By Diane Cardwell | The New York Times
In voting to impose a modest charge on new residential solar customers, Arizona’s power regulators have ended, for the moment, a bitter fight between the rooftop solar industry and the state’s main electric utility.
The closely watched decision, which came late Thursday after months of increasingly heated debate from both sides, preserves a credit system that has been a powerful incentive in attracting solar customers and adds less compensation than the utility, Arizona Public Service, had sought.
The compromise on the system, which is known as net metering — it credits residential and commercial customers for excess renewable energy they send back to the grid — allows it to continue. But it sets up a future battle over the value of decentralized solar power that will play out across the country.
More than 40 states offer some form of the incentive, according to the Energy Department, and the credit programs are under scrutiny in nearly all of them, advocates say.
