Sachu Constantine is the executive director of Vote Solar.
With billions on the line from the federal government and the potential for renters and disadvantaged communities to finally access clean, affordable solar energy, California’s three largest utilities are actively working to stop the California Public Utilities Commission from issuing an equitable community solar program.
In their decade of opposition to a viable statewide community solar program, the utilities have succeeded by sowing fear, uncertainty and doubt — we can’t let them get away with it this time. AB 2316 bill author Assemblymember Chris Ward and a diverse coalition of climate and environmental justice groups, consumer advocates and the solar industry delivered this message at Vote Solar’s recent stakeholder briefing.
The proceeding is coming to the finish line. The judges overseeing the rulemaking for community solar + storage at the commission recently issued a final set of questions about the Net Value Billing Tariff, or NVBT, and how the tariff could best support grid reliability. Parties filed their final comments last month. An unprecedented coalition — including Vote Solar, ratepayer advocates (The Utility Reform Network), environmental justice (California Environmental Justice Alliance), the solar industry (Coalition for Community Solar Access), and environmental groups (Natural Resources Defense Council), to name a few — submitted comments in support of the NVBT, detailing the benefits including environmental justice, cost savings for working families, job creation, grid reliability and meeting our climate goals. The only opponents to the NVBT program are the utilities.
California’s top utilities have filed hundreds of pages of comments, opposing the NVBT and dismissing the need to have a scalable program that can meet the needs of millions of low-wealth Californians. The utilities have doubled-down on a decade of failed community solar programs by again proposing ill-defined, unworkable and small-scale programs that would serve just mere thousands of Californians who live in the state’s most disadvantaged communities and need affordable clean energy. Instead, they’ve proposed green energy options that only benefit large corporations and government customers.
Some of the utilities’ main stated reasons for opposing the NVBT program are 1) that it is in the broad community interest not to have the program, 2) that accounting for community solar and storage is too hard, and 3) that there is a cost shift to non-solar customers. All three of these points are patently false. As previously stated, the NVBT has support from a diverse coalition that rarely agrees: ratepayer advocates, the environmental justice community, green groups, solar developers, homebuilders and more — the utilities stand alone in their opposition.