CenterPoint delays mean solar panels costing thousands of dollars sit useless on Houston roofs

Matt Clingan wiped his forehead as he looked up at the work he and his crew had done on a muggy Tuesday afternoon. Rows of silver beams had been attached to a home’s roof in Friendswood, and he and his 3-person crew with Sunshine Renewable Solutions were working to affix more. In the next couple of days, 51 photovoltaic solar panels would be installed and ready to produce power. Though the panels will be functional, it could take six months for the homeowner to get approval to use them. “I finished a job May 26, and it was still being inspected two weeks ago,” Clingan said.

Solar companies, homeowners and trade groups say the time involved in getting permits to connect to CenterPoint’s service area has gone from about a month to as long as six months, frustrating homeowners who can see tens of thousands of dollars worth of solar equipment on their roofs but cannot turn it on. There are no established timelines for utilities to process permits for household solar panels in Texas. The Public Utility Commission of Texas has created a task force to develop a trial program that will study integrating virtual power plants — or decentralized, smaller scale power generating units like rooftop solar panels and accompanying battery systems — into the ERCOT market, but it won’t begin until the first quarter of 2023. Katherine Wyszkowski, an interconnection policy advocate with Houston-based Sunnova solar panel distributors, said utilities have no incentive to approve interconnection permits. CenterPoint, for example, collects 4.6 cents per kilowatt hour of power delivered to a house — up one penny from 2020. If a home produces its own power, Wyszkowski said, CenterPoint and other utilities lose out on that surcharge.