On April 3, Energy Trust implemented a size cap on eligible solar projects for business customers to ensure we can support as many projects as possible with a limited budget. Projects larger than 250 kilowatts for Portland General Electric customers and projects larger than 100 kilowatts for Pacific Power customers are no longer eligible for Energy Trust incentives.

Energy Trust has set project incentive caps in the past, but any net-metered projects (up to 2 megawatts) were eligible to apply. Since January 2017, Energy Trust received a larger volume of solar projects and at greater capacity than expected. This is the largest volume of solar projects we’ve received since the Business Energy Tax Credit, which expired in 2014. To manage the limited budget and support as many projects as possible with such high demand, we had to reduce incentives more frequently and more aggressively over the past several months. By April, we found it necessary to implement project size caps to avoid exceeding the annual budget.

The majority of incentive applications Energy Trust receives are under the new size cap for solar projects. These changes were made to ensure that Energy Trust is able to continue to support the greatest number of commercial solar projects with the remaining funds.

For information on the current tier and incentive rate visit the solar electric incentive status report. For more information on this change, contact Jeni Hall.