Tag Archives: HB 57

Georgia Power starts selling rooftop solar tomorrow

For most of June, Georgia Power has had two ads rotating on the 300x225 Sunlight from Georgia Power, in Giving you the power to go solar, by Gretchen Quarterman, 10 June 2015 five LED billboards in Valdosta, saying

Giving you the power to go solar —Georgia Power

When? Tomorrow, July 1st, as Southern Company CEO Tom Fanning said at the SO Stockholder meeting 27 May 2015. Why then? Because that’s when HB 57, aka the Solar Power Free-Market Financing Act of 2015, goes into effect. As Tom Fanning has made his mantra since that meeting:

“If somebody wants to buy distributed generation, I want to sell it to ’em,”

Herman K. Trabish, Utility Dive, 11 June 2015 Inside Georgia Power’s move into the residential solar market: The utility says it will offer solar through an unregulated business, but installers fear possible anticompetitive impacts, Continue reading →

GA Gov. Nathan Deal signs solar financing law

The sun is finally rising on Georgia, and if that is possible, Florida can follow, and the southeast, the U.S., and the world.

Today is a historic day, when even a governor who took campaign finance funds from a long list of fossil fuel pipeline companies, the governor of the most corrupt state (least stringent ethics laws), when that governor finally signed a law that even the most corruption-prone legislature, after squelching similar bills for a dozen years, finally passed as HB 57 unanimously in both houses.

Dave Williams, Atlanta Business Chronicle, 12 may 2015, Gov. Deal signs bill letting solar installers offer customers third-party financing,

Georgia property owners will get more affordable options for installing solar panels at their homes and businesses under a bill Gov. Nathan Deal signed into law Tuesday.

The legislation, which sailed through the General Assembly unanimously, will let solar installers offer customers third-party financing of installations. That’s a major change from the old law, which required customers to pay up front.

Already two years ago the Georgia Public Service Commissioners, even though overwhelmingly campaign-funded by the industries they regulate, required Georgia Power to buy twice as much solar energy as it wanted. This year Georgia Power’s parent Southern Company’s annual report says its main source of new revenue for both 2013 and 2014 was solar power. And Georgia has already leaped from far behind to become the fastest growing solar market in the nation, with numerous Georgia Power solar utility-scale installations and smaller ones like for Alton Burns in Thomas County and today for George Bennett in Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia. This new law Gov. Deal just signed will accelerate that growth even more.

Luis Martinez, NRDC, 12 May 2015, The Sun Also Rises in the Southeast, Continue reading →

Southern Company Annual Stockholder Meeting @ SO 2015-05-27

Solar power made much of SO’s increased energy revenues for 2013 and 2014. What else will we learn at the Southern Company 2015 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Wednesday, May 27, 2015? Has Southern Company finally looked up, and will it say, like Thomas Alva Edison in 1931, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy”?

To attend the SO shareholder meeting you have to have owned stock by Monday, March 30, 2015, or you’ll need to get somebody to appoint you their proxy. Since I’m an SO stockholder, I got the 216-page Southern Company Notice of 2015 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, Proxy Statement and 2014 Annual Report, page D-8:

In 2014, wholesale revenues increased $329 million, or 17.7%, as compared to the prior year due to a $326 million increase in energy revenues and a $3 million increase in capacity revenues. The increase in energy revenues was primarily related to increased revenue under existing contracts as well as new solar PPAs and requirements contracts primarily at Southern Power, Continue reading →

GA Senate unanimously approved solar financing bill

Friday’s vote started at least a year and a half ago. Organized years-long activism is paying off for everyone.

Summer before last, after statewide requests by Georgia Sierra Club, Greenlaw, and many others: Georgia PSC required Georgia Power to buy twice as much solar power. About a year later, Mary Landers, Savannahnow, 18 November 2014, Georgia is fastest growing solar market,

Last year the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a motion for Georgia Power, the state’s largest utility, to add 525 MW of solar power generation to its portfolio by 2016.

“That pushed out the growth of solar, especially projecting forward,” Continue reading →

Minnesota follows Austin with Value of Solar Tariff: better than net metering, or not?

Yes, it’s better than the unequal “net metering” Georgia has now, where your one-and-only utility pays you a rate they determine, typically their “avoided” rate of not generating energy by some other means, which is usually a lot less than what you pay your utility. Is it better than real one-to-one net metering? That’s a harder question, because even if it pays more now, it’s less predictable. In any case VOST has spread from Austin to Minnesota.

Herman K. Trabish, GreenTechMedia, 10 April 2014, A Rising Tension: ‘Value-of-Solar’ Tariff Versus Net Metering,


Source: Institute for Local Self Reliance

The Alliance for Solar Choice, a group made up of Continue reading →