The following letter was sent by Jeff Shaw, owner of Gulf South Solar to the LPSC staff and interested parties on 5/15/13 concerning the vote on net metering:
If you support this net metering common sense please call your Public Service Commissioner today and tell them.
Scott A. Angelle 225-342-6900
Lambert C. Boissiere, III 504-680-9529
Clyde C. Holloway 318-748-4715
Foster L. Campbell 318-676-7464
Eric Skrmetta 504-846-6930
I know you asked for the utilities to make an analysis of how different scenarios would affect sample bills. I took a different approach and looked at how changing our current net metering law and rules would affect the ratepayer with solar and how it affects the ratepayer without solar using the numbers provided by the utilities.
Net metering doesn’t actually “cost” the utilities anything since both costs and benefits are passed on to the ratepayers, so I compared with only the utility provided numbers. Both Entergy and Cleco have provided a “Solar Avoided Cost” (SAC) value which is Avoided Cost plus an arbitrary 20%. (Why not 10% or 30%?) The results below are shocking.
- If you use the average of the SAC and Retail values and apply them to the reported Net Metered kWh’s purchased in 2012, then the utilities would have paid the Net Metered ratepayer $302,271 less per year.
- If you use the EOY 2012 Net Metered ratepayer count of 2,579 then that comes to an average of $117.20/yr reduction in what each Net Metered ratepayer would have been paid.
- That in turn would provide a decrease on average of $0.157/year to the 1,923,827 Non-Net Metered ratepayer bill. (Yes, an impact of 15 cents per year)
- By going from Retail to this SAC, you are impacting the Net Metered ratepayer almost 745X or 74,500% more than the Non-Net Metered ratepayer ($117.20 vs. $0.157).
- As a regulator of utilities, is this fair?
Again, this quick impact comparison was made on the utility provided “cost” data. As I have stated since the beginning of these discussions, until a cost-benefit analysis is done we cannot properly determine if net metering customers are providing a benefit or a cost with their net excess generation. In a report released today Arizona revealed that solar will provide Arizona Public Service (APS) customers with $37 million in BENEFITS. http://www.seia.org/sites/default/files/resources/AZ-Distributed-Generation.pdf
Let’s let Net Metering remain true Net Metering, where there is no “buying and selling”, just a net bill at the end of the month for ALL ratepayers.
Thanks,
Jeff Shaw, President
Gulf South Solar