ZELIENOPLE, Pa. (AP) - Of all the thousands of municipalities in Pennsylvania, Baierl Ford decided to go solar in Zelienople, one of a handful that caps the amount of solar capacity customers can produce at one tenth of what Baierl had in mind.
Borough officials didn’t know of its intentions - the car dealership’s original expansion plans didn’t have solar panels on the roof.
Baierl and its solar installer, Scalo Solar Solutions, in turn, didn’t know that five years ago, Zelienople adopted an unusual ordinance that placed a 5-kilowatt limit on the size of solar systems. That’s about enough to power a small home.
Zelienople isn’t exactly a hot bed for solar activity. It has only two rooftops with panels - an auto shop and the office of an electrical contractor that installed both systems.
“The ordinance was mainly passed as a showcase for our business,” said Adam Dilts, vice president of Dilts Enterprises LLC which worked with the borough to get rules in place so it could install a 3.5-kilowatt array on its roof.
Shortly after, the company installed a 5-kilowatt system at Jack Hockenberger Motors. The auto shop’s owner wanted a larger system, Dilts said, but by that time, the cap was already in place.
And that’s how it’s been since 2011.
When Baierl finally submitted its application to connect the 50-kilowatt solar array to the local grid earlier this year, Zelienople denied it.
An argument ensued.
Last month, PennFuture, an environmental advocacy group got involved. It sent a letter to Zelienople to express its dismay at the ordinance and to extol solar as an environmental and economic virtue that tackles national woes from unemployment to national security -“No other country or terrorist group can buy or capture the sun and ransom it to the highest bidder,” the letter said.
Regarding the 5-kilowatt cap, PennFuture’s chief counsel George Jugovic wrote: “There is no engineering, safety or public health reason to establish such a limit - in short, no rational basis - that would support the ordinance.”
The only explanation, he reasoned, is that Zelienople doesn’t want solar cutting into its electricity sales.
’More innocent than that’
The borough is one of 35 municipalities in Pennsylvania and only a few in Western Pennsylvania that operates its own electric utility and isn’t regulated by the state Public Utility Commission.
As such, it has a contract to buy power and it bundles everything from supply to distribution and maintenance into a single rate set according to the needs of the system. Zelienople calculates how much power its 2,200 customers will need during the year and how much money its electric department will require to maintain the system, then it backfills rates according to its revenue requirements.
The revenue from the utility actually stretches further than that. It makes up the majority of the borough’s entire operating budget and helps to keep taxes low, said borough manager Don Pepe.
Unshackled from state laws that mandate regulated utilities to hook customer solar arrays into their systems, reimburse them for excess power fed back into the grid at retail rates, and establish much more generous limits - 50 kilowatts for residential installations and 3,000 kilowatts for commercial customers -Pepe said Zelienople based its ordinance on what a handful of other municipalities in its position had done at the time and on the first ever request from a customer to install a small solar system on its roof.
“We are certainly not against solar power. It’s just that we needed to regulate it,” he said. “It’s not that it would have siphoned off a lot of our revenue. It’s rather more innocent than that.”
Seinfeld ’Unvite’
PennFuture, which has been working with municipalities on solar ordinances for years, had never dealt with municipal-owned electric utilities.
“The restrictions were news to me,” Mr. Jugovic said. “I didn’t realize that there were municipalities out there that had a reason to care.”
Joe Morinville, president of Robinson-based Energy Independent Solutions, recently installed the first solar array in Grove City, another municipality with its own utility that until recently had a ban on any grid-tied solar.
It’s not uncommon for such municipalities to insert “punitive fees and rules” into the solar ordinances, he said.
Zelienople, for example, requires all customers who install solar to hold $1 million in liability coverage - something that isn’t likely to be a problem for a business but is probably three times more than the standard liability coverage in homeowner’s insurance in this region, according to Ron Gallagher, president of the Harrisburg-based Pennsylvania Association of Mutual Insurance Companies.
“It’s the old Seinfeld ’Unvite’,” Morinville said. “They add lots of restrictions and costs to discourage solar all the while saying they welcome it.”
A “normal utility,” he said, has “no liability insurance requirement at all on any array size.”
Zelienople’s ordinance also stipulates that if a customer makes more power than it consumers in a year, it will be paid for the excess energy fed back into the grid at a rate of 50 percent of the wholesale price of power. That means the borough gets to keep half of the value of that power.
Time for change
Everyone, including Dilts and Pepe, acknowledge it’s a time to update the ordinance.
Last week, PennFuture and Scalo Solar got word from Zelienople’s attorney that the borough will be changing its ordinance to raise the caps. It hopes to present a draft to the council before the end of June, Pepe said.
“Zelienople blinked,” said Michael Carnahan, general manager with Scalo Solar. Pepe, who accused Scalo Solar of fomenting the issue, said the borough council is happy to update the ordinance as long as it still works for the borough.
Jugovic said he expects Zelienople to come in line with state standards, but Pepe can’t confirm that will be the case. The borough is still considering “what we can allow,” he said, both from the perspective of how much customer-generated electricity its grid can handle and what impact that will have on its economics.
Baierl Ford declined to comment.
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Information from: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, https://www.post-gazette.com
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