Dive Brief:
- Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, the largest U.S. rooftop solar installer (with about 100,000 systems installed, according to the Guardian's estimate), believes policy offensives from electric utilities are the greatest challenge his company faces today.
- "When you create a disruptive technology, and a disruptive solution to competitors providing a similar service, they're just not going to sit there and say it's OK," Rive told the Guardian. "You have a monopoly industry that hasn't had competition for 100 years. Their first reaction is not to compete, but to try to lobby to neutralize the competition."
- Rive argues that utilities benefit from subsidies like cheap water for electricity generation. "It's a subsidy that's been around for so long they think it's an entitlement," he said. "I am absolutely in favor of a level playing field. But let's make it a level playing field."
Dive Insight:
Expect policy battles over net metering and solar fees to come to a head in 2014, particularly in California, Colorado and Arizona.
But smart utilities aren't waiting for regulators to take action on distributed generation. Instead, they are investing in what may be their biggest threat (and opportunity). In fact, utility Pacific Gas & Electric is a SolarCity investor, while Google, Goldman Sachs and others have forked over more than $2 billion to the fast-growing installer.
There were only 300,000 rooftop solar systems in the U.S. at the end of 2012, but SolarCity alone plans to have 1 million customers by 2018. "Solar is a market that can really scale," Rive said.