Consider this the ringing of the solar alarm bell.
Access to rooftop solar electric — photovoltaic or PV — across the Hawaiian Electric Industries service territories is under threat. Not from the utilities themselves, but from reduced incentives, the regulatory process and the limitations of today’s grids to handle unprecedented levels of distributed energy sources.
A quick PV primer: About 70,000 rooftop solar electric systems have been installed across the islands, giving Hawaii the laudatory distinction of having the most solar per household in the country.
That level of penetration, however, has put us at the leading, and also bleeding, edge of the debate over the appropriateness of incentives provided to go solar (tax credits and preferential utility tariffs) and the limits of our isolated island grids to accommodate so many mini power plants.
Enter the state Public Utilities Commission and its order last October to end the wildly popular net energy metering (NEM) program — which allowed NEM customers to receive full retail credit for any surplus power fed back to the grid — and establish two replacement programs: the Customer Grid Supply (CGS) and Customer Self Supply (CSS).
CGS allows for surplus solar power export albeit at a lower credit rate, while CSS does not allow for export but requires battery storage.
Somewhat arbitrarily, CGS was capped by the commission at 25 megawatts for Oahu and 5 megawatts each for Maui County and the Big Island. The cap was reached on Maui in June and has just been hit on Hawaii island.
As far as CSS, there has been a whopping one system that has been approved for operation in all three Hawaiian Electric service territories and under 40 proposed projects in the combined CSS pipelines for HECO, MECO and HELCO.
As one of the few in the PV industry who publicly supported the ending of NEM, I still do not regret doing so. That said, the reduced incentives to go solar and net effect of transitioning to CGS have been severe.
Having tracked solar electric permit data for the past seven years here, 2016 numbers are downright scary.
On Hawaii island, PV permits are down 50 percent January-July compared with the same period last year; on Oahu, while down 27 percent, permit numbers last month dropped by
54 percent compared to July 2015.
Oh well, one might say — too bad for the whining local solar companies, like mine, who have been feeding at the public-subsidies trough for all these years.
But there’s something else to keep in mind. From the PUC to the Hawaiian Electric companies to the governor and his predecessor and his predecessor, to the Legislature to the consumer and, yes, to the solar industry, there’s widespread consensus that more rooftop PV is a good and necessary thing, if we are to make the required progress toward the 2045 goal of being 100 percent renewable in power generation.
Given the already reduced incentives under CGS, if we, the solar industry and buying public, are forced to exclusively offer CSS at this time, the adoption of rooftop solar PV will slow to a trickle.
But wait: Aren’t new and state-of-the-art battery technologies busting out all over? Perhaps. But despite the energy storage spin and hype coming from various conferences and the popular press, the here and now CSS options are quite limited and very expensive, essentially doubling the cost of the PV system compared to having no batteries.
Simply put, we need more time and more CGS cap room, otherwise consumer choices will be substantially limited and the once-thriving local PV industry will fade to a mere shadow of our former self.
Marco Mangelsdorf is president of ProVision Solar and a Hawaii Island Energy Cooperative director.
