Defend New Mexico's |
Dear
In April, we asked you to urge the Public Regulation Commission not to weaken the rule that enforces New Mexico's Renewable Energy Act.
Nearly 1,000 of you did. The PRC has likely never seen that many comments on a rulemaking case.
But guess what? They have essentially erased your comments.
The commission did indeed vote to close the case proposing damaging changes to its "Reasonable Cost Threshold" rule, which enforces the state law requiring utilities to provide 15 percent of their electricity from renewables by 2015 and 20 percent by 2020.
But commissioners acknowledged they were doing so because the case was not likely to stand up in court due to the shady way it was initiated. Industry forces, PRC staff and commissioners Ben Hall and Patrick Lyons still wanted those changes, so they simply opened another case proposing the same changes, plus others that could be deadly for solar development in New Mexico.
Utilities don't have to meet legal requirements if adding renewables costs more than the "Reasonable Cost Threshold" set by the PRC. Last December, the PRC made it harder to avoid the requirements through creative accounting — as PNM had been doing by staying at 6 percent renewables into 2012, though the law required 10 percent by 2010.
But when two PRC seats changed hands in January, utilities and large industrial customers jumped at the chance to quietly change this complex rule.
The changes the new PRC is considering now would artificially inflate the cost of renewable energy and eliminate rules requiring a diversified mix of solar, distributed generation (rooftop solar) and other renewable sources. Utilities would likely fill virtually their entire renewable requirement with the cheapest source, wind, with devastating consequences for the solar industry.
Your input is needed again, and again, it could mean the difference between New Mexico's renewable energy doubling within seven years or a moribund solar industry and a series of missed requirements.
Please ask Commissioner Hall not to kill solar and weaken the rule that enforces our state law.
For more information on how these changes affect this arcane rule, click here.
Thank you for protecting the planet,
John Buchser, Rio Grande Chapter chair
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