Interconnection bill passes in Delaware Senate committee meeting
DOVER — A bill that aims to help increase solar energy production passed the Senate Environment, Energy, and Transportation committee March 25.
House Bill 269 would require electric suppliers to update their interconnection standards, the rules that connect electricity generators – like wind, solar, and energy storage – to the electric grid, to the Interstate Renewable Energy Council’s procedures within a year of the procedures’ publishing date.
The bill passed in the House on March 19 with an amendment stating that “any deviation from the Procedures must be affirmatively approved by the utility’s regulatory body in a formal proceeding.” For example, Delmarva Power is regulated by the Public Service Commission.
As the Daily State News previously reported, the state has approximately 172 megawatts of solar energy installed, according to Solar Delaware. The state wants to increase its solar energy production to 650 megawatts over the next five years.
In the March 25 committee meeting, Sen. Stephanie Hansen, D-Middletown, cited a news article that said that Delaware’s interconnection standards rate among the worst in the country.
“This has been directly attributed to our state not keeping up with the standards and procedures for streamlining the review process of applications and improving transparency for interconnection applicants and all the things addressed in the updated versions of what’s called IREC’s model interconnection procedures,” said Sen. Hansen, one of the bill sponsors.
She added that this includes expedited approvals to “weed out” community solar projects that do not require a prolonged study to assess whether it is safe to connect to the grid and comprehensive timelines which would fix the year long delays projects have.
Before the committee meeting, the Daily State News spoke to Heather Contant, director for government, community relations for the Delaware Municipal Electric Corporation about how HB 269 would impact their members which are local cities and towns running their own electric utilities.
“As they get those interconnection applications for customers who want to participate in net metering, the bill that Representative Burns is running is going to allow flexibility for those utilities to come in alignment and have consistency across utilities with net metering standards,” she said. “This is a way to allow us to have that common foundation and common goal but be able to meet it at the pace of each community.”
Derek Hendricks, senior manager of interconnection policy at Coalition for Community Solar Access, said virtually at the meeting that the coalition supports the intent of HB 269 but there were concerns about the strict framework of the Interstate Renewable Energy Council’s procedures and how that would affect the efforts the Public Service Commission to improve interconnection in the state.
“Over the past year, stakeholders including CCSA and Delmarva Power have been engaged in a detailed consensus-driven redline process to improve Delaware’s existing interconnection regulations,” Mr. Hendricks said. “The process is near completion and we believe will result in updated regulations sufficient to meet the current moment.”
He added that by requiring the state to immediately adopt the 2023 Interstate Renewable Energy Council procedures, this would “force the Commission to revisit” and undo the previous work that had been done, creating delays.
Matt Hartigan of the Public Service Commission responded virtually to Mr. Hendricks concerns by saying that he believed the legislation’s amendment will be complimentary to their interconnection standards efforts that started last October.
Mr. Hartigan said that some recommendations to strengthen the interconnection standards include making an enforcement mechanism for the procedures that the commission can oppose.
“If the bill passes in its current form with the amendment, I can anticipate that our staff or CCSA or Delmarva could petition the commission, as it allows in the amendment, to say that we should not unwind what we’ve already done and go back to 2023 and try to comply with those standards. My understanding is IREC is coming out with new standards in the next year or so, so at that point we can pick up the process in terms of compliance with that,” said Mr. Hartigan.
HB 269 was reported out of the Senate Environment, Energy and Transportation Committee with five favorable votes. The bill moves on for a full Senate vote at a later date.