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Photo credit Christoffer Reimer/Wikimedia

A large number of electric utilities across the country are famously engaged in a war against customer-owned solar. Using policy barriers, “standby” charges and other tactics, utilities from Arizona to Virginia are doing everything possible to short-circuit a revolution that threatens their control of the electric sector. It won’t work. Trying to keep electric generation out of the hands of the rabble is a stop-gap solution, doomed to fail within a few years when battery storage allows customers with solar arrays (or wind turbines) to defect en masse.

But utilities won’t be the only ones hurt in the process. Stifling distributed generation and forcing grid defection is the worst possible outcome for the economy, the climate, and the security of the electric grid. The more utilities succeed, the more everyone loses.

With all its problems—and they are growing—the modern electric grid remains an efficient way of delivering competitively-priced power to American homes and businesses. Utilities, generators, and grid operators engage in a complicated dance that delivers power economically where it is needed, when it is needed, with no shortfalls and nothing left over, better than 99.9% of the time. If one generating plant suddenly breaks down, others are swiftly brought online. When demand for electricity peaks, grid operators call up “peaker” plants or pay some customers to curtail use. The balance is maintained.

But the sheer size and interdependence of the grid, and its reliance on large, centralized generating plants, makes it vulnerable to massive power disruptions resulting from weather events, electromagnetic pulses, solar storms or physical attack. Aging infrastructure, climate change-driven mega-storms, more intense heatwaves, drought, and potential cyberattacks are growing threats to the reliability of our power supply.

Distributed generation using renewable energy offers the simplest and most efficient way to reduce many of these threats. A power grid that includes thousands of solar and wind installations scattered across a service territory is inherently more secure than one reliant on a handful of huge generating plants and transformer stations. And when the fuel is wind or solar, supply lines can’t be disrupted.

Distributed solar is especially useful when the grid is under stress. Researchers found that just 500 megawatts of widely dispersed solar energy could have prevented the massive blackout of the Northeast in August of 2003.

Add in battery storage, and some small systems can be combined to form microgrids. Microgrids can be “islanded” when the larger grid fails, producing power continuously to ensure that critical needs are met—and decreasing the incentive for hackers and terrorists to target the grid in the first place.

The businesses and residents who are installing solar arrays today aren’t just saving money on energy bills and reducing their carbon footprint. They are buying the building blocks of a more resilient power grid that will serve all of us in the future. Some utilities like NRG and Vermont’s Green Mountain Power recognize the value of distributed solar to the grid and work to encourage customers to stay connected. Others, like Dominion Virginia Power and Appalachian Power in Virginia, NV Energy in Nevada, and the Arizona Public Service Company, are energetically working to impose barriers and punish solar owners with higher costs. If they succeed, the result will be less distributed generation and greater grid vulnerability.

Worse, customers who face these utility barriers and cost penalties will have an incentive to cut themselves off from the grid. Affordable battery storage is beginning to make that an option. Within a few years, disaffected customers could be leaving in droves. Rather than pay a punitive “fair share” of the wires that cross their property, they could opt to pay no share at all.

Then, instead of a stronger grid, we’d have a weaker one. Instead of increasing the security of our power supply, we would increase our vulnerability to attack. In place of a highly efficient, low-cost, interconnected grid, we’d move towards an inefficient, high-cost, Balkanized grid.

This is the worst possible direction for our grid—and it’s the logical conclusion to the war on solar that utilities are waging today. That makes it critical that regulators, customers and state legislatures push back hard in support of customer-owned solar. Protecting the grid is too important to let utilities win this war.