#126 1979 · Steven Strong / Solar Design Associates · Renewable energy / utility policywrong-door
Net metering wasn't invented by a utility building new infrastructure — it was a 28-year-old noticing a dial already spun both ways
the problem
A new capability (crediting homeowners for solar power sent back to the grid) looks like it requires new metering infrastructure and new utility policy before anyone can use it — a chicken-and-egg problem where nobody builds the infrastructure until the policy exists, and no policy gets written until someone demonstrates the capability
background
In 1979, no utility offered a mechanism to credit homeowners for solar electricity flowing back into the grid, and no regulatory framework existed to define how that credit should even work — building solar generation into a home or building appeared to require waiting for utilities to develop new metering technology and new tariff policy before the economics of solar could make sense to anyone.
Steven Strong, a 28-year-old architect running Solar Design Associates, didn't wait for either. Standard analog electricity meters of the era measured consumption using a physically spinning dial — and that dial, being a purely mechanical device, spun the opposite direction whenever current flowed the opposite way, a property nobody had built the meter to prevent because no one had needed to send power backward into a residential circuit before. Wiring solar panels on his two 1979 projects — the Carlisle House and the Granite Place apartment complex — directly into the existing meter caused it to spin backward whenever the panels generated more power than the building used, without asking utility permission first.
the move
Rather than campaign for new metering infrastructure or wait for regulatory policy to be written, Strong exploited an existing mechanical property of equipment already installed on every home — the meter's dial had no directional lock, so it simply recorded net flow in either direction by design, whether or not anyone had intended that use.
the payoff
Massachusetts regulators, confronted with a live, functioning system rather than a proposal, formally recognized a net-metering policy following Strong's installations, and other U.S. states followed with their own net-metering frameworks in the years after — a policy now standard across most U.S. states and many countries, underpinning the basic economics of residential solar adoption worldwide.
what came after
Steven Strong is widely credited in renewable-energy history as the originator of net metering, and the story of the backward-spinning analog meter is a standard reference point in solar-industry and energy-policy literature for how a foundational piece of clean-energy regulation originated from exploiting an existing device's incidental mechanical behavior rather than from top-down policy design.
references
- [1]CleanTechnica — Net Metering History & Logic - Part 1CleanTechnica, 2015cleantechnica.com
- [2]CNBC — Solar Pioneer Has His Moments In The SunCNBC, 2008cnbc.com