Green groups pan new solar energy fees

Dec 5 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Samantha Koon The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Va.

Dominion Virginia Power is under fire from the Sierra Club and alternative-energy proponents after the Virginia State Corporation Commission last month approved the company's proposal to charge some self-generating customers a monthly fee.

The fee, which was approved on Nov. 23, applies only to customers who generate between 10 and 20 kilowatts of power per month. According to state filings, Dominion Virginia Power will be able to charge $2.79 per kilowatt in distribution charges plus an additional $1.40 per kilowatt in transmission charges, totaling $4.19 per kilowatt.

The standby charge will be implemented for qualifying households on April 1.

For a household with a 20-kilowatt photo-voltaic system, the largest solar power unit permitted to be connected to a power grid, this fee can total about $60 per month -- more than $700 per year. Households with smaller systems face proportionately smaller fees.

"Dominion Power is taking punitive action to charge these people $60 a month," said J.R. Tolbert, assistant director of the Sierra Club Virginia Chapter.

He agreed that though solar-energy users do use some electricity from Dominion Virginia Power, "there is a tremendous amount of time in which the consumers are producing their own electricity and thereby alleviating any stress on the grid," he said.

Often, solar panels absorb more power than a household can use during the day, causing the meter to spin backwards. In effect, these customers are "selling" their own power back to Dominion Virginia Power, said Paul Risberg, president of Altenergy in Charlottesville. This system is referred to as "net" metering.

"You're buying it at 10 cents a kilowatt from [Dominion Virginia Power] at night, but during the day when you produce more than you need, you're selling it back to them at about 6 cents a kilowatt per hour," Risberg said, though he specified that these figures are rough estimates.

"You end up receiving less income off of the electricity your system produces," he said, explaining that PV systems are very expensive -- some as much as $50,000 -- and run for a long time, meaning that customers who invest in the technology need to be assured that they will see enough savings in the long term to make the purchase worthwhile.

"The impact is on future growth," Risberg said. "[The standby charge] will most certainly discourage any new construction of PV systems that are above 10 kilowatts on a residential system."

Officials at Dominion Virginia Power think that the charge is justified.

"We are required by law to provide energy to all customers in our service area. That's why there is an infrastructure charge. If we did not charge a standby fee to these customers, you and I would be subsidizing these customers," company spokesman Tom Kazas said.

Kazas noted that the fee applies to very few customers. He said that while the state has 540 net metering customers, only one of them has a unit large enough to merit the fee. On average, net metering customers generate between 4 and 6 kilowatts per month, he estimated.

Risberg countered that there are fewer customers affected by the standby charge because prior to legislation passed in the General Assembly this year, it was unlawful to connect units producing more than 10 kilowatts to a power grid. As of July 1, units can produce as much as 20 kilowatts. The standby charge was attached to this same legislation.

"On the surface it looked like a really good thing for solar, but we found that the inclusion of a standby charge would actually discourage people from building larger solar arrays in the future," Risberg said, adding that he currently has customers who are interested in expanding their systems, but are discouraged from doing so by the new charge. "Once you start having to pay a standby charge to maintain the net metering agreement for these larger systems, the financial viability really suffers."