You get paid the wholesale price and we actually write you a check at the end of the month. you send us a check for what you have used. We don’t credit kWhs
But I think y'all are missing the point of my complaint: in gunny's turf they won't let you OFFSET your usage. You can NOT have net metering and STILL ALLOW any local generation to go to offset premise usage first.
So to be clear in your turf is it "buy all sell all" or can customers offset their usage first before selling it to you?
Oh, no.. use all you produce first, sell us the excess. None of that goes through the meter. We only care about what goes through the meter one way or the other.
The way I see it, I am very skeptical there would be any problem. UL 1749 inverters are used all the time and I don't think I have ever heard of an issue - sure backfeed can cause headaches for POCO from a voltage regulation standpoint, but we are talking about zero backfeed so even that goes away. It would be like 1749 with an added "anti backfeed" protocol.
I definitely agree with you there.
True in general but I am not aware of any other UL compliant inverter vendor openly making such claims that appear to be misleading. There are laws used by the government to punish vendors that make misleading public claims (e.g. supplements that cure cancer) so I am wondering where are the similar laws in this context.
You may not like it, but it isn't "criminal"; it's the rule set by the provider of the grid for its customers. If you want to connect a PV system to their grid, you play by their rules. If you want to build your own microgrid that doesn't touch their conductors you won't be subject to their rules.
So does anyone setup their onsite generation as a microgrid backed up by the utility grid? That should allow behind the meter consumption. To be seamless you'd need a transfer switch that go on/off-grid without power disruption to the loads.
But not all big brothers will everywhere. There are locations, I understand but cannot offer any citations, that require power, water, and sewer for an occupancy permit. Whether local generation counts, and what type, would be a slight question.
The original premise of the thread was the discussion of systems that operate in parallel with the grid but will not export power to it.
You've suggested earlier that you are with a co-op in one of the Duke Energy service areas. I, in Greenville SC, (a Duke Energy direct customer) have net metering and generation up to consumption is effectively at my retail rate. You can probably "go across the street" and find that.
When you get right down to it, I guess you could say we “net meter” to a point like Duke. we just don’t issue credits from one month to the next. Duke takes all credits to net 0 on may1
The big problem with 'buy all' 'sell all' is that it precludes various system configurations that ought to be allowed. For example if one wants to have a microgrid that operates autonomously some of the time but also be able to connect to the grid and import or export some of the time, how do you set that up? Also, how does buy-all-sell-all incentivize or fairly compensate storage used for peak load shifting? I understand the motivation for it, but I find it both morally and technically clumsy.
I'm not trying to be argumentive, I just genuinely don't follow this argument against straight net metering. I think I must be not "seeing" it. Couldn't excess generation (after local use) all be billed at the same rate regardless of which tier the customer is in?
The biggest argument the utilities has is the net metering where you use a kWh meter spins one way, you export a kWh, meter spins the other way offsetting your net to 0.
OK, so I can put up an array that pumps out way more kW-hr than I use? Awesome! Well, if it makes economic sense otherwise. Here in PSEG land I believe that there is (or used to be) a limit on what they would allow you to get credit for. Maybe not more than 10% over your use over the course of a year? If I use 12,000 kW-hr a year, I think I could generate and get paid for up to 13,200 a year. But in NJ there are two parts to the equation. One is the offset of your usage and the other is the renewable energy targets, which might be 3X or more in value, because the utilities in state must show a certain minimum "green" energy in their portfolio. That's why companies come in and tell you you can get a solar system for free. They take the RET portion of the agreement.
I can't speak to that alternative; sorry.
