Solar and battery interconnection rules in West Virginia

Size bands and what each one obliges

The screens that decide it

• Within the 50 kW cooperative and municipal ceiling Limit 50 kW.

  This is the West Virginia trap. A customer of a rural cooperative or a municipal utility is capped at 50 kilowatts, where an investor owned utility customer may go to 500 kilowatts commercial or 2 megawatts industrial. Nothing on the face of the size limit warns you, so confirm the utility class before designing anything above 50 kW.

• Aggregate generation under 15 percent of line section peak load on a three phase circuit 15 percent of line section peak load, a figure only the utility holds.

  West Virginia uses 15 percent of line section peak load on a three phase circuit but only 5 percent on a single phase circuit, which no other state read does. Most rural West Virginia residential service is single phase, so the tighter figure is the one that usually applies.

• Statewide net metering under 3 percent of utility peak demand 3 percent of line section peak load, a figure only the utility holds.

  Total installed customer generation may not exceed three percent of the utility aggregate customer peak demand in the state during the previous year, of which no less than half a percent is reserved for residential customers. The residential reserve means residential headroom can survive after the general pool fills, so ask about both.

Ask the utility this, before you sell it

1. Is this address served by an investor owned utility, a rural cooperative or a municipal utility? The size ceiling is 500 kilowatts commercial at an investor owned utility and 50 kilowatts at a cooperative or municipal, a tenfold difference.
2. Is the service single phase or three phase? The penetration screen is 15 percent on three phase and only 5 percent on single phase.
3. Please send Form No. 2, the interconnection standards and technical requirements incorporated by reference. The Secretary of State copy is a scan with no text layer, so the fee schedule, timelines, storage provisions and any insurance amounts cannot be read from the published rule.
4. How much of the 3 percent aggregate cap remains, and how much of the half percent residential reserve?

Worth knowing before you quote

The rule body is deliberately thin: it obliges the utility to interconnect and defers the substance to Form No. 2. Section 3.7 is a conditional prohibition rather than an absolute one, barring a utility from requiring additional equipment or insurance or imposing any other fee unless specifically authorized under the rules, and no dollar amount appears anywhere in the readable text. Timelines, storage and non export provisions are unknown rather than absent, because they may sit in the unread form.