I did a survey of rate plans for the largest privately owned (non coop and non-municipal/government) utilities. There aren’t so many TOU plans that have a separate sell rate. At least according to the OpenEI database of rate plans.
@gjas24 Thanks for reporting this. There is currently no connection between solar sell-back rates and TOU rate zones at this time. When we were building this feature, plans where export rate varied with TOU periods seemed to only be common in CA via NEM 2.0. That’s interesting that you’re starting to see it in Colorado as well. By any chance could you share the plan’s name or link me to a rate schedule?
That said, it does sound like you’re seeing a bug here where this rate zone is being disabled with the alert toggle. I’ll share with the team directly. Do you mind if we take a closer look at your data?
Would you also mind sharing your solar settings screen? I suspect that your solar sellback rate will also show 0¢.
Hey Justin,
I like the idea behind the TOU energy alerts, but am having trouble turning them into anything actionable because it is hard to make sense of what they are describing. Is the average being used the average power usage for all time spent in that TOU ? Is the comparison against instantaneous usage or against the average over a broader time window ?
Very hard to resolve the alerts below against actual usage events.
Hi @kevin1 - @RyanAtSense is on PTO today, but I believe that the comparison is looking at your current usage compared to a 14-day rolling average of usage in that rate zone.
We notify you when there is “higher than normal” rate-period usage during any rate zone period higher than the lowest rate zone period, where “normal” is defined as 2 calendar weeks of data for each active rate zone. When a new rate zone is created, we look at the 2 calendar weeks preceding that rate zone’s creation.
You bring up a good point, though, and I’ll see if this is something we’d want to add to the Time of Use knowledge-base articles.
1 Like
Thanks Justin ! I think a knowledge-base article would be worthwhile. If the comparison is looking at at the current instantaneous (or 1/2 second) power vs. the 14-day rolling average, plus maybe some margin (the lowest threshold I have seen is an alert at 49% above average), that’s actionable from a latency perspective (catching the increase in the act), but may not be a reliable indicator of something bad happening… Just looking at the topmost of my alerts, at 11:41, I see this in my Power Meter. We almost need more cues, like a 14-day rolling average line to understand where the issue is…
Thanks, Kevin. Re: margin – we issue alerts if they >= 10% over average.
The goal of these alerts at this stage was precisely to help users catch an “increase in the act” – maybe you tap that alert and see your EV charging during peak times when it needn’t be, and can then shift that load to another time. You could imagine the same applying to other shiftable loads – laundry, dishwasher, HVAC (in some cases), etc. There’s definitely a lot more we can do with rate-based alerting and was more TOU users come online, we’ll continue to assess.
We’re very open to feedback on this front! I’d love to know what you and other TOU users would find useful from an alerting standpoint.
2 Likes
v36 fixes this issue. Solar->Settings->Time of Use with Net Metering…turn this on and the Sell Back Rate changes to “variable” and fixes the “to grid” issue.
2 Likes