Warren Buffett, billionaire plutocrat exploiter beloved by the financial press because of his aw-shucks manner and folksy aphorisms tried through his subsidiary NV Energy to kill rooftop solar in Nevada. It wasn’t that NV Energy opposed solar, it was that it would hurt their profits, so everyone else could go screw themselves. They lobbied hard and managed to temporarily mostly kill rooftop solar.
Multiple casinos told Buffett to go screw himself, paid exit fees and are now buying renewable energy on the open market. Ginormous data center Switch has done much the same. Mandalay Bay has 28 acres of solar PV panels on their convention center rooftop. And yesterday Nevada Governor Sandoval just signed bills almost completely restoring rooftop solar to what it was before Buffett interfered.
A Nevada rooftop solar industry crippled by regulators’ 2015 decision to change a pricing structure is expected to make a comeback after Sandoval signed three major energy-related bills at a Tesla facility in Las Vegas
AB405, sponsored by Democratic Assembly members Chris Brooks and Justin Watkins, will restore more favorable rates for customers with rooftop solar panels who want to sell excess energy they produce back to the grid. It also enshrines into law consumer protections for people who buy solar systems.
It wouldn’t allow rates quite as generous as the ones that predated the Public Utilities Commission’s 2015 decision, but customers could now get 95 percent of that “retail” electricity rate. The rate would decline periodically in tiers as more Nevadans install rooftop solar.