To Greg Blake, owner of South Pack Solar in Peterborough, it’s possible that the town’s community power plan will deliver lower energy costs and more renewable energy once it rolls out later this spring.
“The proof will be in the pudding in terms of how it comes to fruition,” he said.
However, Blake is worried about one group of residents – those who currently have solar energy installations installed after 2017. Before 2017, Blake explained, solar users whose systems produced more energy than their houses could consume – common during the summer months – could push the excess energy into the Eversource grid and “bank” the kilowatt-hours to call on without paying when the house wasn’t producing enough.
“You’ve already made them, so you can retrieve them when you need them,” he said of the excess kilowatt-hours of energy.
However, since 2017, Blake said people with solar units started receiving a monetary value less than what they would have paid for energy. According to the Eversource website, the net-metering credits for systems of 10kW or less are “slightly lower” than the retail rate “because charges for energy efficiency, renewable energy and distributed solar are excluded from the net metering rate.”
But, according to Blake, that rate only applies for people who receive their energy from Eversource. Although the company will continue to distribute energy under community power, the energy would come from a third party, which he said would cause solar users to lose the rate they are getting from Eversource.
And with Peterborough residents automatically being enrolled in community power if they are Eversource customers, Blake said the town needs to reach out to people who have solar at their homes and tell them to opt out.
“They’re probably going to have several months of higher electric bills,” if they don’t opt out, he said. “(The town) should have solved this before they’re going to roll out a program.”
Joel Huberman, co-chair of the Peterborough Community Power Committee, stated that he has talked with Blake about the issue, and that Blake’s concern “illustrates the kind of confusion that many people have regarding what will happen in special cases when most Peterborough residents are automatically transferred to Peterborough Community Power (PCP) in early May.”
According to Huberman, people who have solar net-metering will not automatically be transferred to community power.
“That’s partly because we’re aware that folks with newer (post 2017) net-metering would lose out, but also because Eversource is not yet able to provide us the information that we need to properly credit solar net-metering amounts. Eversource is working on this,” Huberman stated.
After Eversource sends the net-metering data to Community Power Coalition of New Hampshire, which is acting as Peterborough’s agent, Huberman stated that Peterborough Community Power will be able to offer net-metering.
“Our intention is to give all net-metering folks the same reimbursement (regardless of when they started net metering) and to make that reimbursement at least as good as the reimbursement currently offered by Eversource for pre-2017 net-metering,” Huberman stated.