Riverside County Supervisors give some residents reason to go solar. IID should cooperate

The Desert Sun Editorial Board | Palm Springs Desert Sun

Show Caption Hide Caption IID solar meeting turns into heated argument Two officials got into a heated argument over customer service at a June 6 meeting of the Imperial Irrigation District's Energy Consumers Advisory Committee.

Some desert residents could see lower electricity costs in the future thanks to a recent move by the Riverside County Board of Supervisors that we’ve been championing for some time.

The supervisors unanimously approved a new ordinance that would allow electricity customers of Imperial Irrigation District in unincorporated areas of the county who want to add solar panels to their roofs to sign up for net metering contracts with the utility. Net metering billing results in substantially lower costs for customers, as they are paid more for the electricity that their solar systems return to the grid than IID’s current “net billing” regime.

The benefits to consumers of net metering are so significant that rooftop solar vendors argue individual systems usually “don’t pencil out” without them.

The Editorial Board has been asking IID to reopen the net metering program to new customers since it abruptly closed it in early 2016.

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IID’s sudden shutdown of its program left in limbo many people who had already begun the process of getting solar or even had panels installed and were awaiting connection of their new arrays. This was patently unfair.

In addition, the state of California and its increasingly ambitious mandates for energy derived from renewable sources can only benefit from even greater use of this potential energy supply in our virtually always sunny region.

As reported by Desert Sun Energy and Environment reporter Sammy Roth, IID isn’t willingly going along with this move.

The utility, which previously staved off an attempt by the Legislature to compel it to reopen net metering, is suing the county over the new ordinance. IID insists it already exceeded state law requirements when it created its net billing paradigm after, according to its calculations, it hit a 5 percent peak demand level of net metering interconnections in 2016.

Evidence of net metering’s effect on solar adoption seems clear: Installations of rooftop arrays in IID territory have dropped since the 2016 cutoff of net metering, though, according to Roth’s reporting, about 800 customers have signed up for the less generous net billing structure since then.

Ideally, IID would work with the county to implement this ordinance and give clients in the unincorporated areas of Bermuda Dunes, Mecca, Thermal and Thousand Palms access to net metering. Our entire desert community benefits from the increased adoption of renewable energy.

Sadly, cooperation appears unlikely here.

In a separate move, IID recently hired former Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to lobby on its behalf against Gov. Jerry Brown’s long-pushed legislation that would create a shared electric power grid covering a dozen western states.

Bustamante was lieutenant to Gov. Gray Davis, who was in charge during California’s worst self-inflicted energy crisis – deregulation-spurred chaos that led to widespread rolling blackouts. Voters recalled Davis and Bustamante’s role as “second in command” did him no good in his losing bid for governor afterwards.

The ongoing net metering battle, like Bustamante’s hiring, only makes sense in the insular, plantation-like world that is IID operations.

One aspect of this latest net metering fight gives us pause, however.

Renova Energy’s Vincent Battaglia has been a champion of net metering and an extremely vocal critic of IID. That the Coachella Valley’s largest rooftop solar firm would be lobbying hard for this ordinance shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows. Battaglia’s assumption of responsibility to defend the county’s move, however, using his own lawyers and promising to reimburse the county for any legal costs it might incur during its fight with publicly owned IID goes a step over the line.

The county and any other Coachella Valley governments considering similar ordinances should use their own counsel to defend their position, which is that the state water code allows them to set reasonable regulations for irrigation districts like IID that sell electric power in their areas, and outside of irrigation district boundaries. These local governments are defending the interests of their residents, after all. That should be the point.