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California slashed the value of rooftop solar for customers of its three biggest utilities last year — and installations of residential solar systems in the state have fallen to near-three-year lows since then. 

But drawing firm conclusions about how the controversial shift in net-metering policy will shape California’s rooftop solar market over the long term — and affect the state’s grid-decarbonization and energy-equity goals — is a lot more complicated than it looks. 

Just ask Galen Barbose, staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Last week, he released a report compiling the latest data on California’s residential rooftop solar market, including the data point showing a marked drop in installations in the first three months of 2024. 

Barbose also scrutinized battery-storage attachment rates, the distribution of solar adopters by geography and income, third-party ownership, system sizing, pricing, and installer market share. The goal was to reveal ​“initial empirical insights into how the market has evolved over the past year, confirming some expectations while also revealing several striking surprises,” he wrote in the report. 

But ​“we have to be careful about not overreaching from the data over this past year,” Barbose stressed in an interview with Canary Media — because ​“this was a strange last year.” 

A year of twists and turns for California rooftop solar

There was a huge rush to apply for and secure interconnections of rooftop solar systems to the grid in the runup to April 2023, when the legacy net-metering (NEM) tariff was officially replaced by the ​“net-billing tariff” (NBT) that the California Public Utilities Commission imposed on customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric. 

That caused installations to spike to record levels throughout the spring and summer of 2023, as all of the projects approved under the old tariff got underway. Installations under the legacy tariff continued even through the first quarter of 2024, according to LBNL data. 

Backers of the CPUC’s decision to reduce compensation for rooftop solar argue that California’s solar market remains robust — just not as overheated as during the historical jump in installations last year. 

“[T]he much more generous compensation for systems installed before April 15 drove a gold rush during the first three and a half months of 2023,” Severin Borenstein, head of the Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a foe of the state’s previous net-metering regime, wrote in a blog post last month. ​“Many of those early-2023 buyers would most likely have been later-2023 buyers were it not for the rush to install before April 15 and lock in NEM 2.0 rules.” 

But there’s also evidence that the far less lucrative economics of the net-billing tariff have severely crimped ongoing prospects for California rooftop solar installers. The rate of installations under the new net-billing tariff have lagged historical rooftop solar installation rates, averaging about 8,000 per month over the first quarter of 2024. That’s a lower rate of rooftop solar installation than in any month under net metering going back to May 2020, according to LBNL’s data. 

In November, the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA) reported that monthly solar sales — a more forward-looking data point than installations — fell by 77 to 85 percent between May and September of last year compared to the same months in 2022. 

The trade group also warned that solar installers expected to have to lay off nearly 17,000 workers, or about 22 percent of the state’s rooftop solar workforce — a level of job losses ​“reminiscent of the Great Depression,” according to Bernadette Del Chiaro, CALSSA’s executive director. 

LBNL’s report includes forward-looking data that backs up CALSSA’s dire forecasts. One such metric is ​“quote activity” — requests for price quotes from customers interested in installing solar. 

Quote requests from online solar marketplace EnergySage spiked before April 2023, then fell to about 60 percent of historical levels from 2019 to 2021. ​“While the EnergySage marketplace may not perfectly represent the California market overall, the fact that quote activity has not meaningfully picked back up is perhaps the clearest signal yet of a substantial and sustained market contraction,” Barbose wrote in his report. 

LBNL also highlighted data that appears to support a key concern of CALSSA — that the new net-billing regime is harming smaller solar installers. According to the report, only half of the roughly 2,500 companies that installed at least one solar system in the past 12 months have completed a system under the new tariff structure. 

The California Senate approved a bipartisan package of 15 bills Wednesday that would increase penalties for organized crime rings, expand drug court programs and close a legal loophole to make it easier to prosecute auto thefts.

One proposal would require large online marketplaces — like eBay and Amazon — to verify the identities of sellers who make at least $5,000 profit in a year, an attempt to shut down an easy way to sell stolen goods.

CALIFORNIA LAWMAKER’S MIC CUT OFF WHILE READING BILL TO END SANCTUARY STATE LAWS, SAYS DEMS ‘DON’T CARE’

“This is not a game,” said Senate President Mike McGuire, a Democrat who represents the North Coast, adding that he hopes to get the bills to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk within weeks. “We are working together for safer California, putting aside politics and making sure we do right for our communities.”

It normally takes months for lawmakers to deliver bills to the governor in California, but the commitment to quick actions is driven by a new get-tough-on-crime strategy in an election year that seeks to address the growing fears of voters while preserving progressive policies designed to keep people out of prison.

Large-scale thefts, in which groups of people brazenly rush into stores and take goods in plain sight, have reached a crisis level in the state, though the California Retailers Association said it’s challenging to quantify the issue because many stores don’t share their data.

The Bay Area and Los Angeles saw a steady increase in shoplifting between 2021 and 2022, according to a study of the latest crime data by the Public Policy Institute of California. Across the state, shoplifting rates rose during the same period but were still lower than the pre-pandemic levels in 2019, while commercial burglaries and robberies have become more prevalent in urban counties, according to the study.

Assembly lawmakers also advanced several other retail theft measures Wednesday, including a bill authored by Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas taking aim at professional theft rings. It would expand law enforcement’s authority to combine the value of goods stolen from different victims to impose harsher penalties and arrest people for shoplifting using video footage or witness statements. The measure also would create a new crime for those who sell or return stolen goods and mandate online sellers to maintain records proving the merchandise wasn’t stolen and require some retail businesses to report stolen goods data.

Lawmakers also passed proposals that would crack down on cargo thefts, restore the district attorney’s authority to go after thieves and resellers who operate beyond their jurisdictions and allow retailers to obtain restraining orders against convicted shoplifters.

All the bills now head to the second chamber before they could reach Newsom’s desk in June.

The advancement of a slew of measures further cements Democratic lawmakers’ rejection to growing calls to roll back progressive policies like Proposition 47, a ballot measure approved by 60% of state voters in 2014 that reduced penalties for certain crimes, including thefts of items valued at under $950 and drug possession offenses, from felonies to misdemeanors.

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Money saved from having fewer people in prison, which totals to $113 million this fiscal year, has gone to local programs to fight recidivism with much success, state officials and advocates said. But the proposition has made it harder to prosecute shoplifters and enabled brazen crime rings, law enforcement officials said. An effort to reform the measure failed in 2020.

As major national stores and local businesses in California say they continue to face rampant theft, a growing number of law enforcement officials and district attorneys, along with Republican and moderate Democratic lawmakers, say California needs to consider all options, including rolling back the measure. The coalition backing the initiative last month submitted more than 900,000 signatures to put it on the November ballot. The signatures are being verified.