuel renewable energy . . .” (emphasis added).

Interpreting this provision takes no special legal talent, surely. It would seem to cover residential and commercial facilities installed and owned by third-party developers, including the familiar no-money-down contract offered to residential customers by Solar City. But again, APCo and Dominion Virginia Power claim the Code doesn’t mean what it says. For more than five years they’ve backed up their position with threats of lawsuits, creating the kind of uncertainty that is toxic to development deals.

If the SCC’s final order endorses the hearing examiner’s finding that PPAs are currently legal, the result could be to open up the Virginia solar (and wind) market to large amounts of private investment statewide.

However, Ellenberg’s finding that PPAs are currently legal appears in her discussion but not in her recommendations to the commissioners; her recommendations are limited to the actions she proposes (rejecting or modifying the tariff). The SCC does not have to rule on the question of PPA legality in order to decide this case. Surely, though, it would be strange if it were to duck the opportunity now that the issue has been fully briefed. With solar a hot commodity across the state, the current legal limbo has become a significant economic drag that the SCC ought not to ignore.

As I mentioned, though, APCo still has one card up its sleeve. This spring it proposed a new tariff to offer its customers 100% renewable energy derived from existing wind, solar and hydro projects. The product appears to meet the condition of §56-577. If approved, it would slam shut the door that the Hearing Examiner just opened (or rather, that she said was open all along, if you had dared to go through it into the toxic miasma where gray-suited lawyers lay in wait). APCo’s request for approval of the tariff (PUE-2016-00051) is scheduled to be heard by the SCC on November 15, with comments due by November 8.

Solar advocates take a dim view of APCo’s move. The new tariff won’t build any new facilities; it simply shifts the burden of paying for existing renewable energy projects onto volunteers, at a significant premium. In today’s market, third-party developers can offer electricity generated by new solar projects at competitive prices. So APCo’s tariff looks less like an accommodation to its eco-conscious customers, and more like a maneuver to prevent anyone from building solar on its turf.

It’s high time the SCC put a stop to this anti-competitive behavior and let Virginians build solar projects with their own money. The Commissioners can follow the Hearing Examiner’s advice, or they can take a pragmatic approach and recognize that PPAs are really just a way to finance projects. They don’t turn solar developers into utilities, and APCo should stop wasting everyone’s time and money blocking private investment in a part of the Commonwealth that desperately needs it.

APCo tries to quell criticism on solar policies, and just makes matters worse

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Photo credit Matt Ruscio, Secure Futures LLC

Photo credit Matt Ruscio, Secure Futures LLC

Appalachian Power Company (APCo) has spent the past two years ducking its Virginia customers who want the ability to buy solar power from third-party providers. This spring it finally unveiled what it claims will be the answer to their prayers: a bizarre, convoluted “Experimental Rider R.G.P.,” available only to certain larger customers like colleges and universities.

Under this proposal, a customer can arrange to have solar panels installed and owned by a third party developer but won’t be allowed to use the electricity or take advantage of net metering, as it would if it owned the system itself. The customer will have to continue buying dirty electricity from APCo, while the solar electricity the customer is also paying for is sold onto the grid, and the customer credited for its value according to a complicated and unfriendly formula. Instead of breaking even or saving money on electricity bills by going solar, the customer will pay substantially more.

By contrast, normally a customer who installs solar uses the solar electricity “behind the meter,” reducing the use of dirty electricity from the grid and saving money, especially if it had been paying high demand charges to its utility, as many institutions do.*

The limitations and poor economics of APCo’s proposal has would-be customers and solar advocates crying foul. According to an analysis by Professor Mark “Buzz” Belleville of the Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA, the program is so expensive that it’s not likely to get any takers. Worse, he concludes, “The [State Corporation Commission’s] approval of the proposal would actually be counterproductive to solar deployment in Virginia.”

That’s because “APCo will be able to claim that they made a [Power Purchase Agreement] program available, and the fact no one signed up shows that there is simply not a demand for PPAs in SW Virginia. Moreover, the SCC’s approval may strengthen APCo’s argument that PPAs are not legally permissible in APCo territory unless they are entered into pursuant to its SCC-approved program, and it will lay the groundwork for utilities to argue that a customer who has a PPA is not eligible for net metering under Va. Code §56-594.”

Understanding what’s at stake here requires a short history lesson. Back in 2011, a solar developer out of Staunton, Virginia, called Secure Futures LLC installed a solar array on a rooftop at Washington & Lee University. The parties used a popular financing approach known as a third-party power purchase agreement (PPA), which can let a customer go solar with no money down by having the developer keep ownership of the solar panels and sell the electricity they produce to the customer.

Federal tax rules make PPAs especially important for tax-exempt entities like colleges that can’t use the 30% federal tax credit for renewable energy facilities. When a for-profit solar developer owns a facility, however, it can take the tax credit and pass on the savings to the customer.

PPAs appeared to be explicitly authorized under Virginia law, but when Dominion Virginia Power got wind of the arrangement at Washington & Lee it moved quickly to block it, claiming a violation of its monopoly on the sale of electricity within its territory. Dominion’s weak legal position didn’t matter; the mere threat that the utility giant would unleash its army of lawyers was enough to stop the PPA in its tracks. The university completed its solar installation using an alternative, non-PPA approach.

Dominion had won the skirmish, but at a price. The utility took such a drubbing in the court of public opinion that it eventually acceded to legislation in 2013 establishing a limited “pilot program” under which not-for-profit entities and some commercial businesses can use PPAs, at least through the end of 2015. Secure Futures has gone on to develop additional solar projects in Virginia under the legislation, including at the University of Richmond and, under a just-announced deal, at six Albermarle County schools.

APCo, however, didn’t participate in the pilot program, and it has steadfastly resisted efforts to bring it into the fold, even in the face of mounting criticism. As Belleville pointed out in a Roanoke Times op-ed in March of 2014, the failure to extend the PPA law to residents of APCo territory put southwest Virginia at an economic disadvantage, closing it off to business opportunities that are available elsewhere in the state. Yet utility lobbying successfully defeated legislation this year that would have made PPAs explicitly legal statewide.

So southwest Virginia’s state of limbo persists, with many legal experts advising that PPAs are legal there under Virginia law, but most developers and customers unwilling to expose themselves to prolonged and expensive litigation to find out for sure. This state of affairs suits APCo very well. No doubt it calculates that the worst that can happen now is that the SCC rejects its rider and prolongs the state of limbo. Then the utility’s lobbyists will tell legislators it did its best to help customers but was prevented from doing so by that darned SCC.

APCo’s actions are those of a rational monopolist facing the threat of competition; it is easier to keep a competitor out of your market than it is to improve your product. But its efforts to throw roadblocks in the way of solar also reflect the suspicion, shared by many American utilities, that distributed solar generation benefits only the customer who installs it, at the expense of the utility and other customers. They believe this justifies them in making solar more expensive, even if it means preventing projects from being developed altogether.

This is a textbook example of cutting off your nose to spite your face, given the need for a rapid build-out of distributed solar generation to fight climate change and strengthen grid security. These are not considerations that hold much sway with Virginia’s SCC, however, so let’s confine ourselves to the cost argument.

The problem for APCo is that the notion that distributed solar increases costs for other ratepayers is mere conjecture, and neither APCo nor Dominion has offered any hard data to support it. Indeed, the only evidence from Virginia points the other way, according to Secure Futures CEO Tony Smith.

Since his company’s skirmish with Dominion, Smith has worked with a municipal utility, Harrisonburg Electric Commission (HEC), to study the financial impacts to the utility of Secure Futures’ first Virginia PPA project, a 104-kilowatt array installed in 2010 at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg (outside of Dominion territory).

The case study measured only the energy and capacity-related impacts of the solar array on the utility, ignoring the wide range of other benefits often considered in “value of solar” analyses. Analyzing three years’ worth of data, Smith found that the EMU array provided an average net benefit to the utility of $22.78 per kilowatt per year. The full technical analysis is available here. In an article soon to be published in the May/June issue of Solar Today, Smith writes:

Using a net benefit model developed in consultation with HEC management, we find that in the case of the EMU solar installation, the benefits to HEC outweigh the costs . . . Our net benefit results suggest that within HEC territory, solar installed for a commercial customer with demand exceeding 1,000 kW benefits all municipal utility stakeholders, including non-participants.

Certainly it would be interesting to repeat the analysis with data from more Virginia projects, including ones in APCo’s territory. But first, those projects have to get built. Right now that isn’t happening due to the PPA limbo. If APCo’s Experimental Rider gets approved—well, the projects still won’t get built, because no one will sign up.

Flip a coin: heads APCo wins, tails customers lose.

The SCC case is No. PUE-2015-00040. An evidentiary hearing is scheduled for September 29 at the SCC offices in Richmond, Virginia.

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*Residential customers don’t pay demand charges, making this an unfamiliar concept to many people. Demand charges (KW) are fees over and above the cost of energy usage (kWh) that are assessed according to a customer’s peak power requirements, measured as the highest peak demand in a given 30-minute period during the month. For many institutions, demand charges can exceed the cost of energy usage, and using solar electricity to reduce peak demand is often a compelling reason to look at solar in the first place.

Virginia’s amazing year in energy: gas rises, coal falls, and solar shines (but it’s still not okay to say “climate change”)

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Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC in support of the Clean Power Plan

Virginians rally in front of U.S. EPA Headquarters in Washington, DC in support of the Clean Power Plan

Nobody laughed a few years ago when former governor Bob McDonnell dubbed Virginia the “Energy Capital of the East Coast”; we were all too astounded by the hyperbole. And today, even “Energy Suburb” still seems like a stretch. Yet, if you measure achievement by the sheer level of activity, Virginia is making a play for importance. The year’s top energy stories show us fully engaged in the worldwide battle between fossil fuels and renewable energy. Of course, while the smart money says renewables will dominate by mid-century, Virginia seems determined to drown rather than give up its fossil fuel addiction.

Coal falls hard; observers disagree on whether it bounces or goes splat. Nationwide, 2014 was a bad year for the coal industry. Coal stocks fell precipitously; mining jobs continued to decline; and the one thing electric utilities and the public found to agree on is that no one likes coal. Even in Virginia, with its long history of mining, coal had to play defense for what may have been the first time ever. So when Governor McAuliffe released the state’s latest energy plan in October, what was otherwise a paean to “All of the Above” omitted the stanza on coal. And this month, the governor proposed a rollback of the subsidies coal companies pocket by mining Virginia coal.

Of course, coal is not going quietly; Senator Charles Carrico (himself heavily subsidized by Alpha Natural Resources) has already responded with a bill to extend the subsidies to 2022.

EPA opens a door to a cleaner future, and Republicans try to brick it up. Speaking of hard times for coal, in June the EPA unveiled its proposal to lower carbon emissions from existing power plants 30% nationwide by 2030. Instead of targeting plants one-by-one, EPA proposed a systemic approach, offering a suite of options for states to reach their individualized targets.

The proposal drew widespread support from the public, but Virginia’s 38% reduction target set off howls of protest from defenders of the status quo. The staff of the State Corporation Commission claimed the rule was illegal and would cost ratepayers $6 billion. Republicans convened a special meeting of the House and Senate Energy and Commerce Committees, where they tried out a number of arguments, not all of which proved ready for prime time. The rule, they said, threatens Virginia with a loss of business to more favored states like—and I am not making this up—West Virginia. Also, Virginia should have received more credit for lowering its carbon emissions by building nuclear plants back in the 1970s when no one was thinking about carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, the Southern Environmental Law Center analyzed the rule and concluded that actually, compliance will not be hard. Virginia is already 80% of the way there, and achieving the rest will produce a burst of clean-energy jobs coupled with savings for consumers through energy efficiency.

Undaunted, Republicans have already introduced a thumb-your-nose-at-EPA bill developed by the fossil fuel champions at the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The “solarize” movement takes Virginia by storm. For the last few years, solar energy has been exploding in popularity across the U.S., but Virginia always seemed to be missing the party. So it surprised even advocates this year when pent-up consumer demand manifested itself in the blossoming of local solar buying cooperatives and other bulk-purchase arrangements. “Solarize Blacksburg” made its debut in March, going on to sign up hundreds of homeowners for solar installations. It was followed in quick succession by the launch of similar programs in Richmond, Charlottesville, Harrisonburg, Northern Virginia, Halifax, Floyd, and Hampton Roads.

The main reason for the solarize programs’ success was the steep decline in the cost of solar energy. 2014 saw the cost of residential installations in Virginia fall to record low prices, making the investment worthwhile to a broad swath of homeowners for the first time.

Utilities say maybe to solar, but only for themselves. Virginia still boasts no utility-scale solar, but utilities elsewhere signed long-term power purchase contracts for solar energy at prices that were sometimes below that of natural gas: under 6.5 cents/kilowatt-hour in Georgia, and under 5 cents in Texas. Compare that to the estimated 9.3 cents/kWh cost of power from Dominion Virginia Power’s newest and most up-to-date coal plant, the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Plant, and you’ll understand why Dominion has suddenly taken an interest in solar projects. Sadly, it’s own foray into rooftop solar so far stands as an example of what not to do, and a testament to why the private market should be allowed to compete.

Yet Virginia utilities continued their hostility to customer-owned solar. Dominion put the kibosh on a bill that would have expanded access to solar energy through community net-metering, while Appalachian Power matched Dominion’s earlier success in imposing punitive standby charges on owners of larger residential systems.

Fracking, pipelines, and gas plants, oh my! Renewable energy may be the future, but the present belongs to cheap natural gas. Yes, the fracking process is dirty, noisy and polluting, and yes, methane leakage around gas wells is exacerbating climate change. But did we mention gas is cheap?

2014 saw proposals to drill gas wells east of I-95, while the Virginia government began updating its regulations to govern fracking. Dominion Power started construction on a second new gas power plant, and talked up its plans for a third. The utility giant, a major player in the gas transmission business, also got approval to turn its liquefied natural gas import terminal in Cove Point, Maryland, into an export terminal. With visions of customers dancing in its head, it also announced plans for a major new pipeline to bring fracked gas from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina—one of three proposed pipelines that would cut through the Virginia countryside and across natural treasures like the Appalachian Trail. The pipeline created an instant protest movement but gained the wholehearted approval of Governor McAuliffe.

Flooding in Hampton Roads becomes the new normal; it’s still not okay to ask what’s causing it. A cooler-than-normal year for the eastern United States gulled many landlubbers into believing that global warming was taking a breather, but meanwhile the ocean continued its inexorable rise along Virginia’s vulnerable coastline. It’s one thing to shrug off the occasional storm, said residents; it’s harder to ignore seawater that cuts off your parking lot at every high tide. 2014 will go down as the year everyone finally agreed we have a problem—even in the General Assembly, which passed legislation to develop a response to the “recurrent flooding.” But while the bill recognized that the problem will just get worse, it avoided noting why.

The public gets it, though. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that climate change was the number one topic of interest to writers of letters to the editor in 2014. And loud cheers greeted Governor McAuliffe’s announcement that he would reestablish the state’s commission on climate change, which Bob McDonnell had disbanded. As one environmental leader quipped, “People in Tidewater are tired of driving through tidal water.”

Public corruption: in Virginia, it’s not just for politicians. Everyone can agree that it was a really bad year for the Virginia Way, that gentlemanly notion that persons of good character don’t need no stinkin’ ethics laws. But we also saw plenty to prove the adage that the real scandal is what’s legal. As we learned, Virginia law allows unlimited corporate contributions to campaigns, and puts no limits on what campaigns can spend money on. So if some legislators act more like corporate employees than servants of the public, well, that’s how the system was set up to work.

But the system only works when corporations get their money’s worth from the politicians, and that quid pro quo usually comes at the public’s expense. For example, take Dominion Power’s North Anna 3 shenanigans (please). In an exceptionally bold exploitation of the Virginia Way, Dominion Power secured passage of legislation allowing it to bill customers for hundreds of millions of dollars it had spent towards a new nuclear plant that it is unlikely to build. (And the irony is that ratepayers will still be better off throwing the money down that rathole than they will be if Dominion does manage to build it.)

So as we look ahead to 2015’s energy battles, anyone wondering who the winners and losers will be needs only one piece of guidance: in Virginia, just follow the money.

APCo wants higher bills for homeowners who go solar

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Workers installing solar on a roof. Photo credit: Dennis Schroeder, NREL

Workers installing solar on a roof. Photo credit: Dennis Schroeder, NREL

Update: The SCC approved APCo’s standby charges with a small modification. As it had when considering Dominion’s standby charge, the SCC declined to consider the benefits of solar to APCo. See http://www.scc.virginia.gov/docketsearch/DOCS/303%2301!.PDF at page 36-37.

Appalachian Power Company (APCo) is seeking permission from utility regulators to impose new “standby” charges on residential customers who install solar systems over 10 kilowatts (kW). The fee is included in the company’s latest rate proposal, now before the State Corporation Commission.

According to the filing, the transmission and distribution charges would add $3.77 per kW to the monthly bill of a customer who goes solar with a large residential system. That means homeowners with 10 kW systems would pay an added $37.70 per month. Charges would escalate to $75.40 per month for homes with 20 kW systems, the largest size allowed under net-metering rules.

So the potential is there for a solar homeowner to owe over $900 per year in new charges on his electric bill. But according to APCo, only three customers in all of its Virginia territory have systems large enough to qualify for a standby charge, with no additional big systems in the queue.

That’s right: APCo is spending many, many thousands of dollars on lawyers and consultants so it can change rules that affect three people.

Ahem. Lest anyone think APCo is worried about cost. APCo’s decision to move now proves this is not about freeloaders on the grid. This is about protecting the corporate monopoly on electric power by shutting down the independent solar industry while it is still small.

In this, APCo is following the lead of Dominion Power, which got the SCC to approve similarly onerous standby charges on its own large residential solar customers in 2011. The utility’s ability to do so was authorized that year by a bill amending section 56-594 of the Virginia Code. The statute leaves it up to utilities and the SCC to determine the amount.

The Virginia solar industry acquiesced to the standby charge language as part of a deal that raised the residential net metering limit from 10 kW to 20 kW. Industry members assumed any charges the SCC approved under the law would be modest, given the many benefits solar brings to the grid.

Their assumption proved spectacularly wrong. The SCC bought Dominion’s arguments about solar homeowners not paying their “fair share,” dismissing expert testimony and findings from other states that solar enhances grid security and offsets peak demand.

The result has been a clear setback for the solar industry’s ability to sell larger home systems. Dominion’s steep standby charges “are forcing the solar industry to take a step backward when we’ve worked so hard to make positive steps forward,” says Andrew Skinner, Project Manager with Prospect Solar in Sterling, Virginia. “Working with several small farms and residences in rural VA, we have had to design right up to the threshold of the standby charge to make the economic case most compelling.”

Dominion and APCo are following the playbook of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a secretive corporate lobbying organization that seeks to roll back pro-renewable energy laws across the country. The parent companies of both Dominion and APCo are members of ALEC, and Dominion’s president, Bob Blue, served on ALEC’s energy and environment task force with representatives from the American Petroleum Institute, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the science-obfuscation shop Heartland Institute, and other champions of all things fossil. (Greenpeace recently announced that six utilities have resigned from ALEC; unfortunately our guys were not among them.)

Given that APCo’s proposed standby charges are so similar to Dominion’s, APCo probably figures its request is a slam-dunk at the SCC. And given how few people are affected, it may be tempting to ignore it. But just last summer Dominion signaled its intent to try to extend its own standby charges to more solar customers, which makes the issue relevant to everyone who owns a solar system, wants one, or supports the rights of others to buy them.

Whether utilities should be loading up their solar customers with added fees is also at the heart of two studies getting underway in Virginia this year examining the costs and benefits of solar, one of them under the auspices of the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy and the Department of Environmental Quality, and the other by the SCC itself. With a consumer backlash growing nationwide against utility efforts to “tax the sun,” APCo’s move looks like a way to lock in a rate increase on solar owners before the data is in—and before its customers catch on.

It’s especially unfortunate that the utilities’ push against net metered solar comes at a time when we are beginning to see a flourishing of the solar market. Total installed solar in Virginia has leapt from under 5 megawatts just a couple of years ago to perhaps 18 megawatts today. Okay, that’s a paltry figure compared to, say, North Carolina’s 557 megawatts or New Jersey’s more than 1200 megawatts, but starting from next to nothing gives us a really fantastic growth curve.

The rapid drop in solar prices has been a major factor driving Virginia sales. Says Skinner, “With the advancements in the solar market over the past couple years, even here in Virginia, we have been inching closer to the 10 year or less payback period. We talk to people every day that tell us they’ll go solar here when the payback is less than 10 years. A standby charge reverses that trend based on an argument with flawed economics. While other states are making progress on the true value of solar, we’re here with our head held under water.”

He concludes, “Even while holding our breath we are still creating jobs and installing solar arrays all over our beautiful state. I was born and raised here, and I’m proud to work for a VA based company; we just need to get rid of these backward policies so we can keep moving forward.”

APCo’s rate case is PUE-2014-00026, which can be found on the SCC website. For a discussion of the standby charge proposal, look for the exhibit containing the testimony of Jennifer Sebastian. The deadline for submitting comments on APCo’s application is September 9, 2014, and a public hearing will be held on September 16 at the SCC offices in Richmond.