Support Rooftop Solar for Denton

Denton Municipal Electric (DME) is proposing to eliminate net metering for customers with solar. This change would discourage customers from installing solar at their homes and businesses.

The Denton Utilities Board will present this proposal to the Denton City Council on July 23. The time to act is now!

Please email Denton’s Mayor and City Council right away:

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I am very disappointed to learn that Denton Municipal Electric is trying to eliminate net-metering for customers with solar panels. This change will discourage customers from using solar at their homes and businesses, which is contrary to Denton’s goals of increasing renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Rooftop solar provides many advantages. 
•	It is emissions-free. 
•	It reduces the need to purchase energy from the ERCOT grid. 
•	It avoids the need for transmission lines, which are increasingly congested in Texas and prevent utility-scale solar and wind from reaching cities that need the energy. 
•	It avoids the need to purchase ancillary services by appearing as load (demand) reduction to ERCOT. 
•	It reduces the need for investments in the distribution grid. 
•	It creates local jobs. 
•	It creates local tax revenue. 
•	It allows the same land to be used twice, as both a home or business and a source of energy. This reduces environmental impact, even compared to utility-scale solar.

The consultant that DME hired to assess the value of rooftop solar has very limited experience with such work and that experience has shown a bias against rooftop solar (including a report they wrote for an Austin Energy rate case). The value they have calculated for DME is much too low and ignores and undervalues many of the benefits of solar.

This policy proposal is a bad solution in search of a problem. It’s not as if there’s an excess of local solar generation in Denton. The city should be looking for ways to make it easier, not harder for customers to use distributed solar at their homes and businesses.

DME may contract with enough utility-scale solar and wind farms to produce the annual amount of energy used by its customers, but the fact that the utility is still running its polluting gas peaker plants shows that more is needed to get to 100% renewable energy. Local renewable energy production – as well as local batteries – is needed. Rooftop solar is an important part of the solution.

I call on you to reject this proposal and direct DME to maintain net metering.

If the utility wishes to engage consulting services to assess the value of rooftop solar again in the future, they should ensure that they will utilize the best practices detailed in the National Standard Practice Manual for Benefit-Cost Analysis of Distributed Energy Resources.

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