GMP offering incentives to ‘go solar’

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(Host) Green Mountain Power plans to offer a big incentive for people thinking about installing solar panels to generate electricity.

The company wants to pay a bonus to customers who sell electricity back to the grid.

GMP says solar power can help reduce peak demand for high-priced electricity.

VPR’s John Dillon reports:

(Dillon) GMP plans to expand a program called "net metering." This applies to people who generate their own power – with wind turbines or solar panels, for example. If you make more than you can use, you can sell the electricity back to the utility. And the utility credits your bill.

Now GMP says it will pay a premium price for power generated by solar panels.

Mary Powell is the utility’s chief operating officer. She says the idea is to reduce the utility’s need to buy expensive power in the summer.

(Powell) “Solar energy is at its height, of course, on those hot summer days. And those are the same days when we’re hitting our peak, that the company is exposed and all our customers are exposed, of course, to our going into the market and buying very high-priced power, and usually dirtier power, in terms of the sources we have to get it from.”

(Dillon) Customers who take advantage of the program will get paid 6 cents a kilowatt hour, over and above the current net metering benefit of 13 cents.

The move is expected to boost demand for solar applications.

(Powell) “I will tell you that as a result of the announcement of this rate, I bumped into one of our engineers first thing this morning, and he said, `My voice mailbox is full with requests.’ It is, I think, going to do exactly what we were hoping – which is spur a lot more development and application of solar.”

(Dillon) Jeffrey Wolfe is CEO of groSolar, a national company with headquarters in White River Junction. He says that utilities historically have opposed net metering programs.

(Wolfe) “What Green Mountain Power has done is said, `Not only do we understand that we should be paying net metering rates for solar, but we understand that we should be paying more than net metering rates for solar.’ That’s the really exciting news, that what we’ve been saying for years, they finally realized is absolutely economically true.”

(Dillon) State officials worked with GMP as it developed the solar inventive plan. David O’Brien runs the Public Service Department, the state office that represents consumers.

(O’Brien) “We are living off of finite resources in many cases, or increasingly expensive resources. And we’ve got to increasingly diversify the base in this direction and this program hopefully is a way to do that.”

(Dillon) GMP must still get approval from the Public Service Board, which regulates utilities. The board will want to ensure that other customers are not subsidizing the rate paid to solar producers.

For VPR News, I’m John Dillon in Montpelier.

 

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