Tobin Booth provides a good primer on Net Metering in the article linked below. We have a strong foundation here in Washington with our state laws, but our 1998-era Net Metering Law is hamstrung with caps that are too restrictive. Who would have ever imagined that one day we would have solar capacity of 0.5% of our peak loads ?!? Now that we have reached this amount in a few utility territories, we are faced with reactionary policy efforts from old-school utility execs in Olympia fearful for their revenues.
Unfortunately, instead of working together to envision how we could enact virtual net metering, we are combating various utility proposals to roll back progress and assign unrealistic and unnecessary costs to new Net Metering Customers who want to install solar.
