But wouldn’t these %'s be relative to where you live and what kind of billing your utility uses. This would not be meaningful to sense since it is a generic app that applies to everyone who uses it and is not location or billing specific. These detailed calculations are up to the individual user to figure out and would have no application to me who lives in another country with totally different billing procedures and therefore not useful in the app.
I think at the start of residential solar, there were really only two %'s that gave good insights into how your panels were going to translate into savings… But with the advent of all new billing structures meant to match supply to demand, time-of-use, demand charges, etc., those %'s are becoming meaningless. The real question now is what your bill would have been if you hadn’t had solar vs. what it is with solar.
I actually wrote a calculator that roughly calculated my bill using virtually all the rate plans for publicly owned utilities in the US and charted my monthly (billing period) savings by having solar. The benefits / savings are much more pronounced in the summer months, as one would expect.
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Very impressive leg work, but I think the sense app solves precisely the basic question we all have regardless of location or billing scenarios. What would my bill be with solar vs without. In my case 58% of my use powered by solar, beyond that I can calculate any specifics related to my exact scenario. Everyones scenario is different and can not be incorporated into the generic app like sense, there would simply be too many variables. I may still be missing the main point of the post so please enlighten me.
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The charge and the credit are the same amount, a little over 12c/kWh. And on top of that they pay me another 7c/kWh for the first 10 years.
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Somewhat meta to this thread:
Energy cost, like most bills, has a limited relationship to real cost. For example, there is an inextricable link between water & power: in hydro-plenty regions electricity is generally priced low to encourage industrial use … which can sometimes artificially, as it were, raise the residential cost. Then you can get a mega-drought.
The key to the efficiency of solar deployment is I think summed up in an off-grid vs on-grid comparison:
- OFF-GRID: any generation you can’t store or use is waste.
- ON-GRID: any generation you can’t store or use is waste.
- NET USAGE/METERING: any generation you can’t store or use is waste.
Yes, all the same issue.
The clear advantage with a network of solar generation, like the internet, is distributed generation; redundancy and local, optimally-efficient, usage.
The clear disadvantage is over-generation or under-usage that leads to both inefficiencies and waste (similar issues).
That’s all a roundabout way of saying: Cost-benefit analysis driven purely by a dollar cost is doomed to complication, as @kevin1 has exhaustively demonstrated, because providers will change costs ever-more frequently and use whatever metrics they see fit.
IMHO: The more Sense moves toward a model and interface that prioritizes load-shifting to maximize local usage, the better. e.g. If the average solar household is only using half of their generation due, mainly, to lack of storage capacity then getting a battery and/or an EV is probably the best way to maximize that usage rather than using net metering to calculate the “cost”. If you’re using provider costs/tariffs to make decisions around solar deployment then you’re probably not looking at the 20-30 year life of the panels and the potential for batteries and EVs. My 2 cents is to ignore the 2 cents as much as possible.
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OK I had a day to digest all this great information. Its a great topic to open my eyes to the world of net metering. So I’m wondering about the benefits of net metering. With net metering there seems to be no advantage to time managing your electricity needs. If I have net metering I can use as much power anytime I want and let my solar pump out as much as it can to the grid, the two become somewhat independent of each other. It seems this would lead to a glut of power on the grid during the sunny times and high consumption at any time of the day or night as the consumer desires. So in a hydro electric area, such as I’m in, this would mean all that large glut of solar generated power would in effect be stored in the water reservoirs during the sunny times. Then at night when most of the public without generation and those with generation on net metering would use power at will causing a spike in generation at the hydro plant. The net effect at the end of the day is net metering would result in extra water being stored in the hydro reservoirs. I suppose then the advantage to this type of utility is they can now sell all that extra water generation to thermal utilities at premium prices thereby allowing them to pay the net metering costs to the individual home solar generators and keep a tidy profit for themselves.
If on the other hand the utility is thermal or nuclear, then net metering allows the utility to consume less fuel during the sunny times and then run as normal during the nights. This saved fuel costs can be used to pay the net metering homes and pocket a tidy profit.
Net metering is in effect creating a huge solar generating system during the sunny times and allowing the utility companies to shift the required generation load to the backs of the net metering homes and paying them to do it. This scenario only works as long as there are more non solar homes than solar homes. If the time comes when the solar production from the net metering homes exceeds the available consumption then a storage solution needs to be implemented so all that excess power in the sunny times can be stored somewhere and used later when the sun is not shining. This then leads to the energy (battery or in some cases large super insulated water tanks) storage home with solar generation such as my situation. Both of these scenarios have there merits depending on the motivations of the home owner. I do believe net metering (and large solar farms) is leading us down the path to have large residential battery banks in neighbourhoods to use this stored energy later in the day and overnight. The end result is a much greener footprint for cities and towns and the planet in general. I think this is the direction we are heading for sure and maybe companies like sense need to put some thought into catering to the needs of the net metering homes as it gains popularity and residential battery storage becomes viable.
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California utilities have had to confront this one head-on since solar installs are prevalent enough to cause the “duck back”, too much generation during sunny times and but rapidly rising requirements as the sun falls. Under law, utilities only had to offer simple net metering (NEMS1) up until solar was 5% of the daytime mix. After that they launched, NEMS2 another tariff scheme that still has a net metering component, but mixes in time of use pricing, and non-bypassable charges. They have also incentivized folks on NEMS1 to move to interesting NEMS2 tariffs that reward off-peak usage. I have a special EV (electric vehicle) rate that works really well for me.
More on the “duck back” below:
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At scale, the only real solution seems to be ultra-efficient super-long trans-hemispherical trans-continental ultra-high-voltage DC grid ties.
Water storage in places like California doesn’t compute. Neither does lithium on a global scale. And wind is a fickle secondary phenomena.
Joining night to day and day to night solves a lot of big problems.
I’d stake that not so much as a longnow futurist bet but as a “within the lifetime of our existing solar cells” type of thing. Infrastructure!
The funky thing is that this is (somewhat) at odds with the immediate needs of matching local solar generation with consumption and getting to an EV future. The internet is “wired” + “wireless”. Wireless energy is a bit of a stretch at scale but ironically, I guess, Tesla’s are an approximation in the energy world.
There are two cartoon versions of the future that spring to mind:
- Really fast cars powered (live) with extension cords. Think multi-gigabit Ethernet.
- Really slow cars powered via onboard solar panels. Only moving when the sun shines. Think 1990s wifi.
Thanks! Will do!
Our NET metering resets every April 30th. Any way to have a resetable production vs usage to see what our net is vs going to the meter?
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Hey all, Sorry to chime in so late here. I also agree that having net metering built into the app would be great for Sense Solar users. I see it as a simple as a checkbox for solar users that also have net metering agreements with their electric utility. If they expanded this to allow users to indicate which date net metering agreements reset to zero (in the event of an annual surplus), or allow users to enter different amounts for what they pay for energy from the grid vs what they are credited by their utility it would be even better. For what it’s worth I write in to Sense folks about once a month with this request. If you all did the same I’m sure they’d be more inclined to make it happen!
Hey Josh, Are you in Oregon by chance? My net metering resets to zero every April too, but only in the event of annual surplus. I’m hoping for this next April, but only time will tell (my solar was installed in November so there’s no way we would’ve built up a surplus in our all electric home over the cloudy / rainy winter here).
Hey everyone. We’ve added a new Net Production stat to the solar page. You can learn more about it here:
We’ll leave this thread open however, as some of the requests go a bit deeper than just a Net stat.
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