San Franciscans don’t often agree on much. But it’s safe to say you won’t get much pushback if you suggest that we should be powering our city with 100% green energy.
What will it take to achieve that vision? More solar panels on our rooftops, of course. But also batteries. Lots of them.
San Francisco needs power when the fog comes out and after the sun sets. Meeting that demand without fossil fuels will be impossible if we don’t start storing our solar energy for off-hours use.
And yet for the past three years in San Francisco, it has been illegal to install a battery storage system over 20-kilowatt hours on a one- or two-family home. For context, that’s not even enough to power a 2013 Nissan Leaf, one of the smallest electric cars on the market.
That’s because in 2019 — without any public debate and without much of anyone outside the solar industry noticing — the city Fire Commission quietly updated the fire code to ban battery systems of this size over unproven safety concerns. This ban would likely have become permanent this week if it weren’t for Jeanine Cotter, CEO of San Francisco solar and battery installation company Luminalt Solar, who provided the only public comment in advance of a vote on the matter, begging commissioners to solicit more public opinion before making such an important decision.
“For the past three years, solar installers have had to stop designing based on the needs of our clients,” Cotter says. “Instead, design and system sizing was driven by the need to be under the city’s threshold.”
San Francisco’s guidelines are far more onerous than those recommended by the California Fire Marshal. And they kneecapped the city’s residential battery market: “Outside of S.F., it’s rare that we would ever deploy a system less than 20-kilowatt hours,” Cotter says.
Thankfully, the San Francisco code change wasn’t a total deal breaker in terms of blocking new solar power. That’s because California’s “net energy metering” program generously rewarded solar owners for sending excess power to the grid during the day, allowing them to use utility-generated power essentially for free at night. Batteries were a nice touch, but they weren’t essential to make a system viable.
Those days, however, are over.
On Thursday, the California Public Utilities Commission adopted new rules governing how residential solar interacts with the state’s power grid. Payments for sending excess power to the system will shrink by roughly 75%. Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar & Storage Association, estimates that this will cut the solar panel market by 40%-50% starting late next year.
All isn’…….