It only makes sense, unless it jeopardizes your monopoly.

It only makes sense, unless it jeopardizes your monopoly.

Arizona, much of which receives more than 300 days a year of sunshine, should be the poster child for a thriving solar industry. Today, the state is the second fastest growing when it comes to solar: more than 500 homes a month add a rooftop photovoltaic unit, and the industry employs around 10,000 people statewide. It's been an ongoing struggle for solar power, since developers, competing energy suppliers and elected officials keep erecting obstacles. Until recently, for example, some homeowners associations and municipalities outlawed rooftop models, arguing that the solar panels disturb the homogenous horizons of red-tile roofs.

Once upon a time, solar cells were too expensive and ineffective, compared to conventional energy sources, and that in itself was a major obstacle. But as technology improved and cost became less of a deterrent, giant utility companies often worked with their political toadies to erect new roadblocks. Another one is about to be enacted into law, perhaps today, in part courtesy of the Koch brothers and our old friends at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). And what's about to go down in Arizona today has national implications, since the issue that's being debated, "net metering," is vital to the success of the solar industry in at least 42 other states.

Simply put, net metering is an odd term that means solar customers, who may collect more energy than they use, can sell excess energy to the local utility company over the power grid. Here in Phoenix that usually means you're selling power to Arizona Public Service (APS), which, like many electric companies, has a virtual monopoly in the region unless you opt for solar or another alternative model.

As the price and efficiency of solar units has become more competitive, net metering has quietly emerged as another major incentive to go solar. So it comes as no surprise that APS and other utility companies have created a two-pronged attack on the solar industry—first by reducing the subsides they provided early on to encourage homeowners to install solar. According to the Arizona Republic:



APS paid customers rebates totaling as much as $21,000 for a 7-kilowatt solar array in 2008, or $3 a watt. That was reduced to 10 cents a watt, or $700 for the same system, this year, and eventually reduced to zero, reflecting the falling cost of solar panels.

But reducing the installation subsidy hasn't killed the solar industry; it's only continued to grow to the tune of a 76 percent growth rate nationally in the last year alone, and so now APS wants to make net metering prohibitively expensive by charging solar customers up to $100 a month to use the grid to sell energy. If you live in the Phoenix area, you haven't been able to turn on a TV recently and not see one of these ads , which blabber on about "corporate welfare" while linking Arizona's burgeoning private solar industry to Solyndra, the rightwing's whipping boy for alternative energy.

Yesterday at the Arizona Corporation Commission offices in Phoenix the campaign came to a head, when more than 1,000 people turned out for the first day of hearings about net metering. The hearing continues today, with a decision expected. According to Reuters, challenges to net metering have emerged elsewhere, but Arizona is the first state where the rebate may be rolled back. And if it happens here ...



Jason Rose, a veteran Republican consultant working for the solar industry, told The Washington Post, “If the utilities are able to upend rooftop solar in Arizona, the sunniest state, then imagine what they can do everywhere else.”