The Village of Greenport is reconsidering net metering after a recent billing error that threw Greenport solar owners into an uproar.
Village residents with solar have since organized to discuss compensation and better communication after nearly a dozen were impacted earlier this month. At least two meetings have been planned so far, with one held Wednesday night and another scheduled for Monday.
“To be notified that I was going to be charged for power and subsidize the rest of the village after making this giant capital investment myself, of course, you know, solar owners were up in arms,” said solar owner Pat Mundus. “In the end, this whole event was a tempest in a teapot. But it did coalesce the group of solar owners in Greenport, and it’s now a platform for dialogue about how to move forward, and how to help Greenport become more green.”
Village residents with solar who were mistakenly billed for electricity use took to Facebook to organize, with many initially under the perception that the village had changed the billing process.
“We have solar at my house and are very upset about the recent change in the village’s billing of solar production,” Beth Haskell wrote on Facebook. “I would like to set up an organizing meeting of all village homeowners with solar Oct. 24 at 6 p.m. at 59 Washington Ave., Greenport. We want to work out the best way that we can get fair compensation for our solar … My biggest concern is to not disincentivize others from going solar.”
Ms. Haskell did not respond to a reporter’s request for comment. According to her Facebook post, she is currently out of the country.
Village administrator Paul Pallas told a reporter solar billing has not changed and there was a mistake in the bill that impacted 11 customers, all of whom were contacted. The only change was the replacement of some meters, he said.
The policy remains the same and the village “routinely changes electric meters,” Mr. Pallas said.
No net metering tariff is currently in place to compensate Greenport households for solar production, although that has been something the village sought in the past — village trustees passed a resolution last September authorizing Mr. Pallas to request permission from the New York Power Authority to implement net metering in Greenport.
Net metering is a process that enables homeowners to sell excess solar energy back to their utility company in exchange for credits to offset the cost of energy usage. Under this system, solar owners pay for only the difference between the energy sold and actually used.
Mr. Pallas told village trustees at a board meeting on Thursday night that he’d met with the state power authority earlier that week, and highlighted New York State’s efforts to restructure its power grid to be more eco-friendly.
In 2019, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act into law. It’s among the most ambitious climate laws in the world and requires the state to reduce economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030, according to the state website. Part of that law requires 70% of the state’s electricity to come from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind by 2030.
“At the meeting with the power authority, we were reminded that our long-term agreement with the power authority requires us to work with them to enhance renewable energy projects,” Mr. Pallas said. “We can build them, it can be community-solar type projects, which is more likely what we would do, perhaps work with other utilities to jointly build projects.”
The village’s long-term agreement with the power authority also requires Greenport to “do what we can to encourage renewable energy at the customer side,” he added. There are currently 10 solar panel systems on residential homes that the village knows of, Mr. Pallas said.
“If you recall, a few years ago, I had approached you about putting in a net metering tariff. And what a net metering tariff does is allow a customer to sell, essentially, electricity back if there is a credit at the end of the month,” he said. “If they generate more electricity in a month than they’ve used for that month, there will be a credit on their bill … that will roll over for 12 months. If at the end of 12 months, there’s still a credit, we would pay them for that energy that we took from them.”
There would be limits for customers, he said, and there is an installation component that requires a building permit. The maximum potential out-of-pocket cost for the village would be around $26,000 a year. “That’s under the assumption that all of those units are operating at full capacity and the customer’s not using anything, which is not real,” he said. “So it’s a very, very minor financial risk.”
Municipalities usually offer net metering tariffs, Mr. Pallas noted. Greenport is an outlier.
Trustee Mary Bess Phillips emphasized that the village should write code and there should be an educational component explaining solar panels on the village website. She also said the village should keep track of who installs solar and communicate with the historic district about how installations would impact landmark statuses.
Lily Dougherty-Johnson, who said the solar billing issue has now been resolved, initially wrote to The Suffolk Times about the mix-up this month.
“I was misinformed when I first called the village. Someone in billing [said] they weren’t counting our output and that was backed up by one of the trustees so I spent three days thinking this whole thing was a crazy mess that would really affect me financially … but it turned out to all be misinformation,” she told a reporter. “I’m hoping that things don’t change again, or don’t change back in some way, and that the latest information I got was actually the correct information.”
Ms. Dougherty-Johnson said the Wednesday night meeting had been planned before the situation was resolved.
Ms. Mundus said she committed to installing solar and a battery for near total independence from the grid after joining a group considering ways to be greener on a local level. It was “quite expensive,” she said, but she spoke to the village ahead of time to learn “exactly how the billing structure was going to be” and budgeted her “long-term capital investment.”
“Everything was great for the first four or five months that I had the thing and then suddenly, without any notification, or anything, Greenport came and changed the meter and then I started getting billed for electricity,” she said. “On most days, my house puts [out] at least three, if not four times the amount of power that I consume, [and] it sends back to the village for free. And I knew that when I went ahead and planned for it, and I was okay with that.”
The village treasurer personally called to apologize and explain the billing error, Ms. Mundus said. The treasurer said she would be credited for the bill next month.
“I think in the future, when somebody comes and changes out a meter or changes their structure, they should at least notify the homeowner,” she said. “That’s why it was so shocking to everybody to go from zero bill to suddenly being charged for electricity that we actually are giving to the village, the whole community.”