After regulators ruled that Pepco violated D.C. law in its implementation of community solar in the city, the utility company is telling solar owners they will need to manually track solar generation, entering thousands of lines of data each month, and potentially costing thousands of dollars.

Community solar is a way that renters and residents in multi-unit buildings can reap the benefits of solar energy, without having to install panels themselves. Subscribing to a solar facility should mean big savings on your energy bills.

But in D.C., those savings could be wiped out — with community solar facilities potentially spending more money on updating spreadsheets than they’re saving on electric bills.

It’s the latest in an ongoing spat over Pepco’s handling of community solar in the District. The D.C. Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities in the city, ruled earlier this year that Pepco had violated the law in its implementation of community solar, undercounting solar energy generation and failing to provide solar credits in an accurate and timely fashion.

Pepco’s proposed solution will only make matters worse, according to solar subscribers, advocates, and D.C. officials, making solar owners pay for Pepco’s mistake.

“It’s taken us hours of meetings, time gathering information, and speaking to professionals that can guide us, tracking people down, getting bids,” says Nathalie Lawrence, manager of a 110 unit co-op building in Lanier Heights. A few years ago, residents voted to put solar panels on the roof of the building, the Ontario. It operates as a community renewable energy facility, or CREF, and residents can choose to subscribe.

At issue are generation meters that Pepco installed at community solar facilities throughout the District. According to the Public Service Commission, those meters were illegally installed — under D.C. law, Pepco must rely on meters owned by the solar facilities.

The commission ordered Pepco to remove its meters, and to reimburse ratepayers for the money the company spent installing them. This ruling came in response to a formal complaint by the D.C. Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the People’s Counsel. The complaint alleged a “pattern of systemic violations” in Pepco’s handling of community solar in the District. In the complaint, solar owners said Pepco’s meters sometimes showed zero electricity generated in a month, while the CREF owners’ meters recorded continued generation.

Community solar owners already have their own meters, but for a variety of reasons Pepco says those meters cannot be automatically integrated into the company’s network. One concern, Pepco says, is the possibility that hackers could find their way into unsecured CREF meter software.

So, as Pepco begins removing its meters, the utility company wants solar owners to manually compile generation data in 15-minute intervals using spreadsheets, and email the data to Pepco. It might sound simple enough, but it would be a massive and menial job, requiring roughly 2,880 data entries per month per solar facility.

Lawrence says she looked into hiring someone to do this, and was quoted a cost of $5,000 for six months. According to Pepco, this interim spreadsheet situation would last for between 16 and 20 months, while the company works on a permanent automated solution. In other words, it would be until late 2024, at the earliest, totaling some 46,000 manual data entries per solar facility.

“It’s going to eat into all of our savings and it’s going to cost us more than what we’re generating,” Lawrence says.

“We don’t know what to do,” Lawrence adds. “I am a general manager of a cooperative, not a solar-electrical-generation-allocation-report person — I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

There are more than 6,000 community solar subscribers in the District. The majority sign up through the city’s Solar for All program, which enrolls low-income residents for free. People who sign up can expect to cut their electric bills in half.

The National Housing Trust owns 17 solar facilities that generate power for the Solar for All program. Gino Capp, who manages solar facilities for the affordable housing nonprofit, says he’s not sure how much it will cost to get generation data to Pepco.

“We have tight budgets and tight revenues. Now you’re throwing on potentially a cost that you can’t tell me how much it’s gonna be?” Capp says. “I don’t know if this is going to be something that completely eats away at my revenue, that instead of making money this year, all of our systems that we have are going to be in the negative.”

Capp says only one of his 17 facilities is currently set up to record generation every 15 minutes — at the other facilities, he will likely have to pay to upgrade meter software, at a cost of $1,000 to $5,000 a year per facility.

In a filing with the Public Service Commission, the OAG and OPC say Pepco’s spreadsheet plan is “unquestionably burdensome,” and also illegal. Under D.C. law, it’s Pepco’s responsibility to read community solar meters.

“In essence, Pepco is asking the commission to remedy one illegal metering arrangement by imposing on CREF owners another illegal metering arrangement,” the government filing reads.

The filing also warns that the manual spreadsheet method could be error-prone. After all, earlier problems Pepco had with accurately allocating community solar credits were due to the company’s reliance on manual data entry using Excel spreadsheets. In February 2020, Pepco’s spreadsheets became overwhelmed with data, the company admitted in a filing, and stopped calculating solar credits.

“Why Pepco would propose to resurrect this disastrous practice, which gave rise to this litigation in the first place, is beyond comprehension,” the incredulous OAG and OPC filing reads.

Indeed, it’s a lot of data to wrangle manually in Excel: there are 371 community solar facilities in D.C. If each one is adding a row of data every 15 minutes, that adds up to more than 1 million rows each month.

In a statement to DCist, a Pepco spokesperson defended its interim metering plan. “We are reviewing multiple paths forward, including a long-term, automated process to collect the data from CREF meters. However, an interim process will be required as the automated option is determined and set up,” the Pepco statement reads.

Pepco lays blame on the Public Service Commission for requiring the meters to be removed quickly, and on CREF owners, for not having meters that are easily readable.

“As we have been working through the meter removal process, we have encountered a variety of challenges, including CREF meters that do not have a display to allow for meter reading or do not otherwise comply with the law, as well as concerns regarding cybersecurity of other platforms currently used by CREFs. Our proposed interim solution addresses the PSC’s directive to remove our meters expeditiously without an existing process to gather generation data, all while navigating through these challenges,” the statement says.

At this point, solar advocates and owners are waiting for the Public Service Commission to again weigh in, hoping the regulators will reject Pepco’s interim spreadsheet plan. OAG and OPC have proposed an interim plan that would involve attaching cellular data packs to CREF meters and automatically transmitting generation data that way. They also recommend pausing Pepco’s removal of its meters until mid-November, so the company can get the cell data packs up and running.

The nonprofit Solar United Neighbors also supports a pause on meter removal, says Liz Veazey, the group’s policy director.

“I almost hate to say that, because I feel like Pepco wanted to make it really hard and complicated and wanted us to say like, ‘Oh, wait, don’t take out the meters,'” Veazey says.

“We’re saying, ‘Wait, don’t take out the meters, but also expedite an automated, streamlined solution as soon as possible,'” Veazey says. And, she adds, Pepco should be on the hook for paying for that solution, “because they messed up.”

Some worry that the public perception that community solar doesn’t work or is a hassle could be just as harmful as any missing solar credits.

“I think in the short term, it’s going to turn a lot of people off from this and they’re going to think, ‘Well, why would I sign up for this program if there’s no benefit,'” says Gino Capp, with the National Housing Trust.

Nathalie Lawrence, the co-op manager at the Ontario, says she thinks more people would subscribe to the building’s community solar facility if they believed they’d get accurate credits.

“That’s part of the reason why some people aren’t signing up,” Lawrence says. “We have to trust Pepco.”

Currently, only about half of residents are signed up, Lawrence says.

Stephanie Johnson, executive director of the Chesapeake Solar and Storage Association, an industry group, says what happens in this case could reverberate around the country. After all, D.C. was an early adopter of community solar, and its Solar for All program, adopted in 2016, was one of the first of its kind in the nation.

“We’ve been nervous that if the Public Service Commission didn’t institute some kind of rules or consequences for Pepco stymieing this process that we’d see that spread in other markets,” Johnson says.