Musk’s Cousins Battle Utilities to Make Solar Rooftops Cheap

[Purveyor]

In September 2013, Hawaiian Electric Co. told thousands of customers they couldn’t connect their new solar panels to its distribution grid. In some neighborhoods, HECO said, its system couldn’t absorb any more unused energy from home solar arrays. The moratorium, which lasted 13 months, made Hawaii a central battleground in the effort by utilities to control the rapid growth of independent solar companies across the U.S. And it was a big deal to people such as Robert Gould, a retired Northwest Airlines pilot living near Honolulu. He’d just paid $53,000 to have solar panels installed.

Gould and other customers protested loudly to state officials. They finally got help from Lyndon Rive, the CEO of SolarCity. The San Mateo, California, company is the biggest installer of rooftop solar panels in the U.S. and has 10,000 Hawaiian customers, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its May issue. Rive studied the situation and zeroed in on a key fact: HECO had never directly measured how much solar its grid could handle, relying on computer simulations instead. “Because the technology is brand-new, no one had ever done this in the field before,” says Colton Ching, HECO’s vice president for energy delivery.

SolarCity joined with HECO to run the tests, with help from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. They found that high-traffic circuits could absorb twice as much solar energy as the utility thought. After asking solar installers to reprogram equipment that connected them to the grid, HECO lifted its ban on new hookups late last year. Gould flipped the switch and connected his new panels to the grid in January.

Rive, 38, says the experiment in Hawaii was a step forward for him and his brother Peter, 41, and their famous cousin, Elon Musk, who helped found SolarCity in 2006. The trio is on a quest to reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels—Musk with his Tesla electric cars, the Rive brothers by replacing coal- and natural gas-generated electric power with solar. What was groundbreaking in Hawaii was that regulators pressured HECO to join with SolarCity in redesigning the state’s electricity grid, moving solar to the mainstream of the industry, Peter Rive says. The Rives, like their cousin Musk, approach the fight against climate change as a moral crusade. Lyndon regards the replacement of fossil fuels with clean energy as an urgent necessity. “We have to accept that what is happening today is impossible,” he says. “It will be suicide to continue that process.”

SolarCity is installing solar panels on homes and commercial businesses in 15 states. It has 190,000 customers, expects to double that to 400,000 this year, and is aiming for a million by 2018. As they grow their businesses, SolarCity and other energy upstarts—its chief competitors are Vivint Solar and the home solar unit of NRG Energy—are waging daily battles with big utilities. They accuse the electricity establishment of trying to thwart their expansion and, in some states, of competing unfairly by installing its own rooftop solar panels while still charging regulated, cost-plus rates that guarantee a profit.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-15/elon-musk-s-cousins-battle-utilities-to-make-solar-rooftops-cheap