Since 2011, SPS has been charging Eastern New Mexico families who invest in solar a hefty monthly fee — averaging $28 a month — that no one else pays, and that solar ratepayers must pay no matter how little energy they use.
SPS knows solar energy is cheap and affordable and is using this tactic increasingly attempted by utilities nationwide to kill competition from rooftop solar.
Rate 59, as SPS has discreetly named this solar penalty, is the reason there are only 110 solar customers in all of SPS’s territory — out of more than 7,000 in New Mexico who have turned to solar to take control of their energy bills and help protect their children from climate disaster.
SPS wants to raise Rate 59, but a PRC hearing examiner found that the utility’s justification for the fee was “riddled with errors” and not allowed by law.
Unfortunately, when the hearing examiner presented her findings to the commission on Aug. 8, several commissioners expressed the mistaken impression that customers with solar rooftops are subsidized by other ratepayers. In fact, almost every independent study done by other states has found the opposite is true.
Please choose your commissioner below and urge them to accept the hearing examiner’s recommendation that found, after hearing weeks of evidence, that “Rate 59,” SPS’s solar penalty, is unjustified and not legal.
Send a message to Commissioner Sandy Jones (Southern New Mexico)
Send a message to Commissioner Cynthia Hall (Albuquerque)
Send a message to Commissioner Patrick Lyons (Eastern New Mexico)
Send a message to Commissioner Valerie Espinoza (Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico)
Send a message to Comissioner Lynda Lovejoy (Northwestern and central New Mexico)
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