Latest news with #BernadetteDelChiaro
Los Angeles Times
07-08-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
California Supreme Court sides with environmental groups in rooftop solar case
The California Supreme Court sided with environmental groups in a Thursday ruling, saying that state lawyers were wrong in their claim that the Public Utilities Commission's decision to slash rooftop solar incentives could not be challenged. The unanimous decision sends the case brought by the three groups back to the appeals court. The groups argue the utilities commission violated state law in 2022 when it cut the value of the credits that panel owners receive for sending their unused power to the electric grid by as much as 80%. The rules apply to Californians installing the panels after April 14, 2023. The Supreme Court justices said the appeals court erred in Jan. 2024 when it ruled against the environmental groups. In that decision, the appeals court said that courts must defer to how the commission interpreted the law because it had more expertise in utility matters. 'This deferential standard of review leaves no basis for faulting the Commission's work,' the appeals court had concluded then in its opinion. The environmental groups argued the appeals court ignored a 1998 law that said the commission's decisions should be held to the same standard of court review as those by other state agencies. 'The California Supreme Court has ruled in our favor that the CPUC is not above the law,' said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president at the Environmental Working Group, after Thursday's decision was published. The other groups filing the case are the Center for Biological Diversity and The Protect Our Communities Foundation. The utilities commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ruling. More than 2 million solar systems sit on the roofs of homes, businesses and schools in California — more than any other state. Environmentalists say that number must increase if the state is to meet its goal, set by a 2018 law, of using only carbon-free energy by 2045. The utilities commission has said that the credits given to the rooftop panel owners on their electric bill have become so valuable that they were resulting in 'a cost shift' of billions of dollars to those who do not own the panels. This has raised electric bills, especially hurting low-income electric customers, the commission says. The credits for energy sent by the rooftop systems to the grid had been valued at the retail rate for electricity, which has risen fast as the commission has voted in recent years to approve rate increases the utilities have requested. The state's three big for-profit electric utilities — Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric — have sided with commission in the case. The utilities have long complained that electric bills have been rising because owners of the rooftop solar panels are not paying their fair share of the fixed costs required to maintain the electric grid. For decades, the utilities have worked to reduce the energy credits aimed at incentivizing Californians to invest in the solar panel systems. The rooftop systems have cut into the utilities' sale of electricity.
New York Times
07-08-2025
- Business
- New York Times
California Supreme Court Requires New Review of Rooftop Solar Policy
The California Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a lower court to reconsider a state policy that reduced how much utilities have to pay homeowners with rooftop solar panels for the energy that they send to the electric grid. The court did not deem California's policy illegal but said a State Court of Appeal had erred in affirming the policy without fully reviewing it and by being too deferential to state regulators. The rooftop solar industry and its allies hailed the decision as a big win and said it could open the door to reversing a policy that has sharply reduced the installation of solar panels on California homes over the last two years. 'Justice is served, and the sun shines a little brighter on California today,' said Bernadette Del Chiaro, senior vice president for California at the Environmental Working Group, one of the parties that challenged the state policy. In 2022, California's Public Utilities Commission significantly reduced the compensation that homeowners receive for the excess electricity they send to the grid, undercutting a business that had its origins in the state. The new policy applied to solar systems installed starting in April 2023. Other states have made similar changes in recent years, making it difficult for rooftop solar companies to operate. Partly as a result, several big rooftop solar companies, including Sunnova and SunPower, have filed for bankruptcy in recent years. With roughly two million rooftop systems, California leads the country in such installations. Because much of the state is very sunny for a lot of the year, it is widely considered one of the best places to install solar panels. California's high electric rates also make it easier for homeowners to justify spending money on rooftop solar because they are likely to recoup their investment in just a few years through savings on their electric bills. But utilities, unions whose members work for utilities and state regulators contend that California's old approach to compensating rooftop solar owners was unfair. Before the state's regulator changed the system, the credits that homeowners received for the electricity they sent to the grid offset the watts they used on a roughly one-to-one basis. Critics of the old approach said those credits were too generous and allowed residents who could afford rooftop solar to pay little or nothing for a connection to the electric grid. As a result, the critics said, households that could not install solar panels were bearing more of the cost of operating and maintaining the grid. Utility companies also contend that the electricity they bought on the wholesale market was cheaper than the value of the credits they were forced to offer owners of rooftop solar system under the old system. Rooftop solar, the utilities said, also produced lots of power in the afternoon, when the supply typically exceeds the demand in California, but not much in the evenings, when demand surges as people return home. Rooftop solar executives and some energy experts counter that home systems help everybody by reducing the need for expensive new power plants, long-distance power lines and other equipment. In addition, rooftop systems can be built a lot faster and face less opposition than natural gas power plants, big solar and wind farms, and the transmission lines needed to carry power from those large projects to cities and towns. In their 2022 decision, California regulators sided with the utilities and their labor unions by lowering the benefits of rooftop solar and redirected some of those incentives toward the purchase of battery systems that could help meet energy demand in the evenings.
