Environment New York – “Households and businesses with solar panels deliver greater benefits than they receive through programs like net metering, a report said today, countering increasing complaints from utilities that solar homeowners don’t pay their fair share. “While some utilities claim they’re subsidizing solar panel owners, our report shows the opposite is probably true,” said Heather Leibowitz, Director of Environment New York.  “If anything, utilities should be paying people who go solar more, not less.” The Environment New York Research & Policy Center report, Shining Rewards: The Value of Rooftop Solar Power for Consumers and Society, is released just days after Governor Andrew Cuomo announced an ambitious plan to curb New York State’s carbon emissions by 40 percent by doubling the amount of power it gets from renewable energy to 50 percent by 2030. Net metering programs credit solar panel owners at a fixed rate — often the retail price of electricity — for providing excess power to the grid, similar to rollover minutes on a cell phone plan. The arrangements have helped solar energy skyrocket across the country, but in recent years utilities have increasingly attacked them as unjustified “subsidies.” Today’s report tells a different story. Of the 11 net metering studies reviewed, eight found that the value of solar energy was higher than the average local residential retail electricity rate. The median value of solar power across all 11 studies was nearly 17 cents per unit, compared to the nation’s average retail electricity rate of about 12 cents.”