KUAR | By Wesley Brown / Arkansas Advocate
A thrice-amended bill that opponents say would upend the state’s burgeoning solar industry easily passed the Arkansas Senate on Tuesday.
Senate Bill 295, sponsored by Sen. Jonathan Dismang (R-Beebe), passed on a vote of 24-9 and was immediately sent to the House, where a twin bill awaits on the lower chamber’s floor that will likely face further revisions.
In speaking for SB 295 at the Senate well, Dismang told fellow senators that is not his intent to kill the state’s flourishing rooftop solar industry only three years after the Legislature passed the Solar Access Act of 2019. That law, largely negotiated and authored by former Public Service Commission (PSC) chair Ted Thomas, put the state’s existing 1:1 net metering policy in place.
Julie McCarthy/NPR
Solar panels are seen on the roof of the Indian Habitat Center, a conference and office complex in the central part of Delhi.