Staff writer
City administrator Larry Paine led a discussion on Tuesday with Hillsboro City Council, minus David Loewen, about instillation of photo voltaic solar systems.
In the council’s agenda packet, Paine said that Hillsboro electric and sewer supervisor Mike Duerksen had received a phone call during the past week from a solar panel company asking what the city’s policies were with solar instillation.
Paine said the two main aspects that needed to be addressed were the safety of how the system attaches to the distribution system, and how to deal with the pricing of solar use.
Kansas Municipal Utilities had sent a copy of Garden City’s policies over to Paine to review.
“When you’re in college, you don’t use someone else’s material, but when you get out, plagiarism is good,” Paine said, “so what I did was I borrowed Garden City’s policy and changed a few things.”
Paine explained the difference between parallel generation rate riders and net metering.
“Parallel generation is actually instillation of refillable tank solar unit or a wind unit or some other thing that’s generating electricity behind the meter,” Paine said. “The net meter part of it is the process in which we would evaluate how much energy is being generated on the customer side versus what we have to provide on the utility side.”
Paine will present the policy again in November for approval. Once it is approved, building inspectors and electric crews will have guidelines to govern the installation of photo voltaic solar systems.