Indiana introduces legislation that could kill solar
January 29, 2017
Indiana legislators have introduced a bill that many fear could kill the state’s solar industry by ending net metering and also essentially preventing people from using the energy from their own solar panels.
Senate bill 309 would ban net metering by 2027, and it would limit the options that the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission could replace it with for compensating customers with solar installations.
Rather than the retail rate paid for solar energy sent back to the grid under net metering, customers could only get the much lower “avoided cost,” or wholesale rates.
Perhaps most disturbing to solar advocates, the bill would institute a mandatory “buy-all, sell-all” provision to replace net metering that would essentially prohibit customers from using their own solar energy, forcing them to sell all of their energy back to the grid at low rates, only to buy it back at higher rates.
