PPH - Soured on solar? Costs, technical delays dampen outlook in Maine

Community solar farms, which sprouted after a 2019 law went into effect, now face challenges including higher costs for Mainers and glitches in hooking up to the grid.

BY TUX TURKEL

STAFF WRITER

EXCERPTS

The solar power industry, which has spent millions of dollars taking advantage of a 2019 Maine law meant to spur the growth of local generating farms, is facing partly cloudy skies.

While some community solar projects have come online in Maine, hundreds have languished in studies required to determine how or if the projects can safely connect to the electricity grid. Many developers are now finding that unexpected, costly upgrades will make their solar farms unprofitable. Some developers may try to downsize their projects or even pull the plug before a key financial incentive sunsets at the end of 2024.

“There are tens to hundreds of millions of dollars the development community has to supply to meet the 2024 deadline,” said Alex Schild, development director at Soltage LLC of Jersey City, New Jersey, “and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”

The state’s Office of Public Advocate and an industrial energy lobby say a solar scale-back is OK.

Provisions in the 2019 law created too-generous incentives that put a mounting financial burden on electricity customers, which the critics claim will outweigh the benefits of community solar as it’s currently structured in Maine.

Maine residents will begin feeling the impact on their electricity bills on July 1. That’s when an accounting mechanism used by the Public Utilities Commission will fold the payment costs of existing community solar projects into bills for Central Maine Power and Versant Power customers.

The timing is especially bad. Mainers have just endured a winter of record-high electricity supply rates, which were partly fallout from last year’s spike in wholesale natural gas prices.

Here’s how the costs of community solar are breaking down, based on calculations by the utilities.

The average CMP household customer who uses 550 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month will see a monthly increase of $5.70, based on a total of $113.8 million in costs. That figure represents incentives for 240 community solar projects now operating in CMP’s service area, with a total capacity of 276 megawatts................................

.............................The Office of the Public Advocate has been adjusting its assessment downward based on CMP’s and Versant’s new estimates and is now pegging the total cost at $220 million. That could add $23 or so a month to a typical residential electric bill after 2024, the OPA says.....................................

..............“Without a clear signal to the solar marketplace that Maine remains open for the clean energy business,” said Jeremy Payne, executive director of the Maine Renewable Energy Association, “many companies may choose to abandon their project pipelines and pull their investment capital from Maine and redeploy it elsewhere.”..................................

.....................Payne said discouraging community solar now would lead to a damaging outcome, “precisely the moment when the state is trying to reshape its energy future to protect consumers from pricing volatility and offering Mainers greater control over the sources of electricity powering their homes and businesses.”...............................

.......................The solar industry’s transition is being watched closely by Bill Harwood, the state’s public advocate.

“The timing is really unfortunate,” he said of the increases. “Ratepayers are going to be very unhappy when they get their bills this summer.”

Harwood said he’s concerned that this first sizable impact of net energy billing will accelerate next year, if nothing’s done to further reduce incentives. It may make sense, he said, to return to the policy prior to 2019, when only small rooftop-scale solar projects qualified under the program.......................................

Please read the full article at  https://www.pressherald.com/2023/04/14/soured-on-solar-costs-techni...

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