Minnesota legislature passes net metering bill without reading it
After a heated end to the legislative session, Minnesota passed an energy and jobs bill. HF 1437 will make net metering customers face higher fees to help pay for the grid.
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The bill would allow utilities to set rates higher for customers who produce wind or solar energy. The bill was introduced less than an hour before the close of the Minnesota session, and only 84 of the 134 members voted -- with many claiming they had no chance to read the nearly 100-page bill.
"I don't know that it makes any sense to vote on this without even reading it," Senate Minority Leader David Hann said, according to the Grand Forks Herald.
After being introduced, the Senate took a 20-minute break to look at the bill, but voted just before midnight on Monday.
The bill would change the way municipal utilities and electric cooperatives could charge their net metering customers. For a facility with less than a 40-kilowatt (kW) capacity, the customer will be billed based on a rate schedule decided by what class of customer they are. A municipal utility or co-op could also charge additional fees to recover fixed costs not already paid by the net metering customer -- although, according to the bill, that fee must be "reasonable and appropriate." For any facility with less than 1,000 kW capacity, a public utility can charge net metering customers in the same way. However, the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) shall determine the class schedules for rates being charged.
The bill also said that any kilowatt-hour credits carried forward will be canceled at the end of the year, and the customer will not receive any additional compensation.
The bill also requires the PUC to keep a list of transmission and distribution (T&D) owners and operators -- including utilities, organizations, or companies -- who must submit their plans to the PUC every other year. In their report, the utilities must identify any investments it considers "necessary to modernize the transmission and distribution system by enhancing reliability, improving security against cyber and physical threats, and by increasing energy conservation opportunities by facilitating communication between the utility and its customers through the use of two-way meters, control technologies, energy storage and microgrids, technologies to enable demand response, and other innovative technologies."
The bill is now on Gov. Mark Dayton's desk.