Some headway was made Tuesday in settling long-running disputes between solar developers and Xcel Energy, a quarrel that has helped delay the rollout of one of the nation's most ambitious solar garden projects.
Between regulators' decisions made Tuesday and a recent Xcel policy change, a critical technical issue that has threatened the viability of some solar gardens appears to be partly resolved. "There's been incremental progress," said David Amster-Olszewski, CEO of SunShare Energy, one of the largest solar garden developers in Minnesota.
Community solar gardens are developed and operated by independent companies like Denver-based SunShare, which must connect into Xcel Energy's grid. A solar garden's customers are thus able to get solar power without the expense of building and operating their own rooftop systems.
Xcel was inundated with about 1,000 solar garden applications starting in late 2014 — causing delays. Numerous disputes between developers and Xcel have caused more delays, and so far only four small solar gardens are actually up and running. Those four together generate less than 1 megawatt — or a million watts — of power.
Projects totaling several hundred megawatts — at no more than 5 megawatts per site — are waiting to be built.
Xcel said in early July that it was "more than realistic" that 200 megawatts of solar garden power would be online by 2016's end. But with September more than half over, "there's no way that's going to happen," Amster-Olszewski said Tuesday.
In August 2015, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission, which has limited staff, created a process to hire independent engineers to review complaints from solar garden developers. The first independent engineer's report came out in April, blasting Xcel's cost estimates and engineering standards for SunShare's proposed solar garden near Becker, Minn.
Since then, about a dozen more independent engineers' reports have been filed for other projects. Tuesday marked the first time the PUC directly took up some of the reports.