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OCEAN CITY — Those guiding Maryland’s energy policies said Friday that expanding the use of solar power for the multistate electrical grid amid a shift from fossil fuels will be among their focuses next legislative session.
Further regulating the solar energy industry, including determining who can install panels and where they can install them, was part of a broad conversation about the future of state energy policy at the Maryland Association of Counties summer conference in Ocean City.
“We’re going to have major bills on the solar industry and (renewable portfolio standards) reform in this next session,” Sen. Brian Feldman, a Montgomery County Democrat and chair of his chamber’s Education, Energy and the Environment Committee.
House Economic Matters Committee Chair C.T. Wilson, a Charles County Democrat, said he will push to regulate companies and individuals who install solar panels, ensuring that they’ve been vetted and are certified.
Residential solar will take a great deal of demand off of the energy grid, but Wilson, like others on the panel, said he doesn’t have solar panels on his home.
“It’s not that I don’t believe in the solar,” Wilson said. “I don’t trust someone to stand on my roof — and my investment — and possibly destroy it.”
Wilson also plans to bring back a bill that he says will make it easier for people to put solar panels on their land, including farmers who may want to produce electrons instead of harvesting crops.
“It’s very frustrating, because some people, they get they just don’t agree with this type of technology,” Wilson said. “The problem is we need to move forward as a state.”
Before Friday’s panel, Michael Sanderson, MACo’s executive director, said the energy policy discussion was sure to be the “sleeper issue” of the conference.
Maryland Public Service Commissioner Kumar Barve, formerly a longtime Democratic delegate representing Montgomery County, joined Feldman and Wilson for a discussion that also included plans for and obstacles to adding data centers, increasing wind energy production and the role that nuclear power might play in expanding energy production.
While Congress has in recent years approved large sums for state governments to implement clean energy projects, including hundreds of millions of dollars in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, it’s been up to state legislatures to determine what policies to pursue.
“I appreciate that the money flows to us, but when it comes to how we’re going to deploy and make policy, that’s happening at the state-capital level,” Feldman said.
Feldman said there’s been a growing tension between the state’s climate goals and transition away from fossil fuels toward renewable energy and the capacity of the regional electric grid to handle the shift.
Advocates have raised concerns about added costs for ratepayers and businesses. While the state is moving toward electrifying homes, buildings, and vehicles and incentivizing the construction of data centers, all of which is sure to strain the grid, it is also contributing to a process that’s prompting coal-fired power plants to close, including the Brandon Shores power station in the Curtis Bay Industrial Area of Anne Arundel County.
“This issue of not enough generation, a lot of demand, is playing out in a lot of different ways,” Feldman said.
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Publish date : 2024-08-15 13:00:00
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