By Jigar Shah, founder of SunEdison and former CEO, Carbon War Room
In looking at the cost/benefit of net metering, it is complicated. But we do need to consider the full array of costs and benefits to the retail customer and the utility.
Net metering was really created as a compromise to utility companies to account for energy sent back to the grid.... It was never considered a subsidy as the utilities are claiming now.
The reason we have this compromise of net metering is that utilities have antiquated billing systems. In fact much of their bill systems are programmed with Cobol-based software ... and then augmented with hand tabulations.
