SALT LAKE CITY — A couple hundred Salt Lake area students jumped into Utah's fray over a proposed net metering fee for residential solar customers, urging the Public Service Commission to chose a "cleaner and more sustainable" future for the state.
The students from Rowland Hall, an independent PreK-12 school, put their names on a petition to the commission, which held one of four study meetings on Tuesday as the utility regulator begins crafting the framework for a cost-benefit analysis on rooftop solar.
"My generation wants a cleaner future," said Claire Wang, a senior at Rowland Hall who led the petition effort.
Wang was one of several speakers at a press conference Tuesday in front of the school, staged to coincide with the study session being held at commission's offices.
Last summer, the commission rejected Rocky Mountain Power's proposed monthly net metering fee of $4.65, ruling the fee could not be justified in the absence of more comprehensive information. That additional layer of scrutiny involves an extensive cost-benefit analysis on residential rooftop solar systems, of which there are approximately 2,500 in Utah.
Net metering allows a retail electric customer to produce and sell power. Under a net metering program, the utility allows the customer's meter to actually run backwards if the electricity the customer generates is more than what they are consuming. At the end of the billing cycle, the customer only pays for the net consumption of energy.
Advocates say net metering is a way to ensure customers get credit for the energy they are producing, but utility companies say these customers who are using less power are still "tied" into the grid, and not appropriately paying their share of infrastructure costs.
Rocky Mountain Power has argued that residential solar customers still need to pay into the system to help the utility company cover its "fixed" costs of delivering electricity to the grid. Those fixed costs remain in the form of power lines, power stations, transformers and even repair crews who must ensure the system failures are restored in service interruptions. Some consumer watchdog groups, too, argue that low-income utility customers unfairly subsidize solar systems for the wealthy.
With the move by utilities to levy a solar fee, critics have decried the monthly charge as a "sun tax," and a deterrent to the pursuit of cleaner energy sources over carbon-based fuels.
Robert Nohavec, a board member of Utah Citizens Advocating Renewable Energy and owner of a rooftop solar system, said it is wrong to penalize people for chosing solar.
"Our faith informs us that we are to be environmental stewards of this beautiful world God has given us," he said Monday, later adding that he is being punished for "trying to do the right thing."
As air pollution continues to be a pressing problem for the Wasatch Front and other areas of the state, advocates like Nohavec insist that the transition to cleaner energy should not be discouraged.
Across the country, the battleground between utilities and solar fans is being staged in multiple states.
Arizona added a fee in 2013, although that state's existing 18,000 residential solar customers were grandfathered in. Another Arizona utility added a $50 fee in March, prompting a lawsuit the next month by the nation's largest rooftop solar installer.
A monthly net metering fee of $6 for every kilowatt of installed solar capacity is under consideration for residential solar customers in New Mexico beginning in 2016.
In February, a pair of net metering decisions by the public service commission in Wisconsin were struck down by a judge, who agreed with clean energy advocates that more analysis needs to be done.
The Utah Public Service Commission is slated to launch the cost-benefit analysis of rooftop solar in mid-summer.
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