Advocates of turning cow manure and other waste into energy
are backing a bill introduced in the Pennsylvania House that would forbid
putting caps on how much electricity those systems can sell to the grid.
The bill is aimed at a proposal still being developed by the
Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission meant to limit reimbursements to customers
who generate power from alternative sources — a dairy farmer with a methane
digester, for example, or a homeowner with solar panels on the roof.
Such customers would only be eligible for reimbursements if
they have systems designed to produce no more than 200 percent of the
electricity they normally use at their farm or home in a year.
Under state law, utility customers who generate more power
from renewable sources than they can use are paid for their annual excess
electricity by the utility. The practice is called net metering.
The law sets limits on the size of the systems that qualify
for payment: Residential generators have a capacity cap of 50 kilowatts and
commercial generators are capped at 3 or 5 megawatts.
Currently, about 8,700 facilities in the state are net
metered, nearly double the 4,500 that were net metered in 2011, according to
the PUC. Those facilities have a combined capacity of just over 200
megawatts, and the vast majority — over 94 percent — are solar.
The PUC’s proposal to further restrict the size of systems
that qualify for net-metering reimbursements has caused a stir among farmers
and groups who want to limit pollution from livestock waste reaching streams
and bays.
Farmers that turn manure into energy with methane digesters
can reap an economic benefit from managing an environmental problem, but
advocates say farmers can only afford those systems if they can count on income
from net metering.
Digesters capture the methane produced by bacteria feeding
on waste in a warm, oxygen-deprived environment like a covered tank in a
process that pretty much picks up where the cow left off. The methane then is
used to generate power.
House Bill 1349, introduced by Rep. David Zimmerman,
a Republican from Lancaster County, would apply to more than farms.
It would forbid the PUC from limiting the amount of energy
produced from all forms of biologically derived methane — an inoffensive
term for gas that comes from the breakdown of generally nasty things, like
manure, garbage and sewage sludge.
At a hearing last week on the bill, Mr. Zimmerman called the
PUC’s proposal “wrongheaded” and said it has already caused a Lancaster County
borough to pause its plans to replace an aging sewage treatment plant with a
digester.
“It makes no sense that the PUC would try to undermine (the
law) like this,” he said.
The PUC says the rule is necessary because undefined terms
in the law have left electric utilities unsure of how to handle some
applications for net metering, which has led to inconsistent treatment of
customer-generators. And since the costs of net-metering payments are passed on
to other utility customers as a tiny fraction of their monthly bills, the
proposed limits are needed to keep electric rates for everyone else “just and
reasonable.”
PUC Chairman Gladys Brown testified last week that ambiguous
wording in HB 1349 could be interpreted to lift even the current law’s cap on
the capacity of waste-to-energy systems that qualify for net metering, which
could cost an additional $87 million a year in subsidies just for current and
planned landfill gas-to-energy projects.
Other parties at the hearing pushed for a broader bill that
would bar limits on electricity generated from solar panels, farm-based wind
turbines and poultry litter.
Technologies other than those described in the bill are
“critically important” for turning lighter-weight manure into energy,
Chesapeake Bay Commission Executive Director Ann Swanson said.
“Think chicken,” she said. “Think turkey.”
Utilities, represented by the Energy Association of
Pennsylvania, are seeking a different kind of change to the law. They want to
reimburse customer-generators for their excess electricity at the wholesale
electricity rate, not the higher, retail rate that they currently pay.
They also want the ability to charge fees to recover the
costs of maintaining an electric grid that can reliably accommodate alternative
energy systems.
Rep. Robert Godshall, a Montgomery County Republican
and chairman of the House Consumer Affairs Committee, which hosted the hearing,
asked multiple panelists whether they thought excess energy should be
reimbursed at the wholesale or retail electric rate, in a sign, perhaps, of
other amendments being considered by the committee.
“Should the owner of one of these digesters… should he pay
his share of getting that electricity to the homeowner?” he asked. “That’s the
major question that we’re dealing with.”
The consumer affairs committee has not scheduled a vote on
the bill. Meanwhile, the PUC is still reviewing its proposed rule after it held
a second round of public comment this spring. Ms. Brown said a final proposal
will be introduced for a vote at an upcoming commission meeting, hopefully this
fall.
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