By: Mike Tony, The State Journal
The resource curse doesn’t have to ensnare the sun.
That was the message passionately delivered by the founder and CEO of an outfit with Jefferson County roots that bills itself as “Appalachia’s solar company” during a rally at the West Virginia Capitol last weekend.
“We’ll build the next great American industry,” Dan Conant, of solar energy company Solar Holler, told a crowd of some 130 supporters Jan. 27. “And we’ll own it this time.”
But Conant said that would happen only after defeating a pending proposal from FirstEnergy utilities serving West Virginia that he and other advocates say would cut off growth of a solar industry sorely underdeveloped in West Virginia relative to the rest of the country.
Conant urged his audience to “tell FirstEnergy to leave us alone.”
The rally highlighted opposition to a plan by FirstEnergy utilities Mon Power and Potomac Edison to adjust a solar energy crediting mechanism called net metering. Solar advocates say the companies’ proposal pending before the Public Service Commission would discourage customer investment in solar.
Mon Power and Potomac Edison want to change the mechanism so that customer-produced solar energy would no longer be valued at the same rate charged for energy provided by the companies. Instead, Mon Power and Potomac Edison want to credit a customer’s account at a wholesale market price approved annually in fuel cost rate proceedings.
Through the mechanism, called net metering, a residential customer owns or leases and operates a renewable energy resource connected on their side of the utility meter. If the customer supplies more energy to Mon Power and Potomac Edison than they get in a billing period, the remainder has been banked by the companies and credited to the customers in future billing cycles when they produce less energy than needed from the utilities.
FirstEnergy has said the proposal filed in May is appropriate to keep other customers from subsidizing net metering customers.
But Conant sounded a note of alarm about the proposal to the PSC at an evidentiary hearing last week, saying his company had to shut down sales in FirstEnergy territory at the beginning of November amid uncertainty over the future of net metering.