Keeping Massachusetts a Solar Power

From abolitionism to universal health care, Massachusetts has led the country on issues that are both morally virtuous and make for smart policy. Fighting climate change is the latest in the line of vexing challenges faced by Bay Staters. We have a responsibility to ourselves, our ancestors and our children to make sure we meet this challenge. Passing smart legislation that encourages the development of our solar industry will guarantee we do just that — and it will grow our economy in the process.

And yet the Massachusetts House passed a bill in November that threatens to kill the commonwealth’s solar industry. Even more remarkably, House Democrats voted overwhelmingly for this bill, even though it is far more anti-solar than the pro-utility bill Republican Gov. Charlie Baker proposed earlier in the year. If the House bill becomes law, the solar industry in Massachusetts will move from among the best in the nation to the worst.

What is so bad about the House bill? Well, it makes arbitrary and capricious cuts to one of the key mechanisms for solar development: the net metering credit. This credit is the reimbursement that solar users receive for sending back to utilities the excess energy their solar panels create. It is the crucial reimbursement that allows individuals and organizations to develop solar power. Without a fair net metering credit, solar power makes little financial sense.

The House bill is not based on data showing that solar power is detrimental to Massachusetts. Nor is it based on public opinion. In a poll conducted by the Worcester Business Journal, 65 percent of respondents supported expanding solar energy. Rather, the legislation draws on fuzzy math provided by utilities and conservative business lobbyists.

We understand why the utilities don't want solar to expand in the commonwealth. They make no profit from it. What we don’t understand is why policymakers would do the utilities’ bidding instead of prioritizing Massachusetts’s best interests. The job of legislators and elected officials is not to protect the excessive profits and CEO salaries of utility executives from competition by clean energy options like solar.

Unfortunately, many legislators have been the victims of a concerted misinformation campaign by the utilities to discredit solar by inflating its costs and ignoring its benefits. Moreover, the House introduced the solar bill only hours before legislators had to vote on it, at the very end of the session, forcing them to make snap decisions on an immensely important issue that requires careful deliberation.

Some House members say they voted for the bill knowing it was bad policy because they wanted to get something quickly into the conference committee. Nonsense. They could just have easily voted to amend the House bill to make it less damaging to solar. But few of them even bothered to try. Worse still, they voted 150-2 for a bill that many of them knew was bad public policy. That only served to enable their House leaders to assert in conference committee that the House had an "overwhelming" mandate not to recede to the Senate's more moderate version of the bill. Had only more House members stood by their beliefs on solar and voted against the bill, it could have significantly changed the negotiations in the conference committee.

The good news is it's not too late for House members to fix their mistake. They can go to their leaders and demand the House yield on provisions cutting the net metering credit, so the Legislature doesn't harm the future of the solar industry in Massachusetts. The only thing House members can do that would be worse than voting Nov. 17 for bad solar policy would be to do nothing now to try and fix it.

Greg Garrison is treasurer of MassSolar. Christopher Smith is chair/secretary of Massachusetts Solar Owners Association.