Delmarva Power Is Not a Solar Developer’s Collection Agency

John Nichols, Fellow, Center of Energy & Environment Policy
Jun 15
9 min read

Updated: Jun 29

Senate Bill 321 would make it one. The record in other states explains why that is a mistake.

Invisible Fees In Delaware Solar Bill - Deep Dive Podcast

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Senate Bill 321, Delaware’s community solar consolidated-billing proposal, would turn Delmarva Power into a collection agency for private solar developers while hiding subscription fees from Delaware customers and shifting financial risk onto those customers, and away from solar developers. At the same time, Delaware lawmakers are advancing House Bill 393, a consumer protection bill aimed at stopping deceptive energy sales tactics. Yet SB 321’s consolidated-billing proposal would allow nearly identical commission-based sales practices for community solar contracts while letting solar developers collect through utility bills on charges the Public Service Commission (PSC) has never reviewed.

Separate from the broader debate over community solar itself, Senate Bill 321’s consolidated-billing proposal raises immediate consumer protection and billing transparency concerns.

Why House Bill 393 Was Introduced

The commission-based sales practices that Senate Bill 321 consolidated-billing proposal would authorize for community solar are the same practices that generated documented consumer harm in Delaware’s third-party electric supply market — the harm that produced House Bill 393. The Public Service Commission and the Division of the Public Advocate received numerous complaints of third-party suppliers enrolling Delaware households in new supply contracts without their knowledge or consent, by impersonating Delmarva Power’s customer service and emergency numbers. The PSC opened formal investigation Docket No. 20-0451 in July 2020, tracing calls to overseas call centers and escalating the matter to the Delaware Department of Justice. In early 2025, customers were unknowingly switched to third-party suppliers and received high bills. Governor Meyer raised concerns directly with PSC Staff. The Commission reopened its supplier regulation docket on April 2, 2025. House Bill 393, the consumer protection bill, followed as lawmakers moved to restrict the same sales practices now being permitted for community solar.

Commission-based door-to-door enrollment of Delaware community solar subscribers is already occurring. Senate Bill 321’s consolidated-billing legislation would extend significant new billing and collection advantages to those same solar subscription providers without applying the consumer protection proposed in HB 393. The Town of Bridgeville issued a peddling and soliciting permit to Royalty Renewables, which the town’s own notice identifies as affiliated with Nautilus Solar Energy, LLC. The enrollment link in that notice contains a commission-tracking representative ID — the standard mechanism by which subscription companies attribute sales to individual agents for payment. The Bridgeville notice told residents: “No money in, free cancellation, no subscription fees or hidden charges applied.” The Delaware PSC’s own consumer page states: “Projects charge the customer a subscription fee”; “You will then receive a bill from the community solar project for your subscription cost”; and “early termination of the contract will be detailed in the enrollment contract.” The PSC’s rules governing door-to-door agents state that agents “may not make false, misleading, or deceptive statements.”

In direct response, House Bill 393 consumer protection bill — voted out of the House Natural Resources and Energy Committee eleven to zero — prohibits six specific practices by third-party electric suppliers: excessive pricing; contracts longer than twelve months; automatic renewals without consent; variable rates; commission-based enrollment compensation; and cancellation or enrollment fees. The unanimous vote reflects legislative consensus that residential consumers cannot adequately evaluate complex energy agreements at the door or on the phone. That consensus applies equally to community solar contracts signed at the same door.

What SB 321’s Consolidated-billing Legislation Does — and Conceals

While House Bill 393’s consumer protection bill attempts to restrict deceptive energy sales practices and improve consumer transparency, Senate Bill 321’s consolidated-billing legislation simultaneously moves in the opposite direction — restructuring community solar billing in a way that conceals subscription fees and shifts collection responsibilities onto Delmarva Power.

Specifically, Senate Bill 321 does two things, it changes both who collects community solar subscription fees and how those charges appear on customer bills. It establishes consolidated billing — making Delmarva Power the collection agent for community solar subscription fees, replacing the direct invoice a developer sends to the customer today. It also implements net crediting as the billing method: Delmarva subtracts the subscription fee internally and shows customers only the net savings. The gross credit disappears. The fee disappears. The bill’s third WHEREAS clause explains whose interests this serves: “ensuring the financial stability of subscriber coordinators.” The legislature is being asked to conclude that protecting developer revenue justifies both inserting Delmarva into a private commercial transaction it has no business being in, and hiding the fee from the customers who pay it.

The numbers behind Senate Bill 321’s consolidated-billing proposal are straightforward. The Delaware Division of the Public Advocate’s April 2026 rate review shows residential Delmarva customers pay about 15.8 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity. Under 26 Del. C. §1014(f)(1), a community solar credit equals that rate for every kilowatt-hour attributed to the subscription. At the Georgetown array’s documented savings rate of 10 percent, $90 of every $100 credit flows to the Subscription Coordinator. The subscriber keeps $10. Under net crediting, the $90 is invisible on every bill for the life of the subscription — even though the PSC has never reviewed whether the charge is just and reasonable.

Senate Bill 321’s consolidated-billing proposal contains none of House Bill 393’s six consumer protections, while community solar coordinators — the companies that sell and manage community solar subscriptions — use the same commission-paid door-to-door practices that prompted lawmakers to introduce House Bill 393. Those contracts have no term limit under Delaware law, with no cap on subscription fee rates, and only a three-business-day right of rescission – a period that expires before the subscribers have seen a single bill or had any opportunity to verify whether what the canvasser told them matches what they signed. Senate Bill 321’s consolidated-billing proposal imposes no mandatory cancellation right on any operator. What one developer offers voluntarily today, Delaware law cannot guarantee tomorrow.

Current law already governs the billing correctly: 26 Del. Admin. Code §3013-10.0 requires the coordinator’s bill to show the credit, the fee, and the net savings. The developer invoices subscribers directly, bears the collection risk, and the system works. Senate Bill 321 does not repeal that requirement that subscriber bills separately show the credit, fee, and net savings. It creates a consolidated billing structure incompatible with those transparency requirements and leaves the conflict unresolved.

When One Customer Cannot Pay, All Customers Do

Consolidated billing creates a bad debt problem while net crediting helps conceal who ultimately pays when community solar bills go unpaid. Under the current model, when a customer does not pay, Delmarva Power has no exposure and no other ratepayer is affected. Under Senate Bill 321 consolidated-billing proposal, Delmarva Power must pay the solar developer within 60 business days regardless of whether the customer has paid their bill. That shifts the financial risk of unpaid community solar bills away from solar developers and onto other community solar customer and ultimately all Delmarva Power ratepayers. To fund that obligation, §1014A(d)(3) assesses community solar subscribers up to 0.25 percent of their monthly credits for an arrearage escrow. When a solar customer defaults, the developer is paid from the escrow — funded by fellow subscribers who paid on time. Unused escrow funds are returned to the developer annually, not to the subscribers who provided them. Delmarva’s unrecovered charges on the same unpaid bill become bad debt recovered through rates from every Delmarva customer, including those who never enrolled. The developer bears zero collection risk.

What the WHEREAS Claims Cannot Show and Other States Confirm

Senate Bill 321’s second WHEREAS clause claims consolidated billing with net crediting has been “successfully implemented” in Maryland and New Jersey, improving billing transparency. That claim has no independent support in the legislative record. Maryland’s community solar program has existed since 2017, but utility consolidated billing only launched in January 2026. The bill’s “successfully implemented” claim therefore cannot rely on eight years of Maryland program experience; it rests on approximately five months of consolidated billing experience. The bill’s synopsis specifically cites Pepco Maryland as evidence of successful implementation. Pepco is a single corporate entity whose billing systems and operational practices are not quarantined by state lines. The DC Attorney General’s formal enforcement action — involving 6,800 affected households and nearly two years of informal engagement before a formal complaint — documents serious community solar billing failures by that same company. New Jersey shows subscribers a net discount after the subscription fee is already deducted. Neither state shows the gross credit or the subscription fee. The legislature is being asked to call a single net number transparency and adopt it permanently on that basis.

More importantly, SB 321's consolidated-billing proposal does not require Delaware utility bills to separately show the community solar credit and the subscription fee charged against that credit. Section 1014A(a)(2) defines net crediting as applying only the customer's "savings value" to the bill, while §1014A(e)(1)(d) requires display only of applied and banked credits. In other words, the statute guarantees neither disclosure of the full credit generated by the solar project nor disclosure of the fee retained by the subscription coordinator. Customers are guaranteed only the net result. If transparency is the objective, those disclosure requirements should appear in the statute itself.

Where independent evaluation exists, the record shows what happens when utilities are made responsible for collecting community solar subscription fees. In Washington DC, the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the People’s Counsel jointly filed a formal complaint against Pepco for systematically failing to provide promised community solar credits to 6,800 households. Officials worked informally with Pepco for two years before resorting to enforcement. The DC Public Service Commission ordered Pepco to repay ratepayers $800,000. In New York, implementation delays exceeded one year; the PSC imposed financial penalties and required a $10 credit to subscribers for each missed bill. In New Mexico, the Public Regulation Commission declined to require consolidated billing after utilities stated they do not want the responsibility of billing subscriber fees, and the Commission found it “likely to cause confusion among subscriber ratepayers as to the respective roles of utilities and subscriber organizations.”

Supporters of Senate Bill 321’s consolidated-billing legislation may argue the Public Service Commission can later require greater billing transparency through regulation. Senate Bill 321’s §1014A(e)(1)(e) grants the Commission residual authority to require “any additional changes the Commission determines will improve billing and crediting processes for subscribers.” Supporters may argue this provision empowers the PSC to mandate disclosure of the gross credit, subscription fee, and net savings by regulation, without the legislature specifying it in statute.

New York’s PSC expressed that identical intent in a formal order in 2019. Six years later, New York’s own PSC found that billing and crediting failures had forced subscribers to cancel their subscriptions, eroding customer trust in the program, and imposed financial penalties on utilities in July 2025 for failing to meet performance standards. Intent without statutory mandate produced not transparency, but implementation failures serious enough to drive customers out of the program. If Delaware’s PSC exercises this authority, developers will challenge it: the PSC holds no statutory authority to review, approve, or cap the subscription fee, and requiring its disclosure on a regulated utility bill is legally contestable. That challenge may succeed. The disclosure requirement must be in the statute.

The Correct Answer Is Already in Place

The billing arrangement that already exists in Delaware is the correct one. The solar developer solicits the customer, invoices the customer, collects the fee, and bears the risk when payment does not come. Delaware Administrative Code §3013-10.0 requires the solar developer’s bill to show the credit, the fee, and the net savings. That system works. Reject Senate Bill 321.

If Senate Bill 321 advances despite this record, it must not do so without all six House Bill 393 protections applied to community solar and a statutory requirement — not a regulatory aspiration — that the gross credit, subscription fee, and net savings appear on every consolidated subscriber bill. Delmarva Power is not a collection agency for privately solicited community solar contracts the PSC has never reviewed. The record in Washington DC, New York, New Mexico, and Delaware itself confirms it should not become one.

Delmarva Power is a utility company — not a collection agency for solar developers.