#Rocky mountain power bill pay how to
#Rocky mountain power bill pay plus

But they didn’t get as low as Rocky Mountain Power was looking for.”Īccording to Brown, solar has been a hot topic among both solar and utilities because it has never been exposed to normal economic forces. “They compromised, they took it down from the previous price, cut it not quite in half, but close to in half. “The Utah commission was being a little bit generous to the solar people, giving them some portion of it,” he said. It was never meant to be an accurate pricing.”īrown agrees that rooftop solar owners are entitled to the energy rate (and “there is not much dispute about that” in the industry), but the Utah PSC also allowed some space for offsetting capacity needs, to both the transmission and generation. So it was a default because it was easy to do.

#Rocky mountain power bill pay how to

didn’t know what to do or how to treat it. There were a bunch of reasons why we had net metering that relate to technology that’s out of date now, that relate to limitations in technology. The cost has declined, but we haven’t changed the pricing to reflect that. “This goes back to the late seventies, early eighties when it came into existence. “The fact is, net metering was coming to exist at a time when the cost of solar panels was about a hundred times what it is today,” he said. The economy of solar has changed over the last 50 years, and Brown feels that the market needs to reflect those changes. So that, and also solar is a much more mature, much more competitive technology than it used to be, so it doesn’t need all these cross subsidies.” “It has cross subsidies, it hurts the poor. There’s a fairly broad consensus, except among people that sell rooftop solar panels, that net metering just produces too high a price,” said Ashley Brown, executive director of the Harvard Electricity Policy Group. “There’s been a lot of compromise along these lines.

The order is the latest compromise struck among public service commissions across the country to work with both sides. The order immediately goes into effect, although the Utah Solar Energy Association filed a motion to change the implementation date to Jan. The PSC also rejected a metering fee and application fee that had been requested by Rocky Mountain Power. “This result protects customers who do not have rooftop solar and provides meaningful compensation for excess generation from those customers who have chosen to produce some of their own power while maintaining their connection to the utility grid.” “We appreciate the work done by the commission to study this issue and arrive at a decision that is fair for all customers,” Rocky Mountain Power said in a statement after the ruling.

#Rocky mountain power bill pay plus

According to the order, “These rates represent an avoided energy component of 2.439 cents/kWh in summer rates (June through September) and 2.109 cents/kWh in winter rates (October through May), plus total avoided generation, transmission, and distribution capacity costs of 3.53 cents/kWh.” The order by the Utah PSC set the value for the export credits at $0.05969/kWh in summer and $0.05639/kWh in winter. The utility had argued that this was fair given the avoided costs of solar production.

They had asked for a reduction in that credit, varying from $0.013 to $0.026/kWh (averaging at $0.015), depending on the time of day and season. Rocky Mountain Power has been paying customers $0.092/kWh since 2017, after an agreement with solar advocates. The Utah Public Service Commission (PSC) has responded to Rocky Mountain Power’s request to reduce the price for export credits paid to solar customers on the grid.