Maine net metering reformed

Maine utility regulators have amended rules governing net energy billing for electricity customers, in the wake of recently enacted laws requiring the rules to be restored to how they read prior to changes adopted in 2017 that cut the value of net metering for customers with solar panels or other distributed generation. The Maine Public Utilities Commission's July 31, 2019 order amending its Chapter 313 net energy billing rules describes the amendments as intended to make the rules "substantively equivalent to the rules in effect on January 1, 2017." Further reforms will follow, as a new law taking effect on September 19, 2019 requires further changes to net metering that significant expand customers' opportunities to participate in distributed generation projects.

Since the 1980s, Maine has allowed electricity customers who install their own small generating facilities to "net meter" or offset their electricity bills with electricity they inject into the grid. In 2017, the Commission approved amendments to its rule that reduced the amount of energy that could be used to offset a customer's transmission and distribution bill.

But those amendments were controversial for a variety of reasons, including their requirement that net energy billing customers install a costly second meter, their imposition of transmission and distribution charges for electricity that a customer both produces and consumes in real-time within its own facilities, and for their overall reduction of the value to customers of operating distributed generation.

In 2019, the Maine State Legislature enacted a law directing the Commission to amend its net energy billing rules to be substantively equivalent to the rules in effect on January 1, 2017, and, further, that the amended rules must apply to all customers that entered into a net energy billing arrangement between March 29, 2017 and the effective date of the new rules. On July 31, the Commission took that step. It amended Chapter 313 to define net energy as the difference between the energy produced by the generating facility and the energy used by the customer or shared ownership customers, required that customers be billed on this basis, and made a handful of other changes the Commission described in its statement of factual and policy basis as "non-substantive."

Separately, the 2019 Maine legislature enacted a law significantly expanding net energy billing. This law expands the maximum size of a generating facility eligible for net energy metering, from 660 kilowatts to 5 megawatts. It also eliminates any limit on the number of customers in the territories served by investor-owned utility who may “share ownership” and net meter against a given project’s output. The new law allows a customer with a power purchase agreement to be considered a "shared owner", in addition to those who own or lease a facility. A new variation on net energy billing provides additional value specifically for nonresidential customers of an investor-owned utility: a voluntary tariff rate providing a monetary bill credit for any electricity delivered to the electric grid from a distributed generation resource, equal to the applicable standard offer service rate for that customer receiving the credit plus 75% of the effective transmission and distribution rate for the rate class that includes the smallest commercial customers of the investor-owned transmission and distribution utility. The law requires the Commission to develop tariffs and rules implementing these additional reforms, which the Commission is expected to do in the coming months.