Last night at 11:58 pm (wink, wink), just as was suspected, the Texas Senate unanimously passed through a net metering bill, HB 1243, with solar SB 545 amended on as a bonus. This is great news for Texas consumers, the environment, and solar power.
Well, we did our homework, and here's what we've found.
HB 1243 will ensure that owners of solar installations, small wind turbines, or biogas generators get paid a fair price for the excess power they produce. SB 545 - which after the Voter ID slowdown, we thought was dead - increases incentives for distributed solar power generation by creating a pool of $500 million in solar rebates over the next 5 years. It also calls for a pilot program with a minimum funding of $4 million to put solar on schools (nudge: the State Energy Conservation Office could potentially spend considerably more of their pending stimulus funds to further these projects) and will create thousands of green, local jobs across the state of Texas.
Another amendment to the bill added on SB 2349. This provision would allow oil wells that create natural gas, but not enough to justify paying for collection, to build a generator to run the gas through, make electricity, and sell it back into the grid. The bill would limit production to 2 MW so that they can provide distributed generation. As of right now, they're just flaring that gas off, so this is definitely a good thing.
According to our friends at Environment Texas (via the Houston Chronicle's NewsWatch: Energy blog), the amended HB 1243 also:
• Requires home builders to offer solar as a standard option in developments with 50 homes or more.
• Prevents homeowners associations from blocking solar panel installations
• Allows up to 70% of incentive funds to be used for utility-scale solar projects
• Allows the Public Utility Commission to extend the program for an additional five years and another $500 million if it determined that a "substantial" amount of manufacturing of solar generation products located in Texas after the initial five-year program
• Requires electric co-ops to allow consumers to interconnect solar to the grid
• Clarifies that consumers will not have to register as a utility and that third party ownership of solar is allowed
• For the next two years, requires retail electric providers to pay at least five cents per kilowatt hour for surplus solar and four cents for other renewable technologies and directs the PUC to determine a fair market price that will become a new "floor" following the two years
• Creates a "Made in Texas" program to certify and encourage Texans to buy locally manufactured solar panels and other energy products. As a result, locally produced products qualify for a 20% larger rebate than imports.
Now that HB 1243 has successfully passed through both chambers of the legislature, we've just got to wait and see what comes out of conference committee, where bill authors from both sides will smooth out the differences between their bills. Many thanks to all of you that wrote e-mails and made phone calls in support of these bills. This is a tremendous victory for Texas solar. Keep your fingers crossed that we can send this bill to Governor Perry's desk!
Original post written by Citizen Sarah at Texas Vox
On a 24 to 7 vote, Senate Bill 541 passed its third reading in the Texas Senate. The bill, primarily authored by Kirk Watson, would mandate that 1500 megawatts of clean renewable energy by the year 2020. In April, the Senate passed another renewable energy bill, SB 545 by Fraser. The group Environment Texas had the following to say about the two bills after today's news:
Last month, the Senate passed SB 545 (Fraser) to create a statewide rebate program for solar power. While that bill is best set up to fund solar on rooftops, Sen. Watson's bill is best set up to fund utility-scale solar, biomass and geothermal projects. By providing energy at peak demand during the day (solar) or round the clock (biomass and geothermal), these projects would complement wind energy, which generally maximizes capacity at night. Texas is already investing $5 billion on new transmission lines for wind projects, so these projects could be co-located underneath wind farms, doubling the return on our investment.
According to ERCOT and the PUC, by displacing use of high-cost natural gas, renewable energy can significantly lower electric costs. With federal action expected on global warming and renewable energy , technologies like solar will become even more cost competitive. An analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund found that SB 541 will provide a net savings of over $3 billion to Texas consumers by 2020 and reduce CO2 emissions by 20 million tons a year by 2020. According to a new poll commissioned by the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation, 61% of Texans favor requiring a certain amount of electricity be generated from solar power.
Both SB 541 and SB 545 could propel Texas to be a world leader in the development of solar, geothermal and biomass technologies, benefitting businesses across the state. In Pasadena, Texas, MEMC is the world's largest supplier of solar-grade silicon. In Austin, Applied Materials (the world's largest manufacturer of the equipment that makes solar panels) has a facility that could be retooled for solar production. In Brownwood, Barr Fabrications produced steel braces for the nation's largest solar thermal power plant in Nevada.
Both these bills are clear policy wins for Democrats, or at least they will be if the House passes them and the governor signs them. And although one of the two bills was authored by a Republican, we can call these clear Democratic wins because each bill received a handful of "Nay" votes; all from Republicans.
Hopefully the House will pick up these two bills and pass each of them. Speaker Straus has shown sympathy to the causes of renewable energy, but the Republicans can only show their dedication to the cause if they pass the bills entirely.
Democrats will win on this, whether in the legislature now or in the elections in 2010. The issue of renewable energy is an economic issue as well as an environmental one -- providing for more renewable energy will create jobs that will last generations. And it's pretty obvious that job creation resonates with voters.
