How California is about to block Solar for 45% of its population

The transcription of the video is below. 

Allie Detrio: Background and Advocacy Work in Renewables, Microgrids, Multi-Family Solar & Storage

Kerim: Hi, everyone. This is Kerim, Kerim Baran with SolarAcademy. I’m here today with Jon Bonanno, my partner in crime, at SolarAcademy’s, strategic operating partners. And today, we are hosting Allie Detrio, of Reimagined Power. Allie is an expert in energy policy in the U. S., mostly in California, but also beyond. And she has been working on a number of important initiatives in the space.

Allie, as we start, can you give us a little bit of your personal background, your professional history, and then let’s get into this topic of the current proposed decision that is causing some havoc in California markets?

Allie: Yeah. Thanks, Kerim and thanks, Jon, so much for having me. And thanks everybody, for joining in and tuning into us.

My name’s Allie Detrio. As Kerim said, I’m the Chief Strategist and Founder of Reimagined power. We’re a boutique microgrid and distributed energy resources policy and market strategy consulting firm, headquartered here in San Francisco, on the cleantech capital of the world. I actually, originally, got my Bachelor’s of Science in Sustainability,  as part of the first ever, undergraduate class in the world, to get an accredited degree in sustainability, back in the day when almost no one knew what that was, from Arizona State University. 

And I went into the water and power sector, while I was in college because what do people need more than anything else in this world? And so originally, I found myself in water policy, groundwater management, water rights and contracts as some of our projects. 

Eventually, they told me that they couldn’t keep me as a new grad after,  without 10 years of experience in a master’s degree in water policy. But they said, you should try the power sector.

And so I did and moved over into renewables. From there, I’ve held a variety of positions in business development, market research,  government regulatory affairs, and nonprofit management and membership. 

And so I found myself in this career, a long journey. I’ve been in here now almost 17 years in the energy sector. I moved to California in 2014. So I’ve been here about a decade now. And that led me into the world of advocacy, policy, intelligence, research, lobbying, and market strategy work. 

Previously, I worked at ENGIE, one of the largest energy services and clean energy developers in the world, and that’s where I caught my teeth on energy storage and microgrid policy. It led me to the role I’m at today, where I really focus a lot on advanced clean energy technologies, like microgrids, sophisticated energy projects, like multi-family solar and storage, and a variety of other initiatives.

So it’s been a fun ride. I’m glad to be here. And as Kerim mentioned, I am one of the boots on the ground, in the trenches, in the various policy arenas here in California. I’ve been working in-depth on the microgrid proceeding at the PUC, the distributed energy backup assets program at the Energy Commission.

And as we’re going to talk about today, the Virtual Net Metering and Net Metering aggregation phase of the NEM proceeding at the CPUC, which is a hotly-contested issue on the adoption of solar and transition to solar plus storage in California. So I’m really happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

Irony of ironies: How California is about to block Solar for 45% of its population?

Kerim: Great. Thanks, Allie. Yeah. So let’s dive into what’s happening in solar in California. As we do that, I just want to set the stage with a couple of my comments, having also been operating mostly in California, in solar, for almost a decade and a half. 

When I look at California, I kind of see it as an irony of ironies in solar, is in California, mainly because California has been a major leader in solar in the world and in the U. S. 

When you look at the residential and small commercial market and distributed solar market, it is clearly the leader in the U.S. with probably half of all residential and small commercial solar deployed in the state with 15% of homes as individual homes, having solar at this point, having gone through a stage of Net Energy Metering, 1.0, 2.0 and now 3. 0 – three versions of Net Energy Metering policies. 

In many ways, it’s a great state to benefit from solar and like we said, 10%-15% of homes, mostly well-to-do and richer homes, have benefited from these policies, yet what’s going down right now with this new proposed decision, especially when it comes to multi-family and aggregation type solutions, what is being proposed is very much stifling and blocking the part of the population, that is, I would say probably, economically, the bottom 40%, 50% of the population, which is mostly renters and multi-family home dwellers, are not going to be able to benefit from the benefits of solar, and their landlords, as well.

So, I want to dive into that topic with you, Allie, and maybe, you can tell us a little bit about how did we get here? Can you give us the evolution of solar?

Jon: Roll it back to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Come on. 

Kerim: Yeah, exactly. Let’s go back to the millions of – 

Jon: Million rooftops. This is a bipartisan issue. Everyone wants low cost.

Kerim: You said a million rooftops, and it did happen. And now we’re probably getting close to 2 million and yet, 40%, 45% of the population rents in multi-family settings. And they are not – what this proposed decision is saying is completely unreasonable.

Jon: They’re being excluded. This entire population is being excluded intentionally. That’s what’s so outrageous about this.

Allie: Agree. 100%.

How did we get here? The evolution of the Net Energy Metering programs in California. 

I mean, how did we get here? How do we get to where we are today? I think Jon carefully related to it well. You know, our original solar policies in California date back to the late 1990s with the establishment of the Net Energy Metering program, the million solar roofs initiative, at the California Energy Commission.

And I would argue we’re so very successful in, not only deploying so much solar in California, but really spurring this energy market evolution and transformation of the energy sector that has spread broadly across the country and across the world. 

We all know that as California goes, so does the rest of the U.S. and the world. So it’s critically important for us to not only continue being a leader in solar energy policy, but recognize the impacts that our policymaker and regulatory decisions have, impact the markets, not just our own home state here, but also reverberate broadly well beyond our state borders.

And so, back in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, the state established policies that were meant to encourage self-generation, onsite consumption of clean energy resources to help reduce demand on grid, to help us start our climate policy goals and really accelerate decarbonization and energy independence. 

So again, both sides of the aisle, solar microgrids, like clean energy resources that are deployed onsite locally, is something that all political stripes can get onboard with, for various reasons, really important to highlight the bipartisan support for these types of solutions.

And so back in the ‘90s and 2000s, our state took a number of steps to incentivize property owners, primarily, to install solar, mostly by virtue of our legacy policy and regulatory instruments at the time, that were not intended necessarily, to exclude any particular customer class, but naturally tended to enable one customer class to benefit from solar, which were those that owned property, primarily homeowners with the creation of Net Energy Metering. 

Where you could install solar on your home or on your property, you installed a bidirectional meter that could record the production of the solar. And your meter would spin backwards. It would spin backwards when you exported power, and it would spin forward when you imported power – pretty simplistic energy and electricity technology. 

And so that allowed for many millions of customers to install solar. And that was something that was directed by our governor at the time, directed by the state legislature, encouraged by the regulators and our early adopter technology customers, really took a lot of risk in deploying these new technologies and really helped get the market off the ground from its infancy into where we’re at today.

And so fast forward, you know, the last 5, 6 years or so, the legislature has acknowledged that, and the regulators acknowledged that we’ve had a tremendous shift in market transformation, where our adoption levels have increased tremendously. 

And so the simplistic Net Energy Metering regulatory construct was no longer meeting the needs of California, especially when it relates to our grid needs, where we now have a ton of solar on the grid, mostly from utility scale resources, by the way. The distributed customer side is still a small fraction of the overall adoption levels. 

But nonetheless, so much unbuffered solar has caused us to have the duck curve and challenges in the grid. And so now, the state has taken steps to incentivize energy storage and make sure that we pair solar and storage together, to help mitigate impacts on the grid, and make sure that these resources can be more grid assets, not just unbuffered solar resources. 

And I was fortunate to work on SB 700 with Scott Wiener, passing $800 million of new SGIP incentive money for storage. And that money has been already almost completely used up because storage has now become so popular with the adoption of solar.

So we’re really making a lot of progress in the market. 

Who is really benefiting from Solar & Who is not? Multi-family communities, MF Property Owners, Renters…

However, again, going back to, who has really benefited, who has adopted solar thus far? It’s largely been those that own property: homeowners, businesses, public entities, which is all great. And we should be thanking them for their contributions to decarbonization and grid modernization.

But we cannot forget about this other large swath of the market, the renting population, which is 45% of the state’s population, rents. And overwhelmingly, the renting community is largely, populations of vulnerable communities, communities of color, low-income, disadvantaged, or otherwise vulnerable, and are statistically likely to rent.

And so we have this large swath of the market that has not yet really accessed the benefits of solar, until the last few years, when the split incentive problem of property owners of multi-family and multi-unit buildings, figuring out a way to build solar on their properties and monetize the resource, while also sharing some of the financial savings with their tenants, to create a win-win value proposition.

And so that has happened, primarily, through the Virtual Net Metering tariff that is meant to encourage us solar adoption at multi-unit buildings. And while it was a rough start, I think that over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a tremendous increase in adoption, even just the last 3 years, going from about 30 megawatts of adoption to nearly 100.

And now, as we’re looking at these rules, potentially changing, which we’ll get into soon with Kerim and Jon, now, there are many more multi-family buildings installing solar and helping these renting communities that have historically lacked access. 

So it’s really a success story all around. And it’s unfortunate that we’re dealing with so many challenges in the regulatory arena now, that may be hindering this progress, and why it’s so important for us to change course, and make sure we continue this forward progress and momentum in the market.

Virtual Net Energy Metering (VNEM) and Netting. Why are they so important in Multi-family?

Kerim: Yeah, thanks for that clarification, Allie. So, yeah. Let’s dive into what’s happening on the VNEM side, which really affects the multi-family market directly. Why, is this? I mean, having lived in California, and having put solar on my home before, so I do know that as a residential homeowner, I benefited greatly economically, from putting solar with a 4- year payback. And then, I was part of the NEM 1.0 cohort, if you will. So essentially cost me four years of electricity. But thereafter, I had pretty much 95 plus percent of my bill was zeroed out. So I get 20 plus years of free energy, thereafter. 

So in the case of VNEM, in multi-family, there are solutions in the market, one of which we’re familiar with, Ivy, as your client, and a company that Jon and I are vested in and associated with. When I first met Ivy, my first reaction was, what a beautiful solution. It’s essentially a win-win-win solution for the landlords, the tenants, the developers, the APC companies, even the grid, if you think about it, with a certain perspective, because it essentially helps the grid be more resilient, less capital intensive, and still do the main function, with much less capital, and that capital not being deployed by them, but others, at the edge of the grid.

So can you tell us a little bit about this world and why what is being proposed right now is unfair? And let’s also talk about other players and how it affects everyone else in this sector, as well.

Allie: Yeah, happy to. So right now, again, like Virtual Net Metering has been helping many multi-family buildings and renters install solar and have a way to monetize the resource, so they can pay back the asset that was invested in originally.

As well as provide a means of sharing some of the financial benefits with tenants that they get discounts on their electric bills. One thing that’s really unique about any sort of multimeter arrangements, when you’re installing solar on a property is that unlike the house, where I talk about the single-meter recording production and consumption through one venue, and really your connection to the grid, there’s a single service delivery point or point of interconnection to the home, it’s easy to monitor the flow of power in and out. 

So in multimeter arrangements, there’s a production meter that measures production of the solar energy system onsite, and there are consumption meters measuring individual electricity consumption by each of the tenants. The meters are separate.

So now the electricity flows are governed by the laws of physics and Kirchhoff’s Current Law, where electricity will flow to wherever there’s least resistance, meaning it will flow to serve the onsite customer load of each of those individual meters, and any excess electricity produced beyond what is required by all those customers at a given time interval, will be exported beyond the property to the grid. 

And so an element of measuring onsite consumption of the generation asset is this concept of netting, which essentially nets production and consumption in a given interval, since those meters are separate. 

In a single-meter arrangement, you don’t need that mechanism to measure self-consumption because you have one bidirectional meter.

Kerim: Right. So if you’re producing with solar, and then you were consuming at the same time, you’re essentially producing – I mean, provided that you’ve paid for the solar panels already, that’s free energy for you at that point. You’re not pulling that from the grid in a single family home  environment because your net, assuming your netting is zero for that split second, but in the case of multi-family, that’s different.

Allie: The netting mechanism is required to ensure that in a given time interval, you can measure or net, production against consumption because the meters are separate in a multimeter. This is really important. I’ll come back to why this is so important in the proposed decision. 

But essentially, onsite customer load and the generating asset of a multi-family building is serving the needs of those customers when they have load and when there is generation being produced at the same time. 

Unfortunately, our utilities have tried to lie and misrepresent the physics of electricity in how electrical engineering principles work in a multimeter arrangement, like a multi-family building at the CPUC. And so this has become a very contentious issue where they would like to measure all of the output from a shared solar asset, at a multi-family building, as if it is all exported to the grid, and therefore, you would only get valued for your solar exports at basically a wholesale rate. 

Kerim: Which is like one-fifth of retail rate. I mean, one is probably valued at 25 cents to 40 cents, which is what the richest 15% of homeowners that already have solar are benefiting from currently. 

And this multi-family building owner is forced to sell it at the wholesale rate, which averages around 3-8 cents for 90% of the time, maybe averaging around 5, 6 cents, if my understanding is correct.

Do you agree with that? 

Allie: Yes, exactly. Essentially, with this construct, not only would you get a really bad financial deal where all of your exports are valued at this super low rates –  

Kerim: Yeah. Like five times worse than the others, pretty much. Yeah.

Allie: but it’s also not physically correct, where meters are just measurements at a certain point of electron consumption. Now, the physics say that, again, multi-family buildings are generating, consuming that electricity onsite, which helps them offset the amount of electricity that they would need to import from the utility, at a retail rate. 

And multi-family buildings, by virtue of having so many customers under one roof and under one service delivery point, they’re able to serve the onsite customer load of many different tenants before anything is exported to the grid. 

So it’s a really powerful demand management solution, even without storage. So even the solar generated onsite because it has so many more avenues of individual tenant customers where it could serve their needs, before it’s exported, it reduces demands on the grid in a much more significant manner than a homeowner that installs solar, where it has a one-to-one generator customer relationship.

So it’s a really powerful tool. And without that netting construct that I mentioned earlier, if you’re forced to export or create an account for all of your exports as exported when you were really consuming them on site, that retail value, as you mentioned of self-consumption, would be valued at 25 cents, 40 cents, 60 cents, whatever the service territory is.

But instead you are being forced to account for it as exported at 4-6 cents, which is a horrible financial deal. And it also could constitute a taking of private properties. 

There are some really bad use with just that construct of accounting and what that actually means in practice for the building owners and the renters when we’re talking about accounting.

Legal issues around the current CPUC Proposed VNEM Tariff and its implications: Grid defection

Kerim: If I may say one thing, when I look at this problem with first principles approach, my mind immediately goes to, okay, screw them. Let’s just put our own solar and batteries in these buildings, and we’ll still be better off. Just like in Hawaii, the economics works better for many property owners to cut themselves off from the grid and just put solar and batteries on their property. 

I mean, with the current trends of cost coming down rapidly, that’s going to be the reality in California, very quickly. 

But there’s also a limitation to selling energy like a property owner, I don’t think, is allowed to legally sell energy to their tenants in California.

Allie: You can resell. You are allowed to provide electricity service to your tenants, under Public Utilities Code Section 218. An owner that has an electric asset that is generated on site for their own use or the use of their tenants – that’s all legal – allowed to provide service and there are other sections of Public Utilities Code where, an owner that installs an asset is allowed to charge for the electricity service, so long as it doesn’t exceed the rate of the PPA that they have with the solar asset developer for the the electric utility, whichever is lower. 

And the main thing is that under master metering laws and consumer protection laws, that are pretty widespread not just in California, you’re not allowed to mark up utility-provided power. However, apartment owners are legally allowed to provide their own electric service to their tenants. And so the one thing that the PD really, I think, misconstrues is portions of the law stating that that’s not legal when it absolutely is. It’s a very plain reading of different Public Utilities Code sections. 

And so I do think that, absent a workable VNEM tariff that’s adopted as the successor in this proceeding, we will start to see apartment owners just not engage and either, disconnect completely, or install solar and storage assets that do not contribute to our grid needs, which is a horrible, unintended outcome and consequence that we don’t want and will only exacerbate inequities in the system, long-term. 

We don’t want the grid defection to happen. Regulators should be thinking about and worried about, rightly, customers leaving the grid and defecting. And they should be thinking about how do we incentivize customers to stay connected to the grid, when we have, utilities have been providing subpar service and our grid is antiquated, and we’re not even able to get interconnection for years, sometimes, and figuring out how we can stay connected, incentivize them to stay connected, and contribute to the system and meeting our decarb and grid modernization goal.

So PD this is really going backwards and not really thinking through all of these consequences, as well as ignoring completely the disparate impact that this decision would have on these underserved renting communities who are, again, overwhelmingly likely to be low-income or minority populations. 

And so there could be potential ‘equal rights protections’ violations at stake here as well, in addition to a number of other state laws that this PD appears to just simply ignore. 

So there’s a lot at stake here, when it comes to our grid modernization goals, empowering energy independence, ensuring renters have their access to clean energy and receive the same level of benefits that homeowners do. 

And so there’s really a lot here that needs to be changed, in order for us to have a tariff that complies with the laws and helps us move forward with all of our various aggressive goals here in California.

The Opposing Arguments of California Utility Companies

Jon: Allie, you’re such a fountain of wisdom, and because you’re such a smart person, I’d like to ask you to steelman the opposing argument to this, which the IOUs have clearly made to the CPUC and have somehow convinced them to write this nonsense in, which basically protects their incumbency and really hurts the 45% of the population that rents, and is being completely excluded by the NEM v-3 legislature that’s being proposed.

So steelman their side, and then you can debunk that to conclude.

Allie: Yeah. I think one of the biggest things that they argued is saying that these resources are not providing any sort of benefits to the grid. That these are just more again, unbuffered solar resources. And that property owners are the only ones that are really benefiting. So they really tried to discredit the notion that we’re providing benefits to renters, and that we’re providing benefits to the grid by reducing demand.

Jon: Okay, is this because there has been no evidence of a virtual meter working at scale? Like, maybe the solutions weren’t there. Or are there solutions that have been demonstrated at scale, and they’re just sort of ignoring that fact?

Allie: The utilities are doing everything in their power to lie, misrepresent data.

Jon: Well, hang on, hang on. I’m still asking you to steelman their position. So I’m just asking, from their perspective, are they just not aware that things like IV energy exist that can do the split of load versus generation and usage, accurately on a bill? Or are they just saying, yeah, we’re aware of that, but let’s forget about that for a second. Like what’s their position?

Kerim: One argument that I read in their documents says that it’s too complicated. It’s two bills presented to the tenants, as opposed to one bill. But hey, if the bill is saving you 20 bucks, hey, what’s an extra minute to pay another bill every month? Because the tenants are saving – 

Jon: Then why don’t we consolidate those bills then? Why don’t we make VNEM –

Kerim: Well, probably at that point –

Jon: [cross-talk] private companies can start sending bills.

Kerim: Yeah. 

Jon: We need to research on that. 

Kerim: Yes. And one argument to that could be that, oh, we don’t want to give up the customer service function to a last-mile operator like Ivy. But if the last-mile operator, like Ivy, and there are others, other competitors of Ivy, like King Energy, that does it in the commercial setting and a number of others. When these last-mile microgrid operators take over the function of billing, that might not feel so good to a utility that has been in that business for a hundred years. 

Jon: Okay. Steelman, Allie. Do it, do it. They’re saying two bills are too complicated for the end user, but baloney.

Allie: It’s baloney. 

Why are utilities trying to block Virtual Net Energy Metering for Multi-Family communities 

This all comes down to exactly what Kerim said. Utilities don’t want to give up any sort of power or hold with their customers. They do not like the idea of – they’ve actually implemented laws that require direct metering because they want to make sure that they keep control and connection to the customers.

They can bill all of the customers all the non-bypassable charges and fees, separately, and that they want to make sure that these solutions that help deploy more solar, wherever it is, and especially the multi-family building, do not rise to the level of adoption that homeowners have because it’s a serious threat to their current and future revenue, as well as their current and future profits.

Utilities make money based on infrastructure, transmission, and distribution infrastructure. They get a 10-12% of return on that. So by reducing demand on the system from these properties with installed solar and storage and even again, like consolidating customer accounts into one billing function, that for them, is a huge threat to their current and future business model.

And that is the main reason we are here today dealing with this. They have that attempt to take – 

Jon: Let’s unpackthat for a second, Allie. Because the way a utility like Southern Edison or PG&E, the way they make money is they create these enormous capital expenditure projects, whether it’s a big generation facility or more transmission and distribution lines. And they then get the permission from the California Public Utility Commission, which their job is to protect the energy user of the state of California. That’s their job. That’s their claimed job, and they want to protect that relationship because that’s their revenue. 

But we’re basically, as energy users, we’ve paid for that infrastructure. So don’t we own that? Not them? Don’t the energy users of California own that infrastructure and not them?

Allie: That’s the way it should be. And especially you look at a multi-family building with this new real estate developments, not only that, but the developers are the ones that build the infrastructure, the delivery infrastructure that serves these properties and then they are forced to deed it over to the utilities at a rate that includes the cost and the aid of construction, so ongoing percentages of the fees. They build it, they pay for it, and then they are forced to deed it over to the utilities who then operate it and again get their guaranteed rate of return over the long- term.

We rate payers have paid for the grid many, many times over. There’s a big notion in this proceeding and others about this notion of paying your fair share of grid costs. That they have successfully poisoned the well, both in the CPUC and the legislature and trying to assert that solar customers are not paying their fair share of grid costs, even though we absolutely have. And many of our costs are continuing to be paid through non-bypassable charges for solar, can’t even offset those costs.

They don’t want to give an inch. That is the bottom line. There’s a big enough pie for everyone to go around. Even if we deployed all these last-mile solutions at every multi-family building, it would actually make the utilities’ jobs easier. 

They would lose hardly any revenue and profit, but this would allow for a lot more market innovation and help reduce demand on the system, which again, the core issue is that we need to reduce demand in the system. It reduces the need for more infrastructure build out. Like you said, these capital intensive assets. 

And for them, they’re looking at the long game of when there’s less T and D need, then there is less profit for them. 

What are some proposed solutions? How the regulatory model needs to shift? Call to Action.

Kerim: Yeah, there might be less D, but there’s always going to be a need for T because I think the the ideal solution is a hybrid solution, where you never get rid of the grid. And you always have some backup source tied to the grid, and therefore a need for the major transmission lines. 

But probably shifting most of that production and last-mile consumption to microgrid environments, as many of them as possible, is probably the ideal solution.

Jon: So, the solution is really the behind the transformer, not the behind the meter. Like, let’s move this idea of where your point ends and where it begins out to the local transformer of the building. That’s potentially a solution here. Is it not, Allie?

Allie: Oh, absolutely. Behind the transformer, anything on the same feeder that never – and by the way, VNEM systems, it says 98% of them are all on the same feeders. All the power that’s generated locally is never even making it behind one feeder and one major circuit. 

Jon: Wait, how much of a percentage, 98?

Allie: 98%. 

Jon: Holy crap. So basically, if we just said, let’s make the transformer, the “meter”, this would solve this problem completely. Would it not? 

Allie: Absolutely. And again, as to Kerim’s point, this is a both/and conversation. We need both. We need both centralized grid solutions like our T and D infrastructure, especially the wheel power between cities. And we can’t have every single demand of electricity met with a local generation. There will be some that’s needed from the bulk power system, but the more and more we can deploy locally, the more cost- effective it is and the more resilient, reliable it is for customers, as well as again, there’s enough market share and enough pie to go around. 

Our utilities, unfortunately, they don’t want to share any of it. And that’s by virtue of them being entitled 100-year-old monopolies and the CPUC liking the devil right now. Their charter as they call it, is to protect the public interest, so to speak, but it’s really to regulate these electrical corporations and therefore, they don’t want to open the market and empower a lot of new providers and solutions. They want to just regulate the devil they know. 

And unfortunately, in the 20th century that worked, when we had the one way flows of power, and we needed a lot of big, centralized generating stations to get power to every customer, when we didn’t have electricity. But those 20th century goals have been met. 

We have new 21st century goals like decarbonization, like environmental justice, like resilience and highly-reliable power. We need to be focused on these 21st century solutions. And therefore, the regulatory model needs to adapt in the 21st century, but we are still operating very much in a 20th century paradigm. 

And that is one of the biggest problems. So it is very much a both/and. There’s enough here for everyone to play and everyone to win and everyone to deploy these solutions again, with maximum value to customers and rate payers at an affordable cost. But we have entrenched interests that do not want to step aside, and give up even one meter. 

Kerim: Allie, well said. Thank you very much for shedding light to this really complicated situation.

So, given what’s going down in the process of this proposed decision, what do we need to do? What do citizens need to do? What is some call to action that we can end this call with?

Allie: I think the biggest thing is for anyone, whoever you are, getting engaged in letting your legislators know, the CPUC know, by submitting a public comment to their docket card.

Or calling the governor at 916-445-2841, and make your voice heard. Any of these channels, it only takes 30 seconds to a minute, to let the state of California and the policymakers and regulators know that this proposed decision would eviscerate the value proposition of solar, for multi-family buildings, renters, as well as schools, farms, and small businesses.

Anyone that’s a renter, in this state, which is again, 45% of our state’s population, if you are a renter, engage your state representatives, the PUC, or the governor, and let them know that this proposed decision needs to be rescinded and an alternate issued, that prioritizes the needs of renters, expanding access to solar, and making sure that everyone gets a fair deal and fair access to clean energy in this 21st century.

Jon: Yeah. Kerim, let’s have those links below in the show notes that people can call that governor’s office, or make that a submission digitally. This sounds like it’s such a crazy thing that this is happening. Let’s get it solved. 

Kerim: Thank you. Well, Allie, thank you for speaking truth to power in this session, as somebody needs to do that.

Jon: Thank you, Allie. This was fantastic.

Kerim: You’ve done a great job. 

Allie: Thanks, Kerim. Thanks, Jon. It was great having this discussion with you guys. I’ll look forward to more in the future, and thanks everybody, for tuning in today. 

Kerim: We will. Thank you.