A three-judge panel in North Carolina upheld Duke Energy’s reduced payments to rooftop solar owners on Tuesday, unanimously rejecting claims from climate justice advocates that the smaller credits run afoul of state law.
The ruling upholds for now a scheme that took effect last October after Duke, some of the state’s oldest solar installers, and multiple clean energy groups reached a complicated truce to avoid the bruising battles over net metering seen in other states.
NC WARN, Environmental Working Group, and others opposed to the compromise argued that regulators adopted it without conducting their own analysis of the costs and benefits of net metering, a requirement of a 2017 statute. Such studies typically show that rooftop solar offers net benefits to the grid, contrary to utility claims.
The appellants rested their argument in part on a statement from one of the 2017 law’s authors, John Szoka, a Fayetteville Republican who served in the state House of Representatives for a decade. An Energy News Network article quoted in the appeal describes Szoka as “adamant” that the Utilities Commission, not Duke, should conduct the study.
The appeals court panel agreed, based on the plain text of the law.
“The commission erred in concluding that it was not required to perform an investigation of the costs and benefits of customer-sited generation,” Judge Hunter Murphy, a Republican, wrote.
But in a disappointing twist for the challengers, he continued, “however, the record reveals that the commission de facto performed such an investigation when it opened an investigation docket in response to [Duke’s] proposed revised net energy metering rates; permitted all interested parties to intervene; and accepted, compiled, and reviewed over 1,000 pages of evidence.”
Joined by two Democrats, Judges John Arrowood and Toby Hampson, Murphy’s opinion also rejected arguments that the commission erred by failing to consider all of the benefits of rooftop solar and by forcing solar owners to migrate to time-variable rates instead of allowing flat rates to stand.
“The commission properly considered the evidence before it and made appropriate findings of fact and conclusions of law,” Murphy wrote.
Many solar installers saw a dip in sales and interest in the last quarter of 2023 when the lower net metering credits took effect. But they were also hopeful about a new Duke program that rolled out this spring, which offers solar customers incentives to pair their arrays with home batteries.
Jim Warren, NC WARN executive director and an outspoken Duke critic, said in a press release that he and his allies would weigh an appeal to the state’s Supreme Court.
“This ruling directly harms our once-growing solar power industry and the communities constantly battered by climate change driven by polluters like Duke Energy,” he said.