IN 2009, MASSACHUSETTS DECOUPLED our electricity rates, eliminating the incentive for us at National Grid to sell more electricity to our customers. This change in the way we do business enabled us to throw our support behind intensive energy efficiency programs for our customers. This fact is noticeably missing from the Acadia Center’s lengthy argument about the relationship between solar and the utilities. In “Technology upends the utility business model,” the Center contends that utilities are afraid of solar growth. They say that solar threatens our business model by reducing load on the grid and requiring fewer infrastructure improvements.

That doesn’t hold up for a few reasons. There is no measure that reduces grid impacts greater than an energy efficiency measure and, yet, National Grid and our fellow utilities have led programs that have made Massachusetts No. 1 in the nation in energy efficiency for five years running. The Acadia Center knows this; they are one of the program’s partners.

The bottom line is that we support efficient investments of our customers’ dollars.

Also absent from the Acadia Center’s account of utilities’ fear of solar are some key facts.  National Grid has teamed up with developers such as Borrego and Solar City to build 20 megawatts of large-scale solar, testing advanced inverter technology and the impact of strategically-located solar on the grid. We have invested in a pilot project from the Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems to begin testing battery storage (technology that will eventually change the solar game). We have increased our distributed generation team to get customer projects online more quickly – interconnecting more than 17,000 Massachusetts solar projects in 2015, an amount greater than the previous four years combined.

In short, solar is not new to us. We’ve been supportive since the 1980s when we installed solar panels on residential and commercial buildings in Gardner and Beverly. That is our commitment. Those are the facts.

Despite all of these shining examples that our company fully embraces solar and sees its value to our customers and to our business, many continue to question why we may want our customers to pay as little as possible for the benefits.

The simple truth is that Massachusetts customers pay twice as much for solar as our customers in other states where we operate. For example, in New York, since January, we have received interconnection requests totaling more than 400 megawatts. Those projects will receive prices around 17 and 18 cents per kilowatt hour as reimbursement versus the 45 cents per kilowatt hour our customers pay here in Massachusetts. The result is that our non-solar customers pay far more than their fair share, paying out more than $280 million in 2015 alone.

We can move closer to the kind of affordable program we see in New York and achieve the same benefits at a lesser cost to non-solar customers in Massachusetts. National Grid welcomes a resolution to the questions surrounding solar incentives in Massachusetts that the Legislature and other stakeholders have wrestled with for the last year.

It is our hope that the ultimate goal of all involved is to develop a long-term, sustainable solar program that best serves the Commonwealth’s customers by unleashing the benefits of solar through more affordable policies that will also provide the solar community with the stability and certainty they seek.

Ed White is the vice president, new energy solutions, at National Grid.

7 replies on “Utilities aren’t afraid of solar”

  1. If “customers pay twice as much for solar than in other states where we operate”, that is NOT the same as claiming residential PV adoption of solar is WHY electricity rates for ALL customers are higher. AND several representatives of the utilities industry, and the Associated Industries of Massachusetts make that claim. In fact, if, as is clear from EIA data, ALL electricity costs in Massachusetts are higher than in other states, it is not surprising that electricity costs to solar customers are as well.

    The question is not whether or not across the region solar is efficient. It is vastly more efficient for an individual customer to generate electricity on their own roof and consume it then and there than it is to have it generated (inefficiently, mind you, a LONG way away) and transmitted across a network which needs to be maintained and incurs losses. Accordingly, it’s cheaper to, wherever possible, defect from the grid, and buy as little of it as someone can.

    The details come for people who cannot afford to pay the capital outlays to put solar on their roofs, and those are the customers that net metering caps, changes in net metering rates, and withdrawal of programs like SRECs will hurt. Moreover, utilities want to place solar where it means they least need to build out the grid to support it, because that saves them money.

    The alternative is to work with the Commonwealth on a plan to sell off portions of their transmission grid to decentralized operators, operators who generate and consume locally, and from time to time borrow from neighboring similar clusters of generator-consumers, and sometimes from the grid at large. That way, the remainder of the grid is not “burdened” by the demands of the clusters.

    The model to follow is New York State. It is possible there are many reasons for electricity costs in all sections of Massachusetts to be high, INCLUDING poor planning on the part of ISO-NE, on the part of the utilities, and especially the incompetent leadership of the House on Beacon Hill, who seem to place their personal political gain above all.

  2. “$280 million in 2015 alone” translates to a 3% increase for the average Massachusetts Rate Payer. 3% or $6 per month ($48 per year) for a customer who spends $200 a month on electricity. Seems a pretty small price to pay to keep from destroying the planet.

  3. Do you know of any effort / report to explain why Massachusetts electricity rates are so high compared to other neighboring states ?

  4. Readers should look up the “Averch–Johnson effect”, otherwise known as “gold-plating”, to understand what is going on here. In fact utilities such as NG must pass on their actual energy costs to consumers without markup by law, so in the end this is not really about energy per se at all. It is about “capacity”, or the maximum rate at which energy can be delivered to a given node on the grid. Decoupling does not change how a distribution company such as NG’s revenue requirements are computed, and if sales decline, the cost per kWh must go up. NG says that’s not fair to those customers who can’t go solar, although that argument also applies to customers who becomes more energy efficient (decoupling not withstanding). The difference between solar and efficiency is that while efficiency has limits (especially in multi-family units where moving everyone out and gutting the place is all-but-impossible), *community* solar does not — and it is really community solar that is being capped here in MA. But as anyone who doesn’t think the UN is the source of all evil by now knows, the onset of undeniable manmade climate change means the public interest is best served by getting off fossil fuels ASAP, by any and all means possible. If NG (and other stakeholders) failed to read the tea leaves in time and so grossly over-invested in the wrong kinds of infrastructure (read: fracked gas), they should pay the same price as any real business and lose money. Instead they’re trying to do what Wall Street does and get bailed out by buying a pack of politicians with promises of a cushy job once their constituents wake up and give ’em the boot. I’m looking at YOU Gov. Baker!

  6. But most of our bill is based on the kWh’s used times the rate. I was told by a local solar installer that the average New England yearly energy consumption is around 8000 kWh vs the national average of 12,000 kWh. So is it that our low annual usage drives up the rate based on (fixed) costs to operate the grid ? If this is so then increased site consumed generation and net metering will only increase the rates further……just what the utility co’s. are saying

  7. Utilities aren’t afraid of solar? Then why do they keep attacking solar customers with fees and unfair rates for their power? Customers pay too much for solar? Maybe but we also pay too much for interconnect and distribution fees to subsidize large commercial and industrial customers. The issue here isn’t solar energy, it is the utility companies keeping their cash cow of residential customers who pay the most for power and use the grid the least. Large commercial and industrial customers pay very little for electrical power, often as little as the wholesale value, usually as an economic incentive to create area jobs. The problem is residential customers are stuck holding the bag. Don’t get me wrong, solar customers do use the grid as a battery and should pay something, But not get screwed in the deal. I won’t go solar until I can go off-grid.

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