Black Hills lowers the boom on solar incentives | Colorado Consumer Coalition

Black Hills lowers the boom on solar incentives | Colorado Consumer Coalition

Black Hills lowers the boom on solar incentives

Written By: Colorado Consumer Coalition
August 30, 2012

Perhaps it was just a matter of time. With the state’s largest investor-owned utility, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, having significantly cut back its solar-energy incentives for its 1.4 million Colorado customers in May, Rapid City, S.D.-based Black Hills Energy announced earlier this month that it will follow suit for its customers in Pueblo and numerous other communities in southern Colorado.
In an amended renewable energy plan the utility recently filed with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission, Black Hills is proposing to cut its program promoting solar-panel installation by 75 percent.
Black Hills currently provides its ratepayers rebates of up to $3,000 toward the cost of a solar system as well as a nine-year, 9.5-cent credit per kilowatt-hour put onto the grid by  small residential installations. Under its pending proposal, the company will add no new solar capacity but will continue to offer the incentives to use up some remaining, unused capacity carried over from previous years.
Why the change? Black Hills officials point to plummeting natural gas prices, which offer a cheaper alternative to pricey solar power.
That naturally doesn’t sit well with Colorado’s budding but still tenuous solar industry.
“This is a pretty good punch in the gut,” a Pueblo-based installer of solar panels told the Denver Post.
To be sure. Yet, as we noted here when Xcel rolled back its solar-incentives program, those incentives haven’t exactly been gifts from the utilities that have provided them. Rather, the utilities, prompted by state renewable-energy mandates, have been handing the tab to their ratepayers. Meaning, all customers have been subsidizing solar power for those who’ve chosen to install the hardware. While that certainly pleases renewable-energy advocates who have shown little concern for the resulting higher utility bills, it can’t sit well with the many ratepayers of modest means. To many of them, every dime can make a difference.
That’s particularly true in Pueblo, where recent rate hikes by Black Hills have raised an uproar and left the company in the hot seat. It has come fire, as well, for what some contend is its meager attempts to help ease the burden on its poorest ratepayers, many of whom have trouble paying their utility bills at all.
For them, an end to politically popular solar incentives could be welcome news.
As we also observed last May, it may be high time to second-guess the renewables-at-all-costs mind-set that has governed energy policy in Colorado for a number of years now. The fact that an economic recovery is still just a rumor in some parts of Colorado seems to make all the more of a case for utilities and their regulators at the PUC to turn their attention anew to the interests of ordinary Colorado consumers. Indeed, they should have been the top priority all along.