New Mississippi rule requires utilities to pay low-income customers up front for solar installations

Dive Transient:

• The Mississippi Public Service Fee has authorised a brand new web metering rule making a $3,500 incentive for residents who set up rooftop photo voltaic, per an order launched Tuesday.

• Regulators capped whole annual rebate budgets at $10 million for Entergy Mississippi and $5 million for Mississippi Energy Co. In accordance with the brand new rule, not less than 50% of the funds devoted to the brand new program should go to low-income clients.

• Environmental and photo voltaic business teams say they hope the brand new program will spur extra residents and companies to put in photo voltaic in Mississippi, which has traditionally had little success incentivizing the addition of rooftop photo voltaic.

Dive Perception:

Mississippi is the most recent state to revise its web metering guidelines with social fairness in thoughts. However in a ruling issued earlier this week, the Mississippi PSC took a brand new method to extend rooftop photo voltaic entry for low-income households.

Tuesday’s order requires the creation of a brand new program providing $3,500 rebates to residents who set up photo voltaic methods, with the cash doubtlessly payable on to the installer on proof of completion. The order additionally permits clients to mixture a number of meters on a single property to share the potential advantages of rooftop photo voltaic, creates incentives for the set up of photo voltaic panels at Mississippi faculties, and retains an present 2 cent/kWh added incentive for low-income households that take part in web metering.

Mississippi doesn’t provide one-to-one web metering. Quite, the state’s program, which has been renamed “web renewable era” by Tuesday’s order, offers for residents to be paid a greenback quantity equal to the full worth of electrical energy consumed and the worth of any extra era that flows to the grid. Even with an incentive that pays 2 cents/kWh to web metering households incomes as much as 250% of the federal poverty line, photo voltaic installations have lagged within the state. Now, present clients from that program will likely be grandfathered into the brand new program for the subsequent 25 years.

In statements launched alongside Tuesday’s order, Mississippi PSC commissioners indicated the bipartisan choice to offer up-front incentives for photo voltaic installations was meant to spur job creation and development within the state’s photo voltaic business.

“Solely 547 houses have put in photo voltaic in Mississippi, the fourth fewest of any state within the nation,” Will Giese, southeast regional director for the Photo voltaic Vitality Industries Affiliation stated in an announcement. The brand new guidelines, Giese stated, “have the potential to considerably broaden rooftop photo voltaic adoption and guarantee it suits into the funds of households no matter revenue stage.”

Louie Miller, director of the Mississippi chapter of the Sierra Membership, stated the rule was “a winner,” in his view, given the big variety of Mississippians who qualify as low revenue.

Entry to rooftop photo voltaic, he stated “has been divided between courses, and we have now a variety of low revenue clients in Mississippi. We predict that it is a novel method to method this by having a rebate on the entrance finish to draw curiosity from the general public.”