California’s decision to change how much customers make from solar energy, which took effect last April, has pummeled the rooftop solar industry in the state, and industry experts expect a nearly 41 percent drop in sales this year.
“We expect installations to fall off sharply in 2024,” Solar Energy Industries Association spokesman Morgan Lyons, a national solar-energy industry trade association, told The Epoch Times.
The state’s Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) put in place a new policy in April that substantially reduced the amount of money solar customers make selling excess energy back to the grid.
The move slashed the value of solar energy shared back to the grid by solar homes and businesses by up to 80 percent overnight, according to the California Solar and Storage Association, a state solar industry association with over 550 member companies.
Preliminary estimates provided by the Solar Energy Industries Association show sales in California were expected to decrease to 1,375 this year—940 fewer installations than last year.
Before California’s new rule went into effect, sales in the state were increasing, according to Mr. Lyons.
Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to provide incentives for energy storage to reduce the losses, but those incentives did not materialize last year, according to the association.
Since the decision, the solar industry has had business closures and depression-level layoffs, the association wrote in a press release in December.
“All over California we are seeing the grim reality of how the CPUC’s cuts to solar are taking livelihoods away from thousands of families,” the association’s Executive Director Bernadette Del Chiaro said in the press release. “No one would expect a supposed climate leader like California to be pulling the plug on green jobs and our fastest and most accessible path to a clean energy future.”
