Column: How I learned to stop worrying and love rooftop solar

As global leaders celebrated a hard-fought agreement to triple the world’s renewable energy production and transition away from fossil fuels, an attorney for the state of California was in a San Francisco courtroom Wednesday, defending a decision by appointees of Gov. I don’t buy the argument made by some rooftop solar advocates that those net metering critics — and academic researchers who have reached similar conclusions — are utility-industry shills. Wednesday’s hearing honed in on a 2013 law ordering the Public Utilities Commission to revise the net metering program “based on the costs and benefits” of rooftop solar. The law says the program’s “total benefits” should roughly equal its “total costs.” Attorneys for the organizations that sued the commission — the Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Working Group and Protect Our Communities Foundation — told the three-judge panel that Newsom’s appointees violated the law by failing to consider several “societal benefits” of solar, beyond electric-bill savings for households with rooftop panels. “I mean, if benefits means benefits, and costs mean costs, then I think we’d want the benefits to exceed the costs by as large a margin as possible.” Even if the Public Utilities Commission was unfair to rooftop solar, should it be up to the court to say so?