Solar Surplus: What SHOULD Utility Co's Pay

The utility should be required to pay whatever the customer would be paying them at the same moment, until the customer's bill is zeroed. Ideally the customer gets free power with the utility as a backup; the utility gets a power source without investing capital. Society benefits from reduced pollution.

 

It seems logical that there should be some sort of "interconnection" fee to sell your surplus electricity. Getting paid exactly what you are charged doesn't make sense. After all, someone has to be paid to maintain your grid connection, and your utility is doing you a favor by allowing you to sell your electricity at retail prices.

For early adopters - yeah, it makes sense to just allow customers to get paid retail knowing that they will lose a bit of money on those customers.

But at some point, someone will have to pay to maintain the grid.

 

The utility should make 10-20% gross profit on your electricity for moving it. If they sell it for 12 cents Kwh then you get about 10 cents and they keep 2 cents. Forget terms like 'avoided cost' and other gimmicks that would allow the utility to pay near zero for your juice, on the small scale they are unfair.

As said above, you are using the utility as a battery, society gets the benefit of greener power. The utility does get power generated close to the point of use and near zero losses and lower peak demand (which is quite valuable to them).

 

In Arizona, we switched over to "net metering" earlier this year. So, the Kwh that we buy from the utility (Trico) nets out with the KWH that we supply to the utility. At the end of the year (September) we get a check for any overage at the "wholesale" power rate of .042 cents / Kwh.

 

Good points. Retail -20% may be fair. It should certainly be no less than the prevailing wholesale rate. (But it could be hard to determine what that is; the spot market for power can vary wildly, with utilities sometimes paying more than their own average retail price at a given moment.)

Or, if the concern really is maintenance of the grid rather than continuing to screw retail residential customers as much as possible :_> pay retail but charge a flat monthly connection/maintenance fee to cover those costs.

The Arizona plan described by Cactus sounds pretty good, both simple and fair. Make it universally so!

 

I essentially agree with this. Beyond what you use net/net shouldn't be paid at full retail, as the utility has infrastructure costs to cover. The reality is that when they buy your power at retail in the first place (net metering) they are buying at a loss. That may be to their advantage because they can cover some of their peak load cheaper than other sources, as well as an advantage to society.

Personally, unless I lived in an ideal solar environment, I think that my money might be better invested in building a larger co-op off site facility that can take better advantage of economies of scale, ideal site selection etc. (For example if you invest $30k for Pv on your roof for say 3 kw of PV, and your site is only 80% exposed, wouldn't everyone be better off if you invested the same $30k, and buy say 3.5kw of Pv that has 100% ideal exposure, yielding a much bigger net/net harvest?)

We tend to get hung up on having our "own" systems on our roof, rather than a more efficient (economically/energy wise) larger system.

 

Here in Maine, the electric bill has two rates:
The delivery charge (what the electric co gets paid to bring power to my house, maintain the lines, etc)
The commodity charge (the cost of the actual juice)

This allows the consumer to choose who gets paid for producing the electricity we use - so you can sign up for solar or hydro or wind or whatever. Obviously, the actual electrons coming to the house are some blend of whatever the utility has in the wires at the time, but the producers burning coal don't get paid, the solar/hydro/wind producer does.

This has the advantage of allowing the consumer to "vote their dollars" without a major capital outlay, and allows those dollars to go to more efficient production methods than the typical "back yard" array.

And by requiring the "regular" power-generation companies to use a higher percentage of renewable sources over time, the price gap between the typical "mix" and pure renewables will become less.

It's pretty simple, but don't expect those companies which both produce and deliver to let go of their stranglehold without a fight.

 

You should get the same you pay them......1 for 1 simple!
I produce just about $300 less than I use each year....I almost break even. If I were to add another 2.5kW block to the system I would be in the black 365 days a year and be getting a check from GWP!

 

And in case you were wondering, the "price premium" for clean sources is less than 20% - but that's only half the bill (the commodity charge). The bottom-line difference on a typical monthly bill is closer to 10% because the delivery charge doesn't change (and is half of the bill).
In addition, the clean producers offer long-term lock-ins, so you don't see the volatility typical of carbon-based sources - which sometimes reduces the gap to less than 5% (sometimes all the way to parity with traditional sources, as happened during the recent oil spike).

So for an extra $60/year, I have clean power - which is a hell of a lot cheaper than even the interest you would pay for a small solar hot-water system, much less a full PV array.

It's a relatively small price to pay (if your electrical use is efficient), but most people don't know about it, aren't allowed the choice, or would rather buy $60 worth of crap they don't need.

I just did some math and if I replace my furnace-based hot water with clean electric, the net cost would be around an additional $200/year, plus the capital outlay for purchase and installation ($2000?). Solar hot-water arrays run $5000, minimum - and aren't a 100% solution (can't address peak loads, and don't provide enough heat on cold, cloudy days).
And with something like this: Electric Water heaters, Electric Hot Water Heater | GE Appliances , the net cost should closer to break-even.

Less dependent on foreign oil, less carbon pollution, AND the cost isn't much higher - this is how we fix the future.

 

Electricity transmission loss in the US averages about 7%:
[ame]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission[/ame]

50% loss would melt the wires.

 

1 for 1 doesn't work very well in the case of big surpluses. You are asking the utility to sell you power at retail, and then buy it back at retail. As discussed earlier and elsewhere, in the case of net metering it makes some financial and social sense, but in the case of a surplus net/net it makes little sense.


As for "green" energy purchase. Puget Power allows you to buy as little or as much green power as you wish, charging a premium on your kwh use for it. We buy 100% green power, at a 20% hit. (that does not include hydro as green however) It isn't too much of a hit, and is a damn sight cheaper than putting PVs on our house in rainy NW WA. We are in effect buying solar and wind in sunny Eastern WA, and that allows our RE dollar to go MUCH further!

 

Hi Icarus, long time/no chat. Hope your well.
I have read and reread the above quote, to me it reads that you have a choice of power providers, one generating "Green" power on a large scale, and on the "Non Green" power plants. You then order the green electicity for say $1.20, instead of non green power for just $1.00.
I seem to be missing something here.
How does a power company sell you a "Green" kWh's worth of power vs dirty kWh power... for 2 different prices??? Or is this something specific to your neck of the woods??? I have never heard of this concept.
To me a "Volt" is just a "Volt" No GM puns please. ....
Could you add a few more details?.... I know your a sharp lad, I always enjoy and usually learn somethig from your posts !!
This time however, you have left me piqued with curiousity!!!

 

The "green" purchase is a binding commitment by the utility. If they sell X kWhours of fossil-free electricity they must produce or buy X kWhours of fossil-free electricity. You're right, there's no guarantee that any particular electron was sent on its way by a non-fossil source, but there's no need for that.

When the option is available, contracting for non-fossil power is the single most effective pollution reduction most households can undertake. In the US on average it reduces CO2 emissions by about 5,000 lbs each year, equivalent to not burning 250 gallons of gasoline.

 

That's more or less correct (if I read it right) - when someone subscribes to a "green" supplier, then the local utility is required to use that source (or an equally green equivalent) for that many kWh's, replacing their usual supplies. I'm not sure exactly how the laws work, but I don't think this changes the renewable targets required for their "standard offer" supply - in other words, I don't think they can increase the coal they give to everyone else just because you bought clean power.

But those "green" kWh's don't have to be instantaneous, watt-for-watt supply from the source to your specific home - most likely, the utilities use whatever sources they need to when demand is high (giving you coal power even though you paid for wind), then make up the difference at other times (giving someone else wind even though they paid for coal).
But the net at the end of the month should be that if you paid for 300kWh's of green power, the local utility should have purchased an additional 300kWh's of green power in place of their usual sources.

 

What Richard and Tom said....

Electrons don't care.

 

i agree with the "current" (no pun intended) ideology that power sent back to the utility should be paid at the rate the utility charges at the time the power is made. granted, this benefits the homeowner slightly as the utility would have some additional overhead expense, but that is not coming out of their pocket. they get that money back from other customers.

also, we need to consider that home EV generators are still on the bleeding edge. they paid a bundle (ya, credits aint nowhere near enough otherwise a lot more people would be doing it) and should be rewarded for it.

sure, eventually when a significantly higher #'s are selling power back, then the rates needs to be re-evaluated, but until that happens, i think people who spend the money to put photovoltaics, wind or whatever, should be recognised and there are few better ways to be recognised than with money

P.S.
we as a country, due to our size have a lot of strikes against us. we are too spread out to afford an efficient power distribution system. (at least that is what some lead us to believe) so decentralization of power generation is a win-win on many levels. this lessens the critical nature and vulnerability of having all our eggs in one basket.

 

This is becoming apparent in a big way in the solar industry. There is a lot of ground being covered in "distributed solar" projects.

These are projects which are bigger than your typical rooftop (think warehouse roofs or parking lot size) and a lot smaller than your typical utility scale power plant - typically in the range of 2-20 MW.

These projects work well because they are large enough to take advantage of economies of scale, but not too large so they are able to take advantage of existing power infrastructure and they are targeted towards "brown fields" (previously disturbed/graded land that is no longer used) or warehouse roofs.

Here's a good article about it - google has more.
A Boom in ‘Distributed’ Solar Projects - Green Inc. Blog - NYTimes.com