This story was reported and written by our media partner the Virginia Mercury.
An opportunity for residents who want solar on their property is expanding to the Richmond and Hampton Roads area amid potential changes to how much savings Virginia’s two largest utilities will offer to customers who install panels.
Solar United Neighbors says participation in its co-op program to install solar panels on residential properties can be a way to hedge against larger electricity bills coming from that increase, and while using carbon-free energy.
“I haven’t paid Dominion Energy for (energy) consumption in almost 18 months,” said Brandon Praileau, Virginia program director for the group, who said he installed solar panels on a church he’s a pastor at earlier this decade. “The utility rate has risen … since I went solar, but I don’t see it.”
The co-op model SUN advocates for involves a period when community members join as a group to ask a solar developer to install panels on their properties. The larger ask brings the cost of installation down compared to companies needing to complete one-off projects, Praileau explained.
Once 20 to 30 members sign up, the co-op will send out a request for proposals to developers, which will then be reviewed by a selection committee of a few members to determine which builder to go with. The installer pays SUN a referral fee for each member who signs up.
“The spring, summer and the early bit of September, October — that’s peak season time,” Praileau said. “The goal is to try to get those systems installed so that those consumers will be able to produce peak energy consumption during the peak time of solar.”
Part of the ultimate savings equation includes selling renewable energy credits created when solar energy is produced, and participating in net metering, Praileau added.
Net-metering reduces the need to pull electricity from the grids’ centralized generation sources, and allows the excess energy that is produced to be sold back to the utility, with the value of that sale being credited, or netted, against a customer’s future bill.
“Think of it like the old AT&T rollover minutes. The minutes you don’t use roll over to the next month. It’s the same concept here,” Praileau said. “If you produce more energy than what you consume, that unused energy you bank is then rolled over to the next month for you to then draw back from against whatever your next month’s energy consumption is.”
According to the National Renewable Energy Labs, the average residential solar install is about 7.5 kilowatts. The equation saving’s answer in Virginia, Praileau said, ultimately amounts to customers getting a return on their 30-year investment on a 4 to 8 kilowatt system in about eight or nine years.
“What makes that eight years reasonable are the incentive tax credits around solar right now on the federal level … and if you’re in a rural area,” Praileau said, adding some localities have tax credits, too. “There might be credits for you if you’re in a disadvantaged community.”
But the savings do come with “cost-shifting” concerns. For instance, non-solar users argue that solar users benefit from the grid for energy needs when their panels aren’t producing or when they’re selling their excess energy back to the grid. That concern has prompted Appalachian Power Company, which serves Southwest Virginia, to ask regulators to reduce its payment for excess power from 16 cents per kilowatt hour to 4 cents per kilowatt hour.
Appalachian’s request, Praileau said, “basically would kill the solar market and kill the solar industry, because that makes the return on investment like 30 years,” and puts an increased focus on what Dominion Energy may request with the State Corporation Commission, which regulates Virginia’s utilities, in May.
There’s also already a cost shift happening across the entire grid, Praileau said, with new generation sources needing to be added to the grid to meet rising energy demands.
“Who do you think is going to pay for that? The rate payer is going to pay for that,” Praileau said. “Where is the real cost shift to?”
SUN began a campaign for the Richmond and Hampton Roads area Nov. 21 and will run it until April 4.
The latest campaign comes after four previous ones in Virginia, which includes Arlington and Fairfax counties, D.C. and the Maryland counties of Howard, Montgomery and Frederick. As a result of those about 1,000 customers signed up and about 4.8 megawatts of solar has been installed leading to an investment of about $4 million, Praileau said.
“We know that Virginia’s energy consumption is rising at a very rapid pace,” said Praileau, adding that getting more residential solar, or “distributed generation” on the grid is part of alleviating the demand. Pair that with battery storage and demand side management programs with smart meters that can adjust a home’s electricity needs to create “virtual power plants,” Praileau said, “you can add just as much capacity as you could building a peaker power plant,” which Dominion is doing to ensure grid reliability.
Those tools Praileau laid out are available as the state and municipalities have pledged to reduce fossil fuel emissions in their jurisdictions. The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments set a target to have 250,000 rooftops install solar. The City of Richmond has reduced the 3.5 million tons of community-wide carbon emissions in 2022 by 23% as part of its goal to have net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The plan includes the adoption of residential solar.
“Three percent of the city-wide emissions are from municipal government,” said Laura Thomas, director of the Office of Sustainability with the city of Richmond during a recent media even. “That means 97% (of reductions) need to happen out in the community.”
