The Arizona Corporation Commission approved a nominal grid access fee for rooftop solar customers. The charge is a few dollars each month – but utility APS said it wanted the charge to be as high as $88 per month.
The Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) voted to approve the Grid Access Charge (GAC) requested by electric utility Arizona Public Service (APS). The charge is a monthly fee applied to rooftop solar customers, ranging from $2 to $3 per month, with the ability to be increased in future rate cases.
“Residential solar customers rely on APS’ power grid to provide electricity when their systems are not producing, similar to relying on the power grid as a battery source of energy,” said administrative law Judge Belinda Martin. “It’s important to note that nearly 73,000 APS residential solar customers who are grandfathered under net metering are not subject to the GAC, therefore about 111,000 APS residential solar customers are paying the GAC.”
Martin said the GAC helps recover the costs of maintaining the range of services and equipment that helps ensure safe and reliable electricity service.
The charge was justified based on an argument that rooftop solar customers create a cost shift on non-solar customers, making electricity service more expensive for those who have not installed solar panels on their roof.
The “cost shift argument,” has been effective in advancing penalties on the rooftop solar industry across the country, particularly California, where the rooftop solar industry has faced sharp declines. The rooftop solar cost shift has been debunked in numerous analyses, and analysis shows that it may instead provide a net cost benefit to all customers on the grid.
While Arizona’s Grid Access Charge is a few dollars a month, the approval from ACC to apply the charge also came with an order for it to be increased in APS’s 2025 electric rate filing. Autumn Johnson, executive director of Arizona Solar and Storage Association (AriSEIA) said that APS requested a fee as high as $88 per customer per month.
AriSEIA said the rooftop solar customers are already paying APS a rate 15% higher than their non-solar counterparts. It said that APS itself testified that if the Corporation Commission removed solar fees, the cost to non-solar customers would be $0.25 per month per customer. Despite this, the ACC leveraged a fee of several dollars per month and authorized APS to increase it in future rate sessions.
(Read: “Ten reasons why small-scale, non-utility solar is important“)
“AriSEIA demonstrated at the hearing that based on a quantitative analysis of several national expert witnesses, APS had miscalculated the cost of service to solar customers. That miscalculation reflected that solar customers were not paying their fair share, when in fact, the inverse is true. Solar customers pay more than they should and actually subsidize non-solar customers,” AriSEIA said.
“The evidentiary record makes it clear that solar customers are subsidizing non-solar customers and yet APS and the ACC continue to penalize solar customers with unfounded and discriminatory fees,” Johnson said.
