was welcome i would like to welcome you to the program tonight on solar policy in belmont and i'd like to welcome paul rob ago to our program carl is the executive director of the pace law school energy and climate center called his twenty five years of experience in the electric utility industry working on power produce working for power producers distribution companies and as a regulator and policy maker able to appear here tonight because he's on his way to deliver the keynote address at the northeast sustainable energy conference in boston coral was while cole was a vice president of austin energy in austin texas he spearheaded the development of the innovative so value of solar rate structure for fairly compensating utilities and solar hosts for solar generation while not burdening other utility customers karl was director of regulatory affairs at eighty s which is a seventeen billion dollar international energy producer operating in twenty one countries and karl has served as commissioner with the texas public utilities commission as well as deputy assistant secretary of energy for utility technology in the u s department of energy so welcome call thanks roger it's great to be here let's get right into it sure solar is growing rapidly across the country and locally you can see solar panels powering electric  lights and traffic lights and roadside signs and on our neighbor's roof and if you go to the r e i in natick you'll see solar panels covering their parking lot if you go to iggy's bakery in cambridge they have a very interesting solar array how come the such a rapid adoption of solar in massachusetts and beyond there's a whole bunch of reasons if you think about the relatively short history of solar we really develop solar cells those little semiconductor cells look kind of glassy and shiny absorb sunlight and convert it directly into electricity we really just got serious about those in the one nine hundred fifty s so we're talking about something that's only a half century old but it's popular today because the costs are falling and they're and they're real low and they're very affordable  wide range of applications and it's one of those amazing technologies like computers and cell phones where the more we make the cheaper they get so we're really enjoying this rapid acceleration in performance and rapid decline in cost i made a list of a whole bunch of other reasons to go and make sure that i cover them i said people are also finding more and more cost effective ways to use it my favorite is to power the lights for school crossings because you don't want to leave something as valuable as our children to the grid and it could get knocked down at least with solar power and a little battery there you know those lights are going to be protecting our children solar goes in when how and in the size we need it we call that scal but you can always get the right size solar solution for your need that's very different than the big giant coal plants and nuclear power plants and makes it a more valuable resource it has no moving parts or very few sometimes you can choose to have it tilt to follow this on most systems on  rooftops just stay still so it's all solid state electronics nothing to wear out and break like there is for so many other power sources it reduces our dependency on coal and gas huge environmental benefits associated with that but it also reduces wear and tear on the power plants that we've already invested in and the transmission systems and the distribution systems and the transformers and all the other parts of the system so when a customer generates a lot of their electricity it's like they're reducing their demand and that reduces wear and tear all the way up the system for savings for everybody who's connected to that utility it gives customers control over their energy use like an investment in energy efficiency it's always good these bills are important to us and if we can manage them better that's valuable to customers it has a good match with expensive summer peak periods when the demand and the price for electricity goes really high that's when solar is doing its best because the same thing that causes those prices causes the solar cells to generate electricity i mentioned before no pollution that means no contribution to global warming that's really really getting increasingly valuable it's a fantastic job creator putting solar on a roof is a labor intensive process and it works better if the crews are right there in the community so it creates lots of jobs because it's solving a local power need it keeps the money that we spend on our energy local and in our community and economic development experts will tell you there's a multiplier effect rule number one in economic development if you wan keep your money you don't give it all away so you can keep your money to meet your energy needs in your community it grows in your community and makes your community stronger and then finally i think we increasing cust numbers of customers recognize it's the right thing to do and a whole bunch of customers here in belmont and other places have said i'm going to take some of my personal wealth some of my personal investment i'm going to take on the personal obligation to participate in moving our electricity system to  clean sustainable solar based system or at least increasingly solar system so we get actual private individual customers helping do what otherwise the utility would have to invest in that's a good partnership for the community so that's a quick list that's great i mean clearly solar has a lot of benefits but it presents challenges for utilities however utilities been responding to the growth of solar solar is challenging if you if you're a utility executive with your mind firmly fixed in the one nine hundred fifty s right i mean that we have and let's not take one thing away from the electric utility industry over the last hundred years over most of the last they did remarkable and heroic things to give us access to this extremely great energy source electricity look at how important and how valuable it is in our daily lives it's true you cannot live a modern life without electricity and utilities across the country are responsible for getting it for us but they did it using basically a dumb one way electron delivery system large central station power plants transmission lines down through distribution lines down to individual customers for us it was like drinking out of a firehose there's a lot of spillage along the way now with this revolution in energy efficiency distributed solar technology we have an opportunity to have a generation occur at the other end but these are systems that customers install these are things that customers do and that's threatening and frightening to utility people they're saying we know how to control that old system but we don't know what to do with this new system so some utilities are reacted by saying that it's even a mortal threat to their very existence it is if they don't change their business model they say it's technically challenging it is if they don't use modern technology to address the problems they say that it causes problems with other customers who don't use solar it will if they don't figure out ways that all customers get to participate in solar as a community as individual customers as renters as people who live in multifamily dwellings there are solutions to all these problems but if you insist on keeping your eyes firmly in the past solar increasing customer control over energy use all of these are challenges to the old business model and it's going to compel some change  so much has lagged neighboring communities in installing residential solar how has the light or yoke of local utility been responding to residents who want to install solar on their homes right so we get down to sort of from the general how does the utility react and by the way i should say i characterize how utilities react if there want to stick with the old system and want to resist there are some fantastic examples going around the country of utilities who are reaching out and partnering with their solar customers and with their solar communities of interest to change the way they do business and to keep the utility profitable even open up new lines of profitability now with a utility like belmont it's not about profitability it's a community solar system it's a municipal sand and i just like austin energy i work before so their goal should be keeping costs lower if they can and if they can take advantage of solar to help keep costs lower overall then they should find ways to do it unfortunately the reason i'm here the reason i responded is because i got involved in conversations with some citizens in belmont who cared about the fact that that the company was was basically proposing some pretty draconian attacks on solar some some rate and regulatory changes that would impose new charges and reduce the value that a customer could receive by engaging  solar and i got to tell you these are outlier actions right these are these are outliers within the community of the hundreds of municipal utilities right here in the state of massachusetts only less than a handful are taking the course of action that belmont is taking of all the forty of all the fifty states forty four have net metering policies like belmont has today and in many of those have reduced resisted changes to try to gut the value that solar gets i was struggling with this roger i was trying to figure out if i could come up with an analogy that didn't sound as sort of complicated as solar and utility rates which is the kind of complication i revel in but i've been doing enough cocktail parties and other things to know that most people find it boring so let me see if i can find i want to try just a simple analogy this is what's going on in belmont this is what's proposed belmont secured for itself the only grocery store in town it sells tomatoes it sells cheap generic tomatoes they're kind of pinkish and kind of chalky tasting but they're all the standard size and they stay good on the on the shelf and they're reasonably priced and you can always find them at the belmont lite grocery store some  you have started reading on this internet thing that home grown tomatoes can be healthy people have put out instructions for very simple ways to grow your own tomato successfully and how to do it without pesticides and and to get a good crop so in the middle of summer bite into one of those juicy red flavorful tomatoes hearing about this the belmont like a grocery store has said not only are we going to continue to charge you every time you do still come in for a tomato because you always have to pay for tomatoes if you want to from us and not only is the price of that tomato going to reflect the cost of the store and the tomatoes by the way the tomatoes a small price the store and the salaries to the c e o and the trucks to deliver the tomatoes to the store and all those things but what they're proposing now is to send you a bill for the tomatoes you didn't buy not exactly for tomatoes but because they have a store there for tomatoes that you don't buy and they say they're entitled to have the entire store paid for and they're trying to make it so that you don't have an economic incentive you don't have a health incentive you don't have a reason to grow your own tomatoes and all those reasons you thought were really good and all those things you thought about taking care of your kids and being healthy and being responsible and getting control your grocery bill all of that the belmont grocery store has said we're responding by making it so it doesn't work for you that's really what's going on here and i said it's not that you won't have to pay the cost of being able to go to the store and you're not you have a hard time growing tomatoes in the winter belmont's going to be there for you and they're go charge you the full price of that but if you dare try to take care of your own tomato appetite they're sending you a bill that's the proposal they're creating new charges and reducing the value of your home grown electricity so that hopefully you won't try to do it anymore do you have any thoughts or recommendations about how belmont could move forward the adoption of solar not that way yeah right ok you know this is a municipal utility there the very reason for public power is that it can be close to its customers i believe so strongly in the core ethic of public power i got a taste of this at austin energy it's remarkable i mean there's nothing like a utility where you if you want to talk to the chairman of the board you just walk down town to city hall and you can talk to him or her you know that's that's the way it should work and they should have the best interests of the community in mind and right now in belmont probably a relatively few customers who are getting up and growing their own tomatoes but there's a lot more that want to there's a lot more that want to figure out how to do it so belmont like the tomato thing the like company should figure out ways to meet this customer demand and they should say things well if you can afford to put it on your own roof and or you live in a multifamily dwelling they should explore what utilities across the country are exploring which is community solar projects where the cost is lower and multiple customers can participate in it they should they should explore other ways to develop and grow the solar industry have the idea of solar installers living and working in this community and making a living there and more than anything what they need to do is back all their decisions up with that  the frightening things that i've seen in the proposals from belmont for example is these charges are based on a hypothetical customer who produces a high profile hypothetical amount of solar energy and then they construct a charge that's very real that's not how it's supposed to work in the utility business it is so a customer cost more a cost to service study should show it and they should conduct that cost a service study and if they want to find the right value to compensate that customer for their solar production they should do the study to determine it and  joke that i use is that you know in god we trust but everyone else should bring data and what's been missing from the belmont proposal so far there's a lot of calculations there's a lot of numbers but there's no data about what is worth and what it costs and what benefits it brings that be a really good place to stop are there any studies that have been done on that and so on there were so yeah more and more every single day i personally have been involved in studies in austin in minnesota in north carolina and several other places and colorado i can tell you that the most recent one days old in maine which is just a short drive from here the value of source study that was just came out it was created by established by the legislature of the state of maine it was reviewed by the public service commission public utility commission of maine came out and it has some pretty remarkable numbers when you fully account for all the avoided costs that are associated with electricity distribution transmission and my way there are real values there and the value of avoided environmental impacts and you do so over the twenty five year life of a solar panel each one of those kilowatt hours of electricity from a solar generator is worth about thirty three cents compare that to paying eighteen cents for electricity today as a residential customer belmar so you're saying that a kilowatt of electricity that's generated from a solar panel could actually be worth more than the retail price you're going to get actually the right direction yes it's worth more and if the utility can pay less than that thirty three cents in the bank if they can pay just eighteen cents if they just gave you retail value for that they would be making let's do my math fifteen cents of extra value for all the other rate payers that they could bring into the system and you know what that spells over twenty five years that's called rate reduction that means that your in your community is not addicted to natural gas prices that are certain to go back up your community is not addicted to polluting sources that are increasingly can to global climate change your community is not continuously addicted to a giant system that can be terrorized by increasing hurricanes and storms your system is strong and local and invested in by the users that's why that value is fifteen cents higher than the cost  do you have any other examples for utilities around the country that have taken a more positive view of residential solar and actions that they've taken well i'm damned if i mean many utilities have done various things xcel energy is doing some fantastic stuff with community solar in colorado third party is bringing third party providers to come work with xcel in minnesota and minnesota power lingo so some of us you could maybe have a good roof without a tree that doesn't shade your roof you could put solar on you might have the money to do it put on a big enough system you maybe the borrow lease you know take out a home equity loan some customers live in multifamily places or they have beautiful trees shading their roof their house is not ideal for solar so the idea is that we basically have a virtual rooftop for multiple customers now solar is a high fixed cost business so if you could do a solar installation that was ten homes big or twenty homes big it's going to be cheaper than trying to do twenty different separate installations so you actually can achieve some cost savings plus if utility will look to the places in its grid where it has congestion and high costs because of the way the system is configured that solar can actually add extra special value to reducing grid costs and save on transformers and poles and wires and research getting and things like that so basically it's an idea that works where you might say shade a parking lot out so you know here by the train station right that municipal parking lot you put up shaded covers and so it's more comfortable in the summer and you make some electricity and you as an individual customer could buy in as a subscriber to a share of that what's really exciting is that we can you can buy into smaller level so for example low income customers customers who are just up you know a tighter household budget can buy smaller amounts but still take advantage of the fact that once you buy into solar the price never changes make you ma electricity bill that you knew was going to be flat for twenty five years now it's why more money right and and some of our customers who have the highest strain of their household budgets would really appreciate getting a flat electric bill or at least some part of their electric bill being flat for years to come that's something they can that's that's electricity that they not only need to live but that they can live with that's great so it sounds like that there are lots of ways that we could improve the environment for residents in belmont no order to be able to adopt solar and and this is really just been fascinating so i'd like to thank you for coming and  giving us your expertise and your time and i'd like to thank the audience for joining us tonight and i hope you found that this was very illuminating and i guess