State Board Ruling Shakes Up Mass. Solar Industry
A legal interpretation by an obscure state board has put solar installation companies in the Bay State on the defensive and has prompted them to look for a legislative remedy.
Earlier this year, the Massachusetts Board of State Examiners of Electricians voted to support an interpretation of existing law that would require that all solar photovoltaic systems in Massachusetts be installed by licensed electricians only.
That interpretation is not sitting well with many in the solar energy industry and specific legislation has been drafted that aims to counter the board’s ruling.
“Part of the difficulty is that we have a very bad, poorly written piece of legislation that defines what is electrical work, and a very aggressive electrical industry that is trying to capitalize on it,” said Steven Weisman, the managing director of the Solar Energy Business Association of New England. In his organization’s view, licensed electricians are “insisting on a monopoly of the installation process.”
Weisman said the new house bill under consideration “is a solution that we proposed that keeps everybody working” and also advocates for a special photovoltaic license that would distinguish between traditional electrical work and solar energy projects.
Even though the state board issued only an interpretation of the law and did not set a formal regulation, the board’s stance on the matter still holds considerable weight.
“Agencies are presumed to have an understanding of the law and regulations that they enforce,” said Steven Sager, an attorney with Westborough-based law firm Sager & Shafer. “Courts will give them the benefit of reasonable interpretations of the law.”
Industry Impact
According to Weisman, the problems of having only licensed electricians do all solar installation work are many. For starters, the cost of installations will go up, he said, because electricians’ rates typically are higher. A solar installation company can choose to absorb those high costs — and potentially eat into their profits — or pass those costs on to their customers.
While costs will increase, installer options for customers will decrease, as will the quality of the work, he claimed. Even public safety could be an issue, he said, since many aspects of solar installations require expertise that a general electrician would not necessarily have.
The impact of the board’s ruling isn’t just on solar installation companies and electricians. Local colleges are having to rework programs that they designed to help fill the local green energy workforce.
For example, Quinsigamond Community College of Worcester offers a solar PV training program intended to educate people about the solar power industry.
Due to the board’s ruling early this year, the school has had to switch its focus away from a general audience interested in solar panel installation and focus instead on the unemployed, licensed electricians.
“If there’s going to be a defined pool of people that are going to be able to do this work, we’ve got to get them trained and we’ve got to get them trained quickly,” said Kathie Manning, director of operations for the training and education center at Quinsigamond. “We have to have people ready to jump in when the market does open up.”
Mary Knittle, a QCC outreach and program development specialist, said interest in the program seems to be waning, which might be a result of the board’s ruling. With only a week before the most recent class, she had less than half of the seats filled.
“I need to get some bodies in the seats or we’ll not be able to run it,” she said. “A more broad-based awareness [of the board’s interpretation] is making people rethink.”
Still, there are those in the industry, like Mark Durrenberger, president of New England Breeze, a solar and wind energy systems installer in Hudson, who don’t foresee the industry being negatively affected by the board’s interpretation.
“For all the complaints that solar installers have had about it, there’s still a lot of solar systems being installed in Massachusetts,” Durrenberger said. “So they’re working around it one way or the other.”
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