The hamlet of Stelle, Ill., a village once known as home to a millennial sect, lies quite literally at the end of the Commonwealth Edison service line. Blackouts, brownouts, voltage spikes that blow up television sets–residents say they’ve seen it all in recent years.
Apparently, they’ve seen enough. The 50-home village, about 20 miles south of Kankakee, may be on the way to becoming the solar-power capital of the Midwest.
The local telephone switch is solar-powered. The water works is powered by a windmill. When power went down for four days last July, a handful of residents didn’t even notice because several homes and a local machine workshop get their electricity from the sun.
Still, Edison had one last shock for local residents. When they wanted to feed excess electricity from their windmill into the Edison grid, the utility demanded they install a costly meter. Moreover, Edison offered to pay Stelle just a few pennies per kilowatt hour, one-fifth of what the town had to pay when the windmill stopped spinning.
“It was a huge hassle. They made us pay so much for metering equipment that it made it prohibitive,” said Mark Wilkerson, a Stelle resident who runs a solar equipment distributorship and heads the local chamber of commerce. Instead, they gave Edison the excess electricity for free.
Stelle is not alone in dealing with a recalcitrant utility. Around the country, a small but growing number of environmentally concerned consumers–the so-called green market–have begun turning to pollution-free solar power to electrify their homes.
They have run into roadblocks set up by their local utilities, ranging from costly requirements for unnecessary cutoff switches and meters to refusals to pay fair rates for excess electricity generated during the peak sunlight hours.
Efforts to eliminate these regulatory barriers have begun in legislatures and before public utilities commissions across the country, initiated mostly by environmentalists and solar-power advocates and manufacturers.
In most areas, utilities are fighting the changes.
For instance, 19 states have adopted so-called net metering regulations. Under net metering, a solar or wind generator that feeds its excess power into the local utility grid gets paid at the same rate at which the owner takes it out. In essence, the homeowner or business gets to run the meter backwards during peak generating hours of maximum sun or high wind, which usually do not correspond with peak usage.
Illinois rejected net metering in its recent deregulation bill after Edison and Illinois Power opposed the provision.
Any threat posed by solar power to utilities is not immediate. Solar power is still two to three times more expensive than nuclear power plants or coal- or oil-generated electricity, the latter two creators of so-called greenhouse gases that are the target of the ongoing global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan. Even among decentralized alternatives to the big power companies, natural gas turbines have emerged as the lowest cost option in today’s market.
But the market for clean energy alternatives such as solar power is expected to take off over the next few years. Electricity deregulation will create an opening for solar dealers to advertise their wares to consumers. The environmental concern over global warming and the falling price of solar cells–the price of a home solar system is around $20,000–will make solar electricity an increasingly attractive option for consumers willing to pay a premium to avoid oil- or nuclear-generated electricity.
In California, the market where deregulation will kick off first on Jan. 1, the chief alternative being offered consumers is “green power,” not low-cost power.
“There’s a core of 10 to 15 percent of green consumers who would willingly pay more and an even larger group who would but for the hassle factors,” said Blair Swezey, a researcher at the federally funded National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. “Very few utilities want to get in this business. The majority see it anywhere from a nuisance to a real competitive threat.”
Utility companies say they are concerned about the safety, quality and reliability of the equipment that might feed electricity into their grids. A decentralized source like solar power that continued feeding the grid when the other power was shut off could prove fatal to someone working on a downed line, they offer as an example.
Utilities aren’t the only headaches for solar installers. Many suburbs have restrictive covenants regarding roof structures. Others use zoning to keep out solar panels. Even building inspectors can throw roadblocks in the way of builders who want to install solar power.
“I don’t know of a single person who’s put in a system that doesn’t run into some of these problems,” said Thomas Starr, a California-based energy consultant who provides technical assistance to solar installers around the country.
The financial industry also needs re-education before home solar units can penetrate the market more widely. The real estate appraisal industry does not have standards for evaluating the worth of what is essentially a home improvement that lowers or eliminates an owners’ electricity bill over the next 20 to 30 years, the estimated life of most systems.
With open competition several years away in most states, there are still many ways for utilities to slow the diffusion of clean-energy technologies. It took Tim Meeh, a 46-year-old farmer in Canterbury, N.H., who produces maple syrup, hay and wood on his 860-acre farm, two years to get Public Service of New Hampshire to buy power at net metered rates from the 10-kilowatt wind turbine he put up in 1993 to run his home and syrup mill.
“They would allow me to sell them electricity at 3 cents a kilowatt hour when I had to buy it from them at 15 cents,” he said.
After he won that battle, he moved to install a solar system too. First, the utility demanded it be allowed to conduct a $900 study, which he paid for. Then it forced him to install a cutoff switch, which cost another $800.
Peter Talmage, a solar installer in Kennebunkport, Maine, puts in about 30 home solar units a year. He had to fight a similar battle with Central Maine Power Co. to allow net metering, which it finally did about two weeks ago.
He says it isn’t the finances of net metering that spurs on solar-electricity home sales. The power is still more expensive than buying from the local utility.
But “the idea that you can go out there and see your meter running backwards is a real allure,” he said.
