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Syndicate

Jun 04
Advocates Thrilled With Energy Bills Print E-mail
Wednesday, 04 June 2008

More School, Farm, and City and Town-based Renewable Energy on the Horizon with Bill Passed by RI General Assembly

via: People's Power & Light

Providence, RI—Bills passed the House and Senate yesterday, Tuesday, June 3, allowing more small renewable energy producers to connect with the electrical grid and essentially run their electrical meters backwards. When they become law, as now expected, they will spur new investment in small, land-based renewable energy installations in Rhode Island, a perfect and essential complement to the proposed offshore wind farm.

Click on "More..." for the rest of this story. Click here for Thursday morning's projo story.

People's Power & Light lauds the expansion of “net metering,” for which it campaigned for two years. The bill will enable more and larger individual renewable energy systems to share their excess electrical production with the electric grid and receive virtually the full retail cost of their production as credit against their bills. The bill also creates limited community net metering or “net billing,” which allows nonprofit affordable housing developers, for example, to deliver electricity from one renewable energy facility to each of the homes in a development. Municipalities, farms, and schools will be permitted to apply credits earned for energy produced to the energy used at more than one meter.

Church Community Housing Corp., a non-profit affordable housing developer in Newport County, may be one of the first agencies to take advantage of the net billing policy. Their idea to build a wind turbine at an affordable housing development in Tiverton and distribute the electricity to all the small, super-efficient homes on the site will now be more financially feasible.

Advocates anticipate widespread adoption of dispersed and diversified renewable energy in this way will make the grid more resilient, provide downward pressure on energy prices for everyone, and reduce global warming and the other environmental problems fossil fuels cause. Because electricity follows the path of least resistance, the excess energy will tend to feed the users closest on the grid, using very little of the grid itself, while potentially, depending on size and location, decreasing congestion on the grid and avoiding costs to all ratepayers of distribution system upgrades.

“The size of renewable energy systems has been constrained by the electric load at a single meter, even if the owner has several meters,” said Omay Elphick, Deputy Director of People's Power & Light. “Net billing allows you to build larger, more financially feasible projects. It will boost the project economics in a game-changing way.”

“We’ve come a long way with these policies over the past two years of negotiation,” said Advocacy Director Karina Lutz. “Current language requires the assessment of the costs and benefits to all ratepayers of the distributed generation. With the expected increase in distributed generation, we’ll be able to analyze the costs and benefits to all ratepayers using real world data. We’re optimistic that sheerly in economic terms the benefits will outweigh costs. And they certainly will if you count the costs of global warming, war over declining fossil resources, and the long-term consequences of nuclear power.”

She thanked net metering bill sponsors Rep. David Segal, Sen. Joshua Miller, and Senate President Joseph Montalbano. Rep. Segal’s H7809 and President Montalbano’s S2851 are the bills that passed.

Click here for the General Assembly press release.
 

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