Indiana’s net metering rules became effective in March 2005 and established a minimum standard for the net metering offering required of utilities. It also set out the program participation requirements for eligible customers and utilities.
At the direction of the Indiana General Assembly, the Commission revised its rules in 2011 and raised the minimum standard offering by expanding the eligibility to more facilities and to all customer classes. At a minimum, as defined in 170 IAC 4‐4.2, a net metering customer is a customer in good standing who owns and operates an eligible net metering energy resource (1) on their premises with a nameplate capacity (2) of less than or equal to 1 MW. This capacity must be used primarily to offset all or part of the customer’s annual electricity requirements.
Senate Enrolled Act 309 of 2017 directed the Commission to revise its rules to increase the availability of net metering to an aggregate amount of nameplate capacity of 1.5% of a utility’s summer peak load (3, 4). Further, of this amount of available capacity 40% is to be reserved for residential customers and 15% for organic waste biomass facilities (5) . After these capacity reservations, an amount equivalent to 0.675% of summer peak load is available for non‐ biomass commercial, industrial, and school customers (6).
In light of increasing net metering participation the Commission held an Informational Collaborative meeting with stakeholders which led to the approval of General Administrative Order 2019‐2 (7) . One directive from that Order called for investor‐owned utilities (IOUs) to provide quarterly updates on their net metering participation.
This report summarizes the net metering quarterly reports filed by each of the IOUs to reflect the participation as of September 30, 2019.
(1) Eligible net metering energy resources include wind, solar, hydro, fuel cells, hydrogen, organic waste biomass and dedicated crops powered generation [170 IAC 4‐4.2‐1(d) and IC 8‐1‐37‐4(a)(1)‐(8)].
(2) Nameplate capacity is the full‐load continuous rating of a generator as designated by the manufacturer.
(3) IC 8‐1‐40‐10 and IC 8‐1‐40‐12(a)(1).
(4) The previous Commission rules required availability to an aggregate amount of nameplate capacity of 1% of a utility’s summer peak load.
(5) IC 8‐1‐40‐12(a)(2).
(6) In this report we refer to this available capacity as the Non‐reserved Nameplate Capacity.
(7) The Informational Collaborative Meeting was held on April 10, 2019, and GAO 2019‐2 was adopted on August 29, 2019.
