HB1427 – Expanding utility net-metering programs.
Prime Sponsor – Representative Mena (D; 45th District; Kirkland) (Co-Sponsors Doglio, Ramel, Street, Berry, Duerr, Hackney, Reed, Fosse, Cortes, Lekanoff, and Peterson – Ds)
Current status – Had a hearing in the House Committee on Environment & Energy January 24th. Replaced by a substitute and passed out of committee February 9th. Referred to Rules. Returned to the House Committee on Environment and Energy for the 2024 Session.
Next step would be – Scheduling a hearing.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Substitute –
There’s a summary by staff of the changes made in the substitute at the beginning of it.

Summary –
The bill would make public utility customers’ systems for generating power of up to 200 kilowatts AC on their own property eligible for net metering, doubling the current limit, and would make it available for private utility customers’ systems of up to 2 megawatts on their own property. (Utilities could also offer it for other systems if they chose to.) It would require offering it until June 2035, rather than June 2029, or until the total capacity of the included systems reached 12% of a utility’s peak demand in 1996, rather than 4%.

The bill would require utilities to enter into contracts covering the terms of their arrangements with customer-generators for at least 25 years, and to develop a standard rate or tariff schedule for them that’s expressed as a percentage of the utility’s retail rate. (I think this is intended to mean that these customers would get the current arrangements for net metering credits for at least the rough estimated life time of a solar system, but I’m not sure what this additional provision about a standard rate for them is intended to do, given the next to the last sentence of the next paragraph. My understanding is that a contract could include provisions for new rates after the requirement for admitting more customers to the program ended, including one rate for electricity used by the customer and a different rate for credited generation …)

Until the point at which they were no longer required to offer net metering, the rates and reimbursement for these customers would be determined by the provisions of the current net-metering law, which deducts any kilowatt hours the customer provided to the grid over the year from the ones the customer is billed for, effectively paying for that power at the current retail rate. (If the system produces more than the customer uses, though, the extra credits go to the utility; the bill would now require the utility to use those to reduce low-income customers’ bills.) A consumer-owned utility could develop a standard rate or tariff schedule to take effect after the point at which they were no longer required to offer net metering to new applicants, and private utilities could develop a rate to take effect after that through a UTC proceeding. These could include time-of-use net metering rates, and if they did, they’d be encouraged to include incentives for energy storage plans.

The bill would have the WSU Energy Program convene a work group with representatives of a range of stakeholders on the future of net metering in the state. The group would consider its implications for the solar industry workforce, the rate of deployment of consumer-owned solar and storage, and future electric load growth, the reductions in utility income associated with different levels of net metering, and equitable distribution of the benefits of consumer-owned solar and storage. It would provide an inventory of other states’ deviation from net metering laws and the impact that had on solar installations, solar installers, utilities, utility customers, rural land, tribal land, and customer-generator payback periods. It would consider whether it’s reasonable for utilities to count consumer-owned clean energy systems in their territory toward their Clean Energy Transformation Act compliance targets. The Energy Program would study the magnitude of any cost shifts among ratepayers associated with retail rate net metering in Washington state, under scenarios assuming total net metered generation capacity of six percent, 12 percent, and 24 percent of 1996 peak power. The work group report would make recommendations on what alternatives to net metering should be considered by the Legislature and when it would be reasonable to implement those, taking the findings of the cost shift study into account, and the Energy Program would report to the Legislature on this work by December 2026.

The bill would require contractors installing solar systems to have written contracts with customers complying with a detailed list of requirements.

The bill declares the Legislature’s intent to update and implement a new net metering policy by 2035, and its position that any rate or tariff offered by a utility under a future net metering policy must compensate customer-generators at a rate that’s different than the retail rate; be expressed as a percentage of the retail rate; be communicated to customers with three year’s notice from when it’s first publicly proposed to when it would go into effect; and allow for inclusion of time-of-use net metering rate structures for distributed storage.