Sometimes a letter has factual errors and bogus numbers so outrageous they must be rebutted (letter from Rep. Jeffrey Pierce, House District 53 (“Bill Would Have Driven Energy Costs Higher,” The Times Record, April 13). These political misstatements pertain to LD 1444, this year’s “solar bill,” aptly titled “An Act to Prohibit Gross Metering.” Rep. Pierce voted to sustain Gov. Paul LePage’s veto of this bill, after voting twice to pass it.

Rep. Pierce writes that solar customers “sell their excess power back to the grid” for 16 cents per kilowatt-hour. Horsefeathers! No solar owner has ever sold anything back to the grid, for any compensation.

Under what is known as net metering, solar owners can use the grid like a storage battery, temporarily storing electricity they make themselves on the grid. No money changes hands and there is no bill credit. Solar owners can take this power back when they need it at no additional charge. If they can’t use it, they give it away to others with no compensation. And like all electricity customers, solar owners pay a fixed fee every month for being connected to the grid.

Net metering is a simple, mild incentive that has been around for over 20 years to encourage installation of small solar projects. This is an important goal. Undoubtedly, there are better incentives that could be employed, using the technology of smart meters.

At the urging of Gov. LePage and CMP, however, the Maine Public Utilities Commission has passed a new rule that will phase out net metering, without a replacement. The commission has even stated it is not interested in studying the benefits and costs of solar energy to everyone, to find a superior alternative to net metering.

When electricity is generated from the sun on a rooftop installation, all this power flows directly to the owner’s electrical service. Some is used simultaneously to run the owner’s electrical equipment (heat pumps, clothes drier, computer, etc.), and some flows onto the grid for storage. Under gross metering, CMP will be able to able to measure and charge the solar owner for all this power, including the portion (perhaps half) that the solar owner uses immediately, without ever putting it on the grid. This is part of the new public utilities commission rule.

Implementing the gross meeting aspect of this rule will be costly. It will intrude into the private decisions of solar owners. It will require installation of additional meters and more complex billing systems. Non-solar customers will pay these new costs, so CMP can bill solar customers for electricity CMP never handles and presently doesn’t even know about.

LD 1444 would have prevented this absurd outcome, which is costly and unfair to everyone. But now we will get it, courtesy of Gov. LePage, CMP, the commission and the House’s failure to override the governor’s veto of LD 1444.