State regulators have OK’d a new set of guidelines for the fees utilities can charge to hook up residential customers’ solar panels to the electric grid.
For years, there have been two different connection fee rates charged by utilities: Residents with solar systems that produce up to 10 kilowatts of electricity had to pay a $100 connection fee, while residential customers producing larger systems have had to pay a $500 fee.
Now the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority has adopted a uniform fee of $200 for all residential systems up to 20 kilowatts in size.
The change was done in response to the Connecticut Green Bank’s evolving incentives for solar, which has led to an influx of applications for systems in the 10 to 20-kilowatt range.
“The [utilities] have received many comments from customers about the $500 fee and believed that simplicity and fairness dictate one fee for all … projects under 20 kW,” PURA wrote in its decision this month.
The agency said it expects the change to simplify burdens on both utilities and customers and encourage more distributed generation projects.
