Baker Administration Listens & Leads on Implementing NEM Law
Last week the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) issued an important ruling on implementing the state’s recently passed net metering law.
On April 11th Governor Charlie Baker signed legislation that increased the Bay State’s net metering caps, preserved full retail rate net energy metering (NEM) for some classes of customers and established a new reduced credit rate for some solar projects.
SEIA played an important role in advocating for the law. For more than a year, solar projects in National Grid’s service territory were unable to move forward because of the cap. SEIA launched a major campaign to break the legislative log jam and we succeeded.
But the law left some important details to regulators and one issue in particular could have had major repercussions for solar projects. The law said new solar projects would receive the reduced compensation rate but existing projects would be compensated with full retail rate net metering.
Regulators then needed to define what a “new” and “existing” project actually was and how to precisely draw the line between the two.
After the law was signed, SEIA weighed in immediately with Baker Administration officials saying any projects that were simply awaiting a NEM cap allocation should be considered an existing project.
These advanced-stage project had submitted all their necessary applications. Failure to grandfather these projects with full retail rate net metering would have undermined investor confidence in the solar market, and caused many of those projects awaiting approval to not be built at all.
While DPU’s initial ruling on this issue failed to clarify the dividing line between new and existing projects a subsequent ruling helped resolve the issue. The DPU clarified that projects awaiting cap allocation would get the credit rate they had expected before the new law went into effect.
This common sense approach provides stability to the solar market and gives solar developers the certainty they need to move ahead with hundreds of projects that had been sitting in limbo.
Kudos to Baker Administration officials for sorting this out and of course to the DPU Commissioners for issuing their final ruling.Â
