Apparently my local electricity company, WE Energies, was imposing a fee on those with solar panels because they didn't like not being able to charge customers for the electricity WE Energies were not producing, justifying this fee as a loss of profit. The commission which allows this is made up of 3 people, 2 of which were appointed by our good friend Scott Walker.
Judge just said
yeah, no.
tl;dr: The judge allowed them to get rid of net metering, but struck down a worse law. In many states people are fighting about net metering, but by making the fight about a worse fee, these utility companies have made it so people are ignoring the fact that net metering is gone, and people are now going to be paid less for their solar power when they sell it to the grid than before this law was passed.
Yowch. They passed a horse through the needle by trying to pass an elephant and hoping people would only attack the elephant. This was a brilliant political maneuver on their part.
Most utilities, up to now, have used what's referred to as "net metering" with solar users attached to the grid. When you put electricity on the grid (ie, sell to the power company) then you would sell at the same rate they sell electricity to you. So if you produced 10kwh during the day, used 5, and put 5 on the grid, then used 5 at night, your bill at the end of the day would be unchanged - you sold as much to the utility as you bought, and under net metering they cost the same, thus you can use the grid as a free battery.
Many utilities are saying that this isn't fair. Using the grid as a battery still invokes transmission costs, and other costs, and under net metering this usage is free. If only 0.1% of the electric grid has such users it's not such a burden, and in fact it's helpful because the solar energy is generated when the electric grid is under its heaviest load during hot summer days.
After a certain point, though, there are too many customers generating power that's still putting a burden on the grid, requiring maintenance and upkeep, and they shouldn't necessarily buy electricity at the same rate they are selling it. When they sell electricity part of that cost isn't energy cost, it's cost to keep the grid running, but when customers sell it back, net metering allows them to skip that maintenance.
So the legislators pushed through a lot of stuff, one of which was to get rid of net metering.
Another was to charge solar and other generators fees for generated power that never made it to the grid.
By trying to push through the second more onerous fees no one is paying attention to the fact that the judge allowed the abolishment of net metering. Solar and other grid users will now receive a lower rate for energy they push on the grid than energy they buy from the grid.
So now the public thinks they've "won" but I'm guessing it was actually a carefully crafted PR move simply to get rid of net metering so utilities can charge solar users for electricity actually pushed onto the grid.
