Sue and George Edwards decided in early 2016 to take the plunge and buy a rooftop solar-energy system for their Swarthmore, Pa., house. Once they signed a contract, they figured they soon would be producing their own power.
But a process they anticipated would take weeks to complete instead took the better part of the year. As delays mounted, so did costs.
Peco, the electric utility in the region, told the couple that it could not connect their 3.8-kilowatt system because it might elevate the voltage beyond legal limits for their neighbors. It would cost the couple $1,300 to modify the utility’s network to accommodate their solar system.
“I had no clue this would be a problem,” said Sue Edwards, an environmental activist. She grumbled about having to bear the cost of upgrading Peco’s equipment.
The solar installer shared the Peco fee, and the system was put in place in November — after the homeowners redid their roof, which added $20,000 to the price of the $12,700 solar system. But the Edwardses are still not sending solar power into the grid because Peco has yet to make the final connection.
“They don’t like competition from nature,” said George Edwards, expressing a common sentiment among solar advocates.
The couple’s experience was not unusual. Of the 50 customers who signed up for solar through a community group’s Solarize Greater Media campaign, 16 were initially rejected by Peco because their systems were incompatible with the utility’s network.
Solar installers say that Peco’s process for reviewing and approving solar jobs is fraught with obstacles, and that customers have experienced a high rate of denials because the utility’s older distribution system was not designed to handle new customer-generators.
“There seems to be some underlying resistance from utilities to solar,” said Ron Celentano, a Flourtown, Pa., consultant and president of the Pennsylvania Solar Energy Industries Association. “You see it all over.”
Peco says it experienced a surge of interest from potential solar customers in 2016, attracted by the declining price of solar panels and a 30 percent tax credit. Through November, the utility received 3,515 requests from customers to connect solar systems, quadruple the total applications it received in 2015.
“We’re making the commitments to expand and enhance the organization to respond to this increase,” said Ben Armstrong, Peco’s spokesman.
The utility has revamped its review process and added 12 new employees to streamline the assessments, Armstrong said. Peco also is developing an online portal to allow solar installers to submit plans and payments electronically, as is done with other utilities.
Since 2009, Peco has received 6,105 solar-installation applications and approved 5,759, including 201 that required some modifications, Armstrong said. Only 6 percent were rejected, mostly because of system constraints.
Climate activists, solar-industry advocates, and customer demand are putting mounting pressure on Peco and other utilities to accelerate renewable-energy development.
Residential solar installations increased 16 percent this year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. SolarCity, the Tesla Motors subsidiary, says it is ramping up local operations and now employs 400 people in Pennsylvania.
Peco’s challenges tie into broader issues facing an industry historically designed to transmit power one-way, from central generation plants to customers. Increasingly, the grid is being asked to accommodate a scattered network of “distributed resources,” such as renewable power, small cogeneration systems, and battery-storage equipment.
“If we’re going to do a two-way system, with more generation on a particular feeder, then we have to think about new ways of managing the generation or new ways to protect and operate the distribution system,” said Tom Key, senior technical executive with the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry nonprofit that is exploring the challenges.
While regional grid operators such as PJM Interconnection orchestrate the shifting power flows on major transmission lines, it falls to utilities such as Peco to manage local circuits, where power is fed from substations to a series of customers.
Most of the obstacles Peco has encountered with solar customers occur on the utility’s 4,000-volt distribution circuits, an older design that can feed power to fewer customers over shorter distances than newer 13,000-volt circuits can. About a quarter of Peco’s customers are served by the 4,000-volt lines, said Michael Pietrafitta, the utility’s director of regional electric operations.
Solar customers, who sell their excess power back into the grid, are more likely to cause the circuit’s voltage to exceed legal limits if they are located near a substation. Too much voltage creates havoc with some appliances and gets Peco in hot water with regulators.
Solutions can be as simple as replacing the wire connecting a house to the utility’s system or downsizing the solar installation to produce less power. Other fixes involve replacing transformers or capacitors on the utility’s system. Under a PUC rule, the utility charges the customer who benefits from the equipment.
