#790 1979 · Steven Strong / Solar Design Associates · Renewable energy / utility policy
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.
what everyone would do
Wait for utilities to build new metering infrastructure and for regulators to write new tariff policy before installing solar — the natural sequencing assumption, since crediting backflow seems to require new technology and new rules. It creates a deadlock instead: utilities won't build new infrastructure until policy justifies it, and regulators won't write policy for a capability nobody has demonstrated, so nothing moves.
what they saw
Strong saw that the infrastructure everyone assumed had to be built already existed — a standard analog meter's spinning dial was a purely mechanical device with no directional lock, so it would record net flow in whichever direction current happened to move, an incidental property nobody had engineered on purpose but that could be used immediately, without asking permission or waiting for anything new to be invented.
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.
why it works
Analog meters measure consumption through a dial that spins in response to current flow, with nothing built in to prevent it spinning the opposite way if current reversed. Wiring solar panels directly into an existing meter made it spin backward whenever the building generated more power than it used, using hardware already installed and already trusted by the utility for billing — no new investment, approval, or invention required to demonstrate it. Confronting regulators with a live, already-functioning system rather than a proposal converted an abstract policy question into a concrete observed fact they had to respond to, and because the demonstration required no upfront spending or risk from the utility, Massachusetts could recognize a policy for something already working rather than approving infrastructure for a capability that didn't exist yet, which is what broke the chicken-and-egg deadlock.
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.
where it breaks
The move only works when the existing infrastructure genuinely has the incidental capability needed — not every 'new capability that seems to require new infrastructure' has an already-deployed system with the right accidental property, and the approach doesn't generalize to cases where truly new hardware is required. It also depends on the unauthorized use going unnoticed or untouched long enough to produce a persuasive working example before drawing objection; a utility or regulator that intervened immediately to shut it down would have prevented the demonstration from ever accumulating the evidence needed to change policy. And it requires the eventual regulatory response to actually be favorable once revealed — demonstrating an unauthorized capability is a bet that visibility leads to legitimization rather than a crackdown, and that bet depends on how threatening the utility perceives the capability to be to its existing business.
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