Ever since the inception of its highly successful $3.3 billion solar subsidy program, California has been continually touted by solar power enthusiasts—ourselves included—as the model state for renewable energy adoption in the United States. As the LA Times reports this week, however, not everything is coming up roses in solar country. Due to the overwhelming success of the program, the state utilities are toeing the legal limit for the amount of electricity they can buy back from customers. Parts of northern and central California served by Pacific Gas & Electric Co. may hit the limit by the end of this year, whereas the areas served by Southern California Edison Co. and San Diego Gas & Electric Co. are in less danger of doing so. What’s a supporter of clean energy to do?

Enter Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley), whose bill AB 560, which proposes to raise the net metering cap from 2.5% to a whopping 10%, passed the California State Assembly in May and awaits a crucial Senate utilities committee vote this week. Present California law restricts utilities from buying back from customers more than 2.5% of a utility’s maximum generating capacity, a cap which some would prefer to see gone altogether. Not surprisingly, PG&E, Edison and SDG&E all oppose the bill—although perhaps not as violently as one might expect, given what they might lose.

All three companies oppose Skinner’s bill. They do not want lawmakers to raise the limit until next year at the earliest, after the California Public Utilities Commission tallies up the program’s costs and benefits.

Utilities say they strongly support solar power but want more information about whether it’s fair to further increase financial incentives for solar-panel ownership.

Such incentives, they point out, would come at the expense of most of the utilities’ other customers, who don’t want or can’t afford to invest in the costly panels.

Other complaints extended beyond the net-metering to the solar subsidy program overall, which a report from the Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee lodged against California’s solar incentives program. It noted that solar power users receive a state subsidy of roughly 20% of the purchase and installation cost, as well as a federal income tax credit of 30%, and suggested that adding more incentives could be going “too far,” citing the disparity between the benefits solar power users receive and regular ratepayers receive. Some supporters of the program, however, chose to focus more on solar energy’s potential as a consumption-mitigation tool.

Caps are an impediment to fully developing solar power’s potential and its ability to provide clean energy that can be tapped in urban areas, where it is most needed, during peak demand on hot summer afternoons, [Adam Browning, executive director of the Vote Solar initiative,] said. Eighteen states allow net metering without any caps, he noted.

Ultimately, though, it’s often the hard numbers that speak the loudest. The LA Times article opens with the anecdote of a woman who, after installing 20 solar panels on her roof, found herself with an electric bill of $1.26 this past June. You can’t even buy an In-N-Out hamburger for $1.26. Furthermore:

Legislation, approved in 2007 and known as the Million Solar Roofs program, has spurred the production of solar-generated electricity to rise 78%. That’s equivalent to the power generated by a modern power plant, the Public Utilities Commission reported last week.

I doubt that the overwhelming popularity of California’s solar subsidy, and the roadblocks that have arisen from it, will sound the death knell of the state’s solar industry. It has far more longevity than that. Former solar poster children—Spain, Germany—have survived, retooled their programs and carried on promoting the adoption of solar energy. But what’s at stake aren’t just some extra dollars we could be saving on an electric bill—it’s a model of solar power adoption in America. Do the utility companies’ arguments seem valid? What possible solutions are there, and have they been tried before elsewhere? We welcome any thoughts, comments, questions—let’s make this an ongoing discussion as the events unfold.