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For the week of May 27th 2015 this is the Energy Gang from Green Tech Media.

I'm Stephen Lacy in Washington DC. I'm a senior editor with Green Tech Media. Welcome

all. This week the gang is off. We are all traveling. So in place of the regular podcast we've got some

supplemental content for you. In this episode we feature a debate from our solar

summit in Phoenix, Arizona last month. The motion should regulated utilities

be allowed to own and rate-based residential solar.

It is a very controversial issue, and that's the reason why we tried to grapple with it.

Shale Khan, our senior VP of GTM research, the periodic co-host on this show, took the stage with me to hash out the issue.

Enjoy the debate. So as Tom mentioned in the last session, many utilities are already invested in distributed

generation through their unregulated arms.

We're saying should the utilities who are regulated monopolies in their own territories

be allowed to own and rate-based residential solar.

And as you can see in one of the slides that I presented earlier, we've seen very little

of this historically in the US.

We've seen a little bit more on the commercial side.

And the residential side, it's become a hot button issue largely because of Arizona, where we are here, where both APS and TEP, two utilities here have proposed and ultimately had approved scaled back programs to do exactly that,

own and rate base residential solar and earned the regulated rate of return.

So it's happened just a couple of times so far, but we expect to see more utilities proposing it.

...