Solar + storage bill at the Louisiana Legislature will help create resilience hubs & allow people to stay safe in their homes during outages

The Aimee Freeman Solar+ Storage Bill (HB 806) will introduce a program to fund solar with battery storage at the Louisiana Legislature so that people can stay safe in their homes during outages and so that resilience hubs can build these systems to help with rapid response. 

The bill was expected to be heard/debated in the Commerce Committee at the Louisiana Legislature today, May 2nd, but was deferred.

​Important Details About the Freeman Bill:

• Cap annual and total per-project rebate to encourage efficient use of funds.
• Tie rebate to system size rather than % of total cost.
• Systems must be able to “island” and serve customers in event of outage
• Ensure significant carveout for low-income households, including multi-family buildings - 40% or more.
• Enable systems to feed the grid on normal days to improve whole-grid reliability.

A similar bill, the Magee bill (807), has moved along past Commerce Committee to the house floor and is now scheduled for the senate floor on Monday, May 2nd as well. 
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The key differences between the two bills:

• Freeman incentives solar and storage, Magee is storage only. 
• Freeman requires that solar (existing or new) be installed alongside storage. Magee's bill is a storage only rebate that does not require any generation source to be available to recharge it other than the grid.  That means once the battery is drained, it can’t do a thing til the grid comes back up. 
• Also, Magee does not require islanding (functionality when the utility’s grid goes down), Freeman clearly requires microgrid functionality for the battery system. 
• Freeman incentivizes lower cost installations, and Magee incentivizes higher cost installations. HOW: Freeman's rebate is per kWh of storage, and Magee is 30% of total cost. 
• Magee's bill incentivizes any residential customer at any income level. Both bills seem to target predominantly tax-exempt commercial-scale customers, although Magee’s bill has been amended in a way that opens up a larger rebate for for-profit commercial customers. 
• Freeman's bill has more expansive details aimed at resilience, critical facilities, low income and environmental justice
• Freeman's storage rebate is very likely to be more than 30% of the cost of the battery system, so Freeman's bill produces a higher likelihood that battery storage projects will actually get built. Magee's bill leaves 70% of the cost of battery storage projects to be paid for by some other source, and considering there are no new revenue streams (like from the grid) by adding storage, that 70% will be hard to fund. 
• Freeman's bill is $15M per year for 5 years, Magee is $8M total. 
• Freeman has much higher per project caps so projects are more likely to actually get built.

​Read the originally filed bill, which is largely definitions and placeholder, below. Also see the expected amendments that Representative Freeman expects to put forward on Monday which will make the bill a program. 

HB 806

HB 806 Expected Amendments