Nevada has 335 days of clear, bright sunshine per year making it an ideal place to have solar powered roof installations. It offers some of the best conditions to generate solar power in the country.
In the late nineties, Nevada set up a policy called net metering. Net metering meant that homeowners who put up solar arrays could sell surplus power back into the grid.
Someone who installed a solar array on their roo top could sell the surplus power they put back into the grid to their neighbors and offset their power bill. In other words, they would get cheaper electric bills.
A typical homeowner with an average electric bill of $330 per month would see their bill reduced to around $10 per month.
People who took part in the program were encouraged to install solar arrays on their rooftops and were happy to be helping the environment while saving money at the same time.
The future of solar was so sunny in Nevada that in 2014 Solar City, Americas largest manufacturer and leaser of solar panels was welcomed into Nevada. They removed the upfront cost of going solar and started leasing solar panels to homeowners with zero down payments.
Many homeowners jumped at the chance immediately. Soon 17,000 homeowners were generating power. By coming in and basically flooding the market with no upfront costs lease systems, Solar City and the State of Nevada woke up a sleeping dragon, encouraging homeowners to make the switch to solar.
People were led to believe this project would reduce their electric bill permanently.
In late December, Nevada's public utilities commission decided that solar customers were mooching. They were not paying their fair share to maintain the grid and Nevada Energy should charge them more. If the current plan stands a homeowner that switched to solar in Nevada will pay more for electricity for the next 30 years then if they had not made the switch to solar.
Nevada can buy power cheaper than from NV Energy than the rates offered by homeowners with solar rooftops.
Under the previous incentive program, NV Energy paid customers 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for excess electricity—the amount it typically charges residential customers for power. But Buffet has said NV Energy could buy power from large-scale solar plants for as little as 4.5 cents per kWh. credit
Solar City quickly decided that doing business in Nevada no longer made sense.
This isn't just a sideshow in the desert, it's a proxy war. You see, Nevada Energy is part of Warren Buffet's business empire and Elon Musk is behind Solar City and it looked like Buffet's company had just secured a victory.
Hundreds of homeowners came out in droves to protest the rate changes by the public utilities commission. and some unusual collaborators like actor Mark Ruffalo turned out to protest.
I think there's a much larger issue here that individual homes generating solar energy, an issue larger than Nevada.
If monopolistic energy companies owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the fund owned by Warren Buffet, can keep their control and destroy solar energy innovations in Nevada, that this will set the precedent that they will take to other states across the country to kill the competition that is solar power.
If this ruling stands the way it stands now it will effectively kill all new solar rooftop installations in Nevada.
The thousands of people caught in the crosshairs of these billionaires are realizing that by trying to do the right thing they may have made the wrong decision. People have spent so much money to build these solar arrays on the premise that it is the right thing to do and will save them money only to find the rules have been changed to benefit corporations and not them.
The environment has been left completely out of the equation and it is the environment that gains with all these rooftop solar installations.
Since the rally, Nevada has suggested grandfathering in existing contracts, but the rate changes are still in place making it unfavorable for rooftop solar.
It's not clear which billionaire will triumph but what happens in Nevada may just set the course for the rest of the country.
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