New plan for solar users needs careful, expert review

Sunday, Aug. 9, 2015 | 2 a.m.

Imagine living in a community served by just one grocery store that had expanded over the years to accommodate the region’s growth.

One day you decide to embrace a healthier lifestyle and produce your own food. Some neighbors do the same. You shop at the supermarket only when your own pantry runs low. In fact, your garden sometimes does so well, the store’s produce manager buys your extra vegetables and puts them in a bin to sell to others.

The owners of the supermarket grumble; they never anticipated a handful of renegade customers would grow their own vittles. So the store owners say, if you come back to the store, you’ve got to pay to park, and not just pay for your groceries but also pay a fee to make sure the shelves will be stocked. Their logic: Someday, your trendy garden will go to seed and you’ll be back filling your grocery cart to the brim, and if you think we’re going to have all those products on our shelves for you to buy whenever you feel like it, you’ve got another thing coming.

This is a simple metaphor for how NV Energy wants to treat customers who have turned to rooftop solar panels to generate most, although not all, of their electricity. The company is asking the state Public Utilities Commission — three people appointed by the governor — to keep solar-energy customers on the hook for helping to cover the cost of the utility’s investments over the years.

At issue is how much residential customers with solar panels should pay NV Energy to tap its electricity at night, on cloudy days or when panels aren’t producing enough electricity to meet the household’s needs. Utility executives say solar customers should pay not only for the electricity they pull off the grid and a basic service charge that covers administration and salaries but also a “demand charge” — a monthly fee to guarantee the utility will provide them as much electricity as they’ve ever used during a period of gluttonous power consumption.

We understand NV Energy’s expectation that customers who turn to solar panels still bear some financial responsibility to the utility’s investors and other customers. The fact is, until these power pioneers totally cut themselves off from NV Energy’s power grid — a turning point that may not be that far off given the development of industrial-sized solar power batteries — they still should pay toward the cost of maintaining that grid.

But we grow confused by NV Energy’s decision to base the demand fee on the homeowner’s past peak use rather than average use. Regular NV Energy customers don’t pay the same rate of demand fees because they don’t use as much electricity as solar-panel users, according to Kevin Geraghty, the utility’s vice president of energy supply.

In fact, we are confused by virtually the entirety of NV Energy’s nearly 500-page application to the PUC about how the utility wants to charge a new wave of solar-panel customers after the initial quota is filled and billed under current law.

NV Energy boasts that its document is “transparent, understandable and explainable to customer-generators.” It is not.

Reading it, one’s head would spin enough to create its own electricity — but then surely NV Energy would find a way to bill us for that, too.