THE EMPEROR’S COMMUNITY SOLAR

Dominion to offer community solar, minus the community and the solar

Ivy Main, September 9, 2015 (Power for the People VA)

“In the children’s story The Emperor’s New Clothes, a couple of shysters convince an insecure monarch to fork over gold in exchange for what they assure him are the most beautiful clothes ever made—clothes with the remarkable quality of being invisible to stupid people. Too embarrassed to admit he can’t see the clothes, the emperor allows the fraud to proceed. Public humiliation ensues…[In] Dominion Virginia Power’s new scheme to extract money from customers who want to buy solar power…[called “Dominion Community Solar” (or Rider DCS), Dominion contracts to] build a 2-megawatt (MW) solar facility and put the electricity it produces onto the grid. Customers can buy it by paying an extra 4 cents per kWh (in $4 blocks) on top of the regular retail rate of about 11 cents…[But] Dominion will not actually sell solar energy to participants. (See SCC Case PUE-2015-00005.) It will use their ‘contributions’ to ‘offset’ the costs of its Solar Partnership Program…The result is that although Dominion will bill the do-gooders extra to build a solar facility, it won’t deliver solar energy to them. The altruists will pay 15 cents/kWh for the same drab fossil fuel electricity everyone else buys for 11 cents/kWh…” click here for more

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