“We have the facade of a renewable energy standard that is not making any meaningful change,” said P.J. Wilson, executive director of Renew Missouri, a not-for-profit that advocates for clean energy in the state.

The lawsuit, filed by the Great Rivers Environmental Law Center, contends that the Joint Commission on Administrative Rules (JCAR)—a group of 10 Missouri legislators that reviews state rules and regulations—removed two important paragraphs in the law, allowing utilities an end run around the new renewable standard. The passage that was eliminated requires the state’s four major investor-owned utilities to invest in renewable power produced either in Missouri or an adjacent state.

“The utilities argue that they should be able to buy credits from anywhere in the country,” said Henry Robertson, the Great Rivers attorney who filed the suit.

That, incidentally, is the objective of model legislation developed this year by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative group that has attempted and failed to repeal renewable energy standards throughout the country.

The problem with that approach, as Robertson sees it, is that it doesn’t foster development in Missouri of solar, wind or biomass energy sources—one of the primary objectives of the state’s renewable standard.

Warren Wood, vice president of regulatory and legislative affairs for the utility company Ameren Missouri, said they have already invested “significantly” in renewable energy. He cited more than 100 megawatts they’re buying from Iowa, as well as a landfill gas power plant now producing electricity near St. Louis.

Renewable power sells for less in other states than it would cost to generate in Missouri, he said, and Ameren owes it to its customers to keep rates as low as possible.

“That’s called prudence,” Wood said. “If we bought (renewable energy) locally, we’d be criticized.”

Proposition C, passed by 66 percent of voters in 2008, requires that the state’s major utilities draw on renewable sources to provide two percent of their power now, five percent in 2014 and at least 15 percent by 2021.

Proposition C was passed with the aim of fostering the development of renewable energy in Missouri, Robertson said. But other than some small-scale rooftop solar projects, he said, “the RES has done nothing.”

The Public Service Commission spent two contentious years developing rules, and then, in 2010, JCAR opted to disapprove of the language requiring renewables to be generated or purchased from Missouri or some place close by.

Robertson claims the commission caved in to pressure from utility companies. Cindy Kadlec, general counsel for the commission, pointed out that people with other viewpoints made them known to the commission.

The lawsuit alleges that the legislative commission’s disapproval of a small part of the regulations was unconstitutional, and that the secretary of state and the Public Service Commission should have insisted on including that section.

“JCAR’s action was not only unconstitutional, it was also an infringement on a state agency’s ability to have its own rules published, as well as an infringement on the people’s right to enact legislation by initiative petition,” said Heather Navarro of Missouri Coalition for the Environment.

Wilson, from Renew Missouri, said he is puzzled as to why Missouri utilities seem so resistant to building a renewable energy industry in Missouri. As with coal and gas-fired plants, the utilities can be compensated for expenses and more.

“If they would build a wind farm, their rate of return would be nine to 12 percent,” Wilson said. “There’s money to be made there.”

IN OTHER NEWS

Also on the renewable energy front, Matt Kasper and Ryan Koronowski recently reported in ThinkProgress about a new report finding that Americans who want to install solar panels on their houses are having to pay less than ever before:

The installed prices for solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems fell by a range of 6 to 14 percent, or $0.30 per watt to $0.90 per watt, from 2011 to 2012 according to the sixth edition of “Tracking the Sun,” an annual PV cost-tracking report published last week by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The report looked at a 208,529-unit sample of residential and commercial solar installations that “represents 72% of all cumulative grid-connected PV capacity installed in the United States through 2012.” The researchers looked at the median installed price of solar panels in three system size groupings. In 2012, this median installed price ranged from $5.3 per watt for small systems, down to $4.6 per watt for systems larger than 100 kilowatts:

Since 1998, installed system prices have been falling thanks to reductions in the costs of solar energy that do not include the panels themselves: inverters, mounting hardware, labor, permitting and fees, customer acquisition, overhead, taxes, and installer profit. Prices have been falling in the short-term because of the decline of the cost of solar panels, which fell by $2.6/W from 2008 through 2012. This represents an 80 percent price drop for PV systems generating less than 10 kW.

The steady drop in costs have helped to enable a steep increase in the pace of installation over the last several years. This graph shows the growth of total installed solar capacity since 1998 (along with the sample). Look at the jump from 2009 to 2012:

However, module prices are established based on supply and demand. “There simply are limits to how much further module prices can fall, and so it stands to reason that continued reductions in PV system prices will need to come primarily from the soft cost side,” co-author Ryan Wiser explained.

The soft costs, or non-hardware prices, can be influenced by local, state, and national policies. Countries like Italy, Australia, and Germany have generally incentivized solar adoption through long-term policies, which have in turn helped to reduce soft costs. In fact, residential PV systems installed last year in Italy, Australia, and Germany are nearly 40 percent lower than in the U.S. The report directly cites the pricing of soft costs for this glaring difference. These costs represent approximately half of the total installed cost of residential solar systems, so having the right policies in place at all levels of government remains the greatest opportunity for cost reductions, which Climate Progress discussed last month.

Even so, the U.S. achieved many significant accomplishments last year, installing a record 3,313 megawatts of PV in 2012. Additionally, the market size for the U.S. industry grew from $8.6 billion in 2011 to $11.5 billion in 2012, according to GTM Research. And in California, PV system prices have decreased by an additional 10 to 15 percent just within the first six months of 2013 — leading the report authors to suggest that PV price reductions in 2013 are on pace to match or exceed recent years. In order to continue the downward price trend over the long term, the U.S. solar market will have to focus on reducing soft costs.