HB5280 – Authorizes community solar gardens.
Prime Sponsor – Senator McCoy (D, 38th District, Snohomish County)
Current status – Had a hearing on a substitute bill in the Committee on Environment, Energy & Technology February 12th. Still in committee by 2019 cutoff; reintroduced and retained in present status for 2020 session.
Next step would be –  Action by the committee.
Legislative tracking page for the bill.

Comments –
The substitute specifies that any project has to meet the current requirements for community solar projects in RCW 80.28.375. These cover registration with the WSU Energy program and bonding (if required). It now requires at least ten subscribers or one per ten kilowatts, rather than at least five subscribers none of whom could own more than 40% of the project.

Olympia Community Solar has a flyer about the original bill.

Summary –
Community solar gardens are utility scale projects, in which subscribers buy a share of the project and get credits for their share of the output on their utility bills. The bill says they’re intended to exist “outside of tax-related subsidy programs”, and that they “include community solar projects” as those are defined in the current law about tax incentives for renewable energy. (That program has reached its cap, and is not allowing new projects.) For twenty-five years, subscribers would get credits on their bills at the retail rate for their share of the project’s output.

The bill requires each private utility to submit a plan for operating them to the UTC by January 1, 2020, and requires public utilities to submit plans to the Department of Commerce.

Comments –
The bill doesn’t say much of anything about the requirements for creating one of the profit or non-profit corporation that can own these projects in addition to utilities. It doesn’t say anything about provisions for transferring a subscriber’s contract if they leave the service area, or about what happens to a contract if one of these subscriber organizations goes out of business.

Details –
Utility Plans
The UTC can approve, disapprove or modify a private utility’s plan, and the bill talks about “a plan approved by Commerce” (though it doesn’t seem to specify Commerce’s powers over public utilities’ plans in the same way.)

Plans must:

• Reasonably allow for the creation, financing, and accessibility of community solar gardens;
• Provide guidelines for including low-income customers as subscribers, and may allow a preference for community solar gardens that have low-income subscribers;
• Establish uniform standards, fees, and processes for the interconnection of projects that allow the utility to recover reasonable interconnection costs for each one;
• Be consistent with the public interest;
• Identify the information that must be provided to customers to ensure fair disclosure of future costs and benefits of subscriptions;
• Include a program implementation schedule;
• Identify all proposed rules, fees, and charges;
• Describe how the program will be promoted;
• Describe the system for crediting each subscriber’s monthly bill; and,
• Identify the preferred locations for solar gardens within a utility’s distribution system, if the utility has analyzed it and designated some that don’t unreasonably restrict solar gardens’ development.

Each utility has to maintain a public website with this information and information about each project in its service area.

Limits on projects
A project must have subscribers for all the electricity it generates, and they have to be in the utility’s service area. It has to have more than five subscribers, and none of them can subscribe for more than 40% of the project. At least 40% of the capacity has to be allocated to residential and small business customers with loads under 40kWs, and at least 10% of it has to be for customers who are eligible for the State’s low-income energy assistance plan.

Subscriptions have to be for at least one kilowatt, and (including any other distributed energy generation at the location) one can’t be for more than 120% of your annual yearly consumption “at the premises to which the subscription is attached.” (Apparently, you could have more than one subscription if you were a customer with more than one location.)

The project must be located on the utility’s distribution system, and within a preferred location on the system, if the utility’s plan identifies any.

Subscriber organizations
These are for-profit or non-profit organizations that own or operate one or more solar gardens. They own the renewable energy credits generated by their projects, and can sell them. They contract with subscribers who want to own a share of a project, but that doesn’t make them regulated as utilities. They’re responsible for making a monthly electronic report of each subscriber’s share of the output to the subscriber’s utility, so the utility can credit their bills.

They have to have a system for resolving any disputes with subscribers.

Regulations
The UTC and Commerce can coordinate in developing rules for these projects, and should have those for private and pubic utilities be the same, to the extent that that’s practical.