Appalachian Power customers are one step closer to being able to sign up for solar power without having to own panels themselves, as legislation that would create a shared solar program for the utility’s service territory moved forward Monday.
SB 255, sponsored by Sen. Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County, and HB 108, sponsored by Del. Rip Sullivan Jr., D-Fairfax County, would create next year a shared solar program with a maximum capacity of 50 megawatts for Appalachian Power customers.
Surovell’s SB 253 and Sullivan’s HB 106 would expand Dominion Energy’s existing shared solar program next year from a maximum of 200 megawatts of electric generation capacity to 350. Dominion’s program was first authorized in 2020, and today most of its current capacity has already been awarded to solar developers.
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All four bills advanced on voice votes Monday in their respective chambers of the General Assembly, with no debate from lawmakers, and now head toward final votes as crossover — the day when bills passed by the House head to the Senate for consideration, and vice-versa — looms on Tuesday.
A shared solar, or community solar, program allows a customer to buy electricity from a participating solar company without the customer needing to own solar panels. Generally speaking, a customer pays a subscription fee to the company and receives credit on their electric bill for the solar power generated.
Proponents say shared solar programs can help customers save money using clean energy, but opponents say the programs shift costs onto other ratepayers.
The legislation caps the size of a participating shared solar facility at 5 megawatts and therefore deals with smaller projects, such as a 5-megawatt facility recently completed in Waynesboro and a 3.125-megawatt project planned for South Boston, not the larger utility-scale solar farms that have been the subject of more debate and controversy.
While the four bills advanced easily on Monday, some details of the programs remain to be determined.
As the Appalachian-related bills head toward crossover, the House and Senate versions have one key difference that would need to be reconciled before final passage.
The House version includes language requiring that low-income customers enrolled in the program see financial savings of “at least ten percent, relative to the subscription fee,” but the Senate version contains no such language.
If the shared solar legislation is ultimately signed into law, another as-yet-unknown is just how much of a minimum monthly bill each subscriber to a shared solar program would be required to pay in addition to the subscription fee. The monthly minimum is intended to cover the cost of electricity distribution and infrastructure and is levied regardless of how much electricity a customer uses.
Dominion’s monthly minimum currently sits around $62, but low-income customers are exempt from paying it. Dominion has said a higher monthly minimum is needed for shared solar program subscribers to pay their “fair share” toward maintaining the grid, but shared solar proponents have said the minimum is so high that the program is only cost-effective for low-income customers.
The bills to establish Appalachian’s program have no exemption to the monthly minimum for low-income customers.
Both the House and Senate versions of the legislation instruct the State Corporation Commission to set the Appalachian and Dominion programs’ minimum bills in such a way as to “ensure subscribing customers pay a fair share of the costs of providing electric services” and to “minimize the costs shifted to customers not in a shared solar program” — but also to “calculate the benefits of shared solar to the electric grid and to the Commonwealth and deduct such benefits from other costs.”
Determining that value of solar energy to the grid is a task the SCC is expected to undertake over the next two years. Shared solar proponents say that they hope that once such benefits are factored in, the minimum bill set by the SCC will be low enough to make shared solar a good deal for all customers.
The proposed legislation provides for incentives to build shared solar facilities on brownfields, landfills and rooftops and establishes a workgroup to determine those incentives.
The legislation also says that shared solar projects’ renewable energy certificates — which are essentially market instruments created when a company produces solar energy and which utilities and businesses can buy to help meet their clean-energy goals — cannot be kept and sold by the solar developers but must be allowed to go toward Appalachian’s and Dominion’s efforts in meeting such goals.
