Californians still considering installing rooftop solar panels will earn less for the electricity they generate. New rules go into effect Friday. When state regulators made the rule changes in December, it sparked a rush to install new systems.
“A lot of consumers that were previously on the fence about going solar, jumped off that fence” said Bernadette Del Chiaro, the executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association . “There has been a significant increase in the number of people scrambling to get in under the current existing program because quite frankly the savings are bigger.”
The industry should stay busy well into the summer installing all the solar systems that had a formal interconnection agreement signed before the deadline.However, once that backlog of projects is finished, Del Chiaro expects the number of new installations to fall off dramatically.California regulators decided against a draconian flat-fee proposal for solar users — something opponents derisively called a solar tax.
However, the CPUC slashed the credit for electricity generated on rooftops and sold back to the grid. “They cut the value of the credit,” Del Chiaro said. “The value on your bill that you get for every electron that you send back to the grid on a sunny day, they cut that by about 75%.” Essentially, that means residents will have to wait a longer to recover the upfront investment, from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars, they made on a solar system.
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