Ameren Missouri says it soon will pay out all the solar rebates it's required to pay, under a stipulated agreement reached last November with the Public Service Commission and other parties.
And this week, the PSC voted 5-0 to approve Ameren's 60-day notice that it will stop making rebate payments when it reaches a total of $91.9 million in those payments.
"The PSC order is consistent with the stipulation and agreement we entered into last fall," Warren Wood, Ameren Missouri's vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs, said Thursday. "It does not represent any change in our $91.9 million dollar-rebate commitment.
"And the important point is, we will still pay rebates to all customers to whom we have made rebate commitments."
That means people who have been promised rebates will get them, he said.
But an Ameren customer who installs a solar energy collector now, then asks for a payment, likely won't get one.
"You're probably beyond the deadline of the $91.9 million," Wood said. "There's a queue of people waiting to have access to that money.
"We've received more applications than the money available under that program."
The rebates are required by a state law called the "Renewable Energy Standard" that nearly two-thirds of Missouri's voters approved in November 2008.
The law was placed on the ballot through an initiative petition campaign, with its backers arguing that passing the law would help reduce Missourians' dependence on fossil fuels, and increase the use of "renewable" energy resources such as sunlight, water and wind.
Among its provisions, investor-owned utility companies - like Ameren Missouri and Kansas City Power and Light - were required to generate at least 15 percent of their power using renewable resources by 2021, and to offer a $2-per-watt rebate to customers who install devices that use sunlight to generate electricity.
The law's backers originally envisioned the rebates as an ongoing program, limited only to 1 percent of a utility's revenues each year. But last year, the Legislature changed that provision so that payments gradually are reduced to zero, starting with $1.50/watt this year.
"One of the things all the parties wanted to do was, instead of going stop-and-start, stop-and-start over a period of years, what's the amount of money that we can pull forward several years into one pool of funds?" Wood explained, "and when it's done, it's done."
The 2013 law became a basis for the PSC changing some of its rules, and led to last November's "non-unanimous" stipulation agreement.
The stipulated agreement allowed Missouri's four investor-owned utilities - Ameren Missouri, Kansas City Power and Light, KCPL General Missouri Operations and the Empire District Electric Co. - to use a 10-year planning estimate for setting rebate limits.
But two groups that backed the 2008 law - Save Our Lawfully Authorized Rebates (or SOLAR), and the Missouri Coalition for the Environment - filed a 19-page lawsuit in Cole County circuit court on June 23 against the PSC, arguing it didn't have the legal authority to change its rule-making regulations in a way that allows the utilities to set limits on their rebate programs instead of using the 1 percent limit set by the voter-approved law.
Because those calculations used "hypothetical and speculative 10-year projections and forecasts," the lawsuit said, the resulting numbers were "based on this flawed analysis."
The case was assigned to Judge Dan Green, who has scheduled a hearing next Tuesday.
Although Ameren Missouri is an intervenor in the case, Wood said Thursday he couldn't comment on the legal battle.