Note: This is a response to John Farrell’s Grist article “An Enormous Question for ‘Solar Choice’.”
Net Metering’s proven advantages over Value of Solar Tariffs in sustaining and growing a kickass solar market can be boiled down to six principles:
Don’t fix what isn’t broken. Don’t let your primary competitor determine the price of your product. Stick with the policy that revolutionized the game and gave birth to a bona fide industry the likes of which we have never seen before. Support fair value for Net Metering, and fight like hell for it. Because we can win. In fact, we are winning.
And by winning, I mean that Net Metering has facilitated unprecedented solar industry growth, and deployment of clean energy. The industry employs over 140,000 people, with growth at more than 10 times the national average.
Value of Solar Tariffs, on the other hand, are as dubious as they were when we called them Feed-in-Tariffs. The largest irony of Value of Solar Tariffs (VOSTs) is that they let the nation’s utilities—who have worked aggressively to undermine rooftop solar in recent years– determine solar’s value. This is, in a word, nuts.
You don’t hav... Read more
