Opinion: Rooftop Solar Made California a Climate Leader — We Can’t Throw This Away

California is a clear power chief in the US, thanks largely to the widespread adoption of photo voltaic by 1.5 million residents and companies all through the state. Over the previous 5 years, half of all photo voltaic in-built California has come from shoppers changing houses, church buildings, faculties, flats, and companies into mini-electricity turbines for themselves and their communities.

It’s been spectacular to look at all of those small-scale methods add as much as the equal of six nuclear energy vegetation — sparing us from the waste that comes from nuclear power and the air pollution of fossil fuels. Nonetheless, this progress is threatened by a proposal pending earlier than the California Public Utilities Fee to switch the favored and efficient program referred to as web metering, a billing course of that credit photo voltaic house owners for the electrical energy they add or export to the grid.

Beneath strain from investor-owned utilities, the CPUC is now proposing to slash the worth of photo voltaic power despatched again to the grid on sunny days by 75% to 80%.

If permitted, this might be the steepest decline in worth of photo voltaic power in the US, together with Nevada’s disastrous determination from 2015, which was later reversed by its legislature. These cuts would take impact virtually instantly and would put photo voltaic out of attain for many shoppers, choking off the expansion of solar-charged batteries on the similar time.

In its proposal, the CPUC tried to ease the transition to decrease worth for patrons promoting extra photo voltaic power again to the grid. Regardless, the worth of rooftop photo voltaic power would nonetheless be reduce by 75% on common. California’s rooftop photo voltaic market, the crowning jewel of its clear power market, would grind to a halt.

We admire that CPUC’s newest proposed determination is a big enchancment from its unique December 2021 proposal. The 2021 proposed determination would have carried out a punitive tax on rooftop photo voltaic customers and retroactively slashed advantages for Californians who had already put in photo voltaic. Nonetheless, the absence of those provisions on this up to date proposal alone doesn’t equal good coverage.

California requires much more clear power if we’re to maintain the lights on whereas assembly the clear power targets our planet calls for. The California Air Sources Board, one of the crucial influential local weather companies on the planet, lately supplied a reminder of how we should speed up the transfer towards clear power. Its up to date local weather motion plan discovered that native photo voltaic must triple by 2045 for California to attain its local weather objectives.

That is an instance of why, as members of Congress, we labored exhausting to cross the Inflation Discount Act, which prolonged the tax credit score for shopper photo voltaic methods by 10 years and bumped the credit score up from 26% to 30%. Our objective was to speed up the adoption of photo voltaic power, together with storage batteries, and assist shoppers save on their month-to-month utility payments. A number of impartial analyses have discovered that the general incentives within the act will scale back greenhouse fuel emissions by roughly 40% by 2030 beneath 2005 ranges — however these analyses assume the continuation of supportive state insurance policies.

By making photo voltaic power dearer in a single day, California would erase the worth of the prolonged tax credit score, elevating prices for Californians and threatening our nation’s capability to satisfy our emissions discount targets. It will reverse years of progress making photo voltaic extra inexpensive for low- and moderate-income households.

The excellent news is the proposal can nonetheless be modified, beginning with creating an actual glidepath to permit for batteries to turn out to be accessible and inexpensive for working and middle-class shoppers. There was dialogue of an eight-year transition to steadily step down the worth of rooftop photo voltaic offered onto the grid to scale back the probability of a photo voltaic market crash. That appears affordable, particularly given headwinds from world provide chain constraints and rising prices. The state must also take into account shopper rebates to additional drive storage adoption.

In the end, California wants to stay a clear power chief and it may’t do this with out rooftop photo voltaic. This proposal, if adopted as is, wouldn’t solely threaten the state’s clear power objectives, however it could venture the unsuitable type of management for the remainder of America and the world.

Rep. Mike Levin represents the forty ninth District in north coastal San Diego and south Orange counties. Rep. Mike Thompson represents the fifth District in Napa, Contra Costa, Lake, Solano and Sonoma counties.