Southern California Edison, which supplies most of Orange County’s electricity, wants to levy a fee on future residential solar users, ostensibly to pay for maintaining the grid.
The monthly fee, condemned by the solar industry and environmentalists and likely to be controversial with solar customers, was described in a proposal Edison submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission earlier this month. It would charge customers who install solar panels on their roofs in coming years $3 per kilowatt of capacity. That means a homeowner with a 5 kilowatt roof solar system – an average size – would pay a fee of $15 per month to Edison just for having the system.
If adopted by the CPUC, the proposal would impact residential solar customers statewide. However, the 131,000-plus Edison customers across Southern California with solar installations today would be grandfathered in under the old rules.
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