Augusta, Maine — Maine’s rooftop solar installers and the state’s major utilities have set aside long-standing differences to strike a deal they say could increase solar power in the state tenfold in five years.

 

But national solar companies are trying to stop it.

The Alliance for Solar Choice, a national industry group focused on defending rooftop solar, and California-based firms Sunrun and SolarCity want to kill a key part of the plan as it moves through the Maine Legislature.

Although the companies don’t work in Maine, they’ve dispatched lobbyists to Augusta, funded an opinion poll and are running a social media advertising blitz warning that the deal would allow utility monopolies to “tighten their hold on their captive consumer base.”

The solar industry is watching Maine closely because the state is considering a novel solution for a regulatory problem that more than a dozen states are also wrestling with, said Autumn Proudlove, senior policy analyst at the North Carolina Clean Energy Technology Center.

“What Maine is doing, even though there is not a lot of solar there, has national implications,” she said.

Utility companies in other states are also watching Maine and working behind the scenes to push back against the national solar firms, said Tony Buxton, a lobbyist for the state’s large industrial energy users, such as paper companies.

“It’s almost a proxy war,” he said.

The Maine plan addresses the contentious issue of “net metering,” a long-standing financial incentive used in Maine and other states.

First implemented in the 1980s when solar panels were more costly than they are today, net metering requires utilities to provide a one-to-one credit to solar customers on their bills for the surplus power they generate and feed into the grid.

Utilities around the country oppose this practice because they say it doesn’t compensate them for the full cost of providing service to all customers, such as maintaining power lines and substations.

The solar industry and environmentalists say solar panels help all electric consumers by reducing the strain on electric grids on summer days when demand soars and utilities are forced to buy additional power at high rates.

The two sides have clashed most publicly in Nevada, where regulators last year eliminated net metering for solar customers and drastically reduced the payout solar customers receive for their surplus electricity. Both SolarCity and Sunrun in recent months have announced they’re leaving Nevada and laying off hundreds of employees.

In Maine, lawmakers are considering a bill to replace net metering with “next metering,” a system that lets utilities sign 20-year contracts with residential solar customers. Instead of paying retail price, utilities would pay rates set by regulators.

The bill would grandfather the existing practice for current solar customers through 2029. It would also lift barriers on community-owned and large-scale solar farms.