Tariff's Fallout on CA Solar Industry Raises Fears

A member of the California Energy Commission, along with many in the solar industry and environmental movements, is warning that the Trump administration's planned tariffs on imported solar technology could cost jobs and raise prices for homeowners.

Administration officials framed the 30 percent tariffs as a way to protect domestic manufacturers and take a more aggressive stance toward China, which produces a number of the photovoltaic cells and modules that go into solar panels. About 80 percent of solar equipment is made abroad and imported to the U.S.

California state officials, solar businesses and industry groups say U.S. manufacturers can't keep pace with production in China, and they fear that the move could slow the adoption of renewable energy, raise the price of solar panels and cost the region jobs.

"I think it's a self-inflicted wound," said David Hochschild, one of five members of the California Energy Commission, the state agency that focuses on energy policy. "Any policies that arbitrarily raise the price of clean, domestic sources of energy like solar are a mistake, and I think the evidence is very strong that when you do that kind of thing, it results in a net reduction in total solar industry jobs."

"This is a political decision for the president and I think it's unfortunate because people on the left and right embrace solar energy," said Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar Energy Industries Association.

The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates the tariffs will eliminate some 23,000 jobs this year. Many of those could be in California, which is home to around 100,000 of the country's 260,000 solar energy jobs, Hochschild said. The solar industry provides more than 2,000 jobs in Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties alone.

"There will be a big impact for us here," Hochschild said, adding that manufacturing makes up 10 to 15 percent of solar industry jobs, while most of the jobs are in support and maintenance and sales, which could be adversely affected by the tariff.

By Tribune News Service, Techwire Insider

Some of the leading solar companies saw the tariff coming, Hochschild said, and stocked up on panels ahead of time.

Del Chiaro said local governments could mitigate the effects of the tariff by relaxing other costs for things like building permits. But Hochschild pointed out that a number of incentives for going solar have expired, and he said softening the blow will not be easy. The tariff reportedly includes a 30 percent solar import tax for crystalline-silicon solar cells and modules, which steps down by 5 percentage points each year to 15 percent by the fourth year, according to Green Tech Media. In addition, GTM reported, 2.5 gigawatts of cells are exempt from the tariffs each year.

While most of the solar industry voiced its opposition, the tariffs were requested by two solar manufacturers — bankrupt solar company Suniva and the U.S. subsidiary of Germany's SolarWorld — which contend that the increase in imported panels in the last five years sent prices plummeting and harmed business.

Trump supporters celebrated the move as another indication of the president's commitment to bringing manufacturing jobs back home.

"The president's action makes clear again that the Trump administration will always defend American workers, farmers, ranchers, and businesses in this regard," U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said in a statement announcing the decision.

Said Hochschild: "Virtually every solar company will be impacted by this."

Source: http://www.techwire.net/news/tariffs-fallout-on-ca-solar-industry-raises-fears.html

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How an IID consultant tried to tap the agency's solar program as ratepayers were shut out

A solar farm developed by ZGlobal was so big that it helped prompt the sudden end of the imperial irrigation district's popular net metering program.

By Sammy Roth, The Desert Sun

The Imperial Irrigation District infuriated customers last year when it abruptly closed a popular solar program to new applicants, putting rooftop solar out of reach for many families who could no longer afford it — and leaving more than 1,000 homes and businesses that had already decided to go solar in financial limbo for months.

But a solar project developed by an IID consultant, ZGlobal Inc., applied for the publicly funded solar program, known as net metering, just in time. ZGlobal's solar project was so large that it helped prompt the sudden end of net metering and at least temporarily kept hundreds of regular IID customers from enrolling, newly obtained documents show.

ZGlobal led the development of that solar project, at Imperial Valley College, while the consulting firm also helped run IID's energy department. ZGlobal's project was three times larger than the size limit for the utility's net metering program — and 600 times the size of an average rooftop solar system. That means it would have taken up 600 times more of the limited space in IID's solar program than the typical home solar installation.

Less than a month after getting net metering applications for the Imperial Valley College project, IID suddenly closed the program to new applicants, saying it had inadvertently accepted too many applications and might not be able to enroll everyone who had applied. That was stunning news for the thousand-plus IID customers — many of them in the Coachella Valley cities of Indio, La Quinta and Coachella — who had applied for net metering but hadn't yet been approved. Many of those homes and businesses had already paid for rooftop solar systems based on the expectation of net metering.

Without net metering, which pays solar generators for the electricity they produce, those customers weren't sure whether solar would save them money or raise their energy bills.

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Indio resident Paul Nelson was stuck in limbo for several months in 2016, after the Imperial Irrigation District abruptly closed NEM to new customers, making it unclear whether Nelson and many others would be able to afford their newly installed solar panels.
(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

After six months of growing political pressure, IID finally let most of the stranded solar customers enroll in net metering. But the utility provided little information to those customers in the interim, leaving many of them anxious that the tens of thousands of dollars they had agreed to pay rooftop solar installers would turn out to be a losing investment. In some cases, IID encouraged its stranded customers to sign up for a new, less generous solar program known as net billing, creating more confusion and anxiety.

"I've already paid for the system. I've got my investment just sitting there, doing nothing," Indio resident Paul Nelson, who had solar installed in early 2016, told The Desert Sun as he waited for word from IID last year. "I figured my return on my investment would be the reduction in my monthly bills. Well, guess what? I'm still getting monthly bills."

ZGlobal disputed the idea that the college solar project had anything to do with net metering's abrupt closure.

Kassy Perry, a Sacramento-based public relations consultant working for ZGlobal, said Imperial Valley College never actually received net metering benefits. She said the college ultimately agreed to switch to IID's new, less generous net billing program before its solar project came online, so that more homeowners could enroll in net metering.

Perry also suggested IID staff had caused the over-enrollment problem by continuing to accept net metering applications even when they knew the program was nearing capacity. The suggestion that ZGlobal's Imperial Valley College project helped prompt the end of net metering "is based on erroneous facts," Perry said in a written statement.

After net metering ended, a ZGlobal client stood to benefit from a new solar initiative that IID staff framed as a response to public anger over the closure of net metering.

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La Quinta residents Bob and Arlene Livon talk about the problems they’ve had trying to go solar as customers of the IID on May 9, 2016.
(Photo: Jay Calderon/The Desert Sun)

As more than 1,000 IID customers waited months to find out whether they'd get net metering, utility staff told IID's board of directors they were working on a plan that would allow ratepayers to keep accessing solar power. ZGlobal employee Jesse Montaño worked on that plan, which would involve IID buying power from a large-scale "community solar" farm. IID gave a ZGlobal client a $75-million contract for that solar farm, to be built on land owned by a limited liability company with close ties to ZGlobal.

"I've done business with a lot of government agencies, and I haven't seen one that's operated in that manner," said Kirk Weiss, regional sales manager for Planet Solar, a Palm Desert-based rooftop installer. "If you're an insider, you get special treatment."

ZGlobal terminated its $9.1-million consulting contract with IID in October, a year ahead of schedule, in the midst of an investigation by Imperial County's district attorney into the relationship between the consulting firm and the utility. That investigation was sparked by a series of articles in The Desert Sun focused on potential conflicts of interest at IID.

IID launched an internal investigation in response to The Desert Sun's reporting, which so far has led to the cancellation of two energy contracts, collectively worth $82 million. Utility officials had said they would release a report this week outlining other potentially problematic contracts, but IID's board of directors blocked the report's release until after the completion of a planned mediation between IID and ZGlobal.

IID didn't respond to detailed questions from The Desert Sun for this story. But in an emailed statement, the utility's general manager, Kevin Kelley, said: "To the extent there are issues, including the one you are asking about involving (Imperial Valley College), IID will address them in the mediation process by availing itself of the potential remedies under Government Code Section 1092."

Government Code Section 1092 allows public agencies to void any contracts that were made in violation of California's conflict-of-interest law. The law says elected officials, public employees and private contractors working for government agencies "shall not be financially interested in any contract made by them in their official capacity."

ZGlobal founder and president Ziad Alaywan has denied that he or ZGlobal ever acted improperly, saying the consulting firm has boosted the Imperial Valley's economy by bringing solar developers to the area and helping IID keep electricity rates low.

Read the full article at: https://www.desertsun.com/story/tech/science/energy/2017/12/21/imperial-irrigation-district-zglobal-iid-rooftop-solar-net-metering-coachella-valley-indio/907593001/

New, $1 billion program will bring rooftop solar to California renters

By Katy Murphy, The Mercury News

Over the next decade, roughly 150,000 low-income renters in California will see their apartment buildings outfitted with solar panels — and their electricity bills drop.

Regulations approved this week cleared the way for the state to spend $1 billion over 10 years — using proceeds from the state’s landmark climate-change program — on incentives for landlords to install rooftop solar panels on apartment buildings housing low-income residents.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about why we can’t get rooftop solar in the communities that need it most,” said Shana Lazero, legal director for the Richmond-based Communities for a Better Environment, which was part of a coalition that co-sponsored the solar legislation. “One of the hardest nuts to crack is the rental market. It’s a huge step to solving one of the biggest pieces of the problem.”

From costly solar panels to costlier Teslas, renewable energy is often associated with environmentally conscious elites — not poor families who live near factories and crowded freeways, suffering the most from the side-effects of a fossil fuel economy. In fact, a common criticism of California’s early climate-change approach was that the poor and working class were paying more to subsidize the electric vehicles and solar panels of the wealthy — “and there was some truth to that,” said Ethan Elkind, a UC Berkeley law professor who is director of the climate program for the school’s Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.

But in recent years, Elkind said, the state Legislature has tried to democratize its climate-change initiatives by investing more in those hit hardest by pollution.

“There are strong moral reasons to do that. There are strong economic reasons, too,” he said. “We want more people in California, particularly low-income people in disadvantaged communities, to feel a stake in the state’s climate programs and receive benefits from them.”

To qualify for the Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing program, known as SOMAH, an apartment building must include at least five subsidized units for low-income tenants. It also must either be located in a disadvantaged area or be inhabited mostly by families earning 60 percent of the area’s typical income. Landlords will apply for the incentives.

By law, at least 51 percent of the utility savings must go back to the tenant — a key aspect of the program.

The timeline for the new solar program also provides a window into the speed of bureaucracy: The bill creating the program — carried by Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, D-Stockton — was signed into law in 2015. Since then, it has undergone a halting regulatory process at the Public Utilities Commission, which this week approved the final regulations.

Lazero said she hoped that the first panels would be installed in the fall of 2018.

Co-sponsoring Eggman’s bill was the California Solar Energy Industries Association, which notes the challenge of installing solar panels on any multi-unit apartment building is far greater than on a single-family home, especially for a building housing low-income tenants.

But there is good news: As they become more common, solar panels have steadily gotten cheaper to install, said Kelly Knutsen, a senior policy adviser for the association. The cost per watt — $4.10 in 2015 — was $11.20 in 2000, according to data by the trade group.

“We’re excited it’s got momentum,” he said, “and we want to keep this going.”

Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/16/new-1-billion-program-will-bring-rooftop-solar-to-california-renters/