Do-over!
Critics who hate the state’s new rooftop solar rules — which slash the amount that future rooftop solar owners will get for exporting power to the grid — are demanding a rehearing before the California Public Utilities Commission.
“The decision is part of a conspiracy to violate antitrust laws,” one petition for a do-over asserts.
The alleged conspirators? The three big utilities — Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric (who said that current rooftop solar owners are credited for far more than their exported power is really worth, forcing their non-solar neighbors to pay for it).
The co-conspirators? Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Utility Reform Network and the California Public Utilities Commission itself (which favored a revamp).
The conspiracy’s objectives? “Wholesale and retail price fixing, group boycotting, price discrimination.”
“We allege that the CPUC has effectively surrendered its regulatory authority … over the IOUs (investor-owned utilities) by affording the IOUs undue influence and control over the CPUC deliberations, decisions and actions … and by politically incestuous relationships between regulator (CPUC) and regulated (IOU) officials,” said the motion by CAlifornians for Renewable Energy and Michael E. Boyd.
Illegal!
A separate request for a rehearing, by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Protect Our Communities Foundation and the Environmental Working Group, is markedly less colorful.
Instead of asserting conspiracy and manipulation, it argues that the PUC made legal errors and thus the decision must be reversed.
The errors? California law requires the PUC to foster “continued sustainable growth” of solar power and encourage its spread in disadvantaged communities. The new rules will do neither, they argue.
The PUC also weighed the costs of rooftop solar on non-solar folks too heavily, and weighed the savings from canceled…
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