Question on net metering

I have a grid tied PV system and live in a net metering state,
Massachusetts. This spring, in one month I delivered about 100 kwh to
the power company. Normally I'm a low net user, but I was away that
moth and became a net generator. After one or two polite reminders the
electric company finally credited me $6 ( or 6 ¢/kwh) . I was
expecting $15 (15 ¢/kwh, which is what I pay). When I asked for an
explanation of the difference, they explained they credited me at the
wholesale rate.

Normally, when the meter goes one way or the other they credit me at
the rate I buy ( at least I hope they do, who really knows with the
electric meters they install) Because I had the misfortune to be a net
generator when they got around to reading the meter, I get penalized.

My question is what is the net-metering law in Massachusetts? I
realize chances of anyone knowing the law is low, but could anyone
give me a clue how to find out. I'm tempted to take the electric
company to small claims court to collect the $9 they owe me .

TIA
--G

 

FWIIW.. looks like the electric company was correct, net excess
generation is treated differently than ordinaly net metereing. Excess
generation is "Credited at average monthly market rate to
customer’s next bill" whereas ordinary net metereing with no excess
generation is done at the retail rate

reference
Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) Connecting to the Grid
Project State and Utility Net-Metering Rules
(Updated December 2005)

 

In California, PG&E-land, I am a net metering customer, and I have gone
below zero on my bill a few times. There is an "annual true up", where I
pay them for any shortages, and they zero out any credits ;-(

"Net excess generation (NEG) is carried forward to a customer's next bill
for up to 12 months. Any NEG remaining at the end of each 12-month period
is granted to the customer's utility. Customers subject to time-of-use
rates are entitled to deliver electricity back to the system for the same
time-of-use (including real-time) price that they pay for power purchases."

This isn't done on a month to month basis.

Perhaps if you had waited another month, you would have gone back into the
consumer portion, and received a small bill, maybe not.

http://www.dsireusa.org should have pointers to programs in your area.
Massachusetts:
"allowed customer-generators to carry NEG forward -- credited at the
average monthly market rate -- to the next month's bill. "

"monthly market rate": I'd need a definition of that.

Or, your local utility's pages should explain it.
http://www.pge.com "your home" "generate yor own power" explains my
"Standard Net Energy Metering" program.

 

This would make more sense to me:

They basically defined the term "Avoided Cost" in
regard to IPPs, Independent Power Producers, as the
costs that would be AVOIDED had a "New Power Plant"
NOT been built...

If you provide an extra 1 kW at peak time, the utility may not have to
build a new power plant... so maybe the avoided cost is the cost to build
1 kW of new plant minus the cost to deliver your power to others. I wonder
how to calculate that.

I met a "negawatt trader" who would look at the NY Power Authority auction
web site and bid on meeting demand on a few peak summer afternoons when
the cost per kWh rose to $1 or so. If he won, he would ask a few large
apartment building managers to turn off the AC from (say) 2-3 PM, and
get paid as if he had provided real power rather than reducing demand,
with extra green credits for doing so without any pollution. Perhaps
there's a way to relate this to avoided cost in the legal sense.

Nick

 

On Tue, 20 Jun 2006 23:38:16 +0000 (UTC),

Not;

I tried that last year, and they just forgot about crediting me. This
year I decided to be more persistent, polite but persistent

I don't believe the company is deliberatly difficult, I just think
that residential co-generation is such a small part of their business,
they do not properly accomodate it

For example, last year they switched the old mechanical meter to a new
one that could be read by radio. Alas, to discourage theft, the new
meter had a ratcheting mechanism that prevented it from going
backwards

This year they installed a all electronic co-gen meter, that is
designed to read backwards ( and presumeably to be read by radio).
Alas, it went down to zero and stalled in that time I was away . I had
to call to get one that worked

I don't believe the errors are deliberate, I believe they just lack
experience on the residential co-gen accounts and it shows in poor
implementation in billing and metering.

In this case, teh company was correct according to Ma net metering
laws. The only explanation I got was that "we pay you at the
wholesale rate" without explanation of NEG. i dug deeper because my
expereince is the electric company makkes mistakes in these matters.


--G

 

Well, that wasn't Net Metering... ;-(

In California, there were different eras.
First, you just hooked it up, and nobody knew (which sounds like what
you've got, now).
Then PG&E said that wasn't fair, and installed ratcheting meters.
The solar lobby said that wasn't fair, and we got co-metering, which was
two meters in parallel, each ratcheting in opposite directions, to pay at
wholesale and buy at retail.
Then came the bi-directional meters, which is an electronic version of the
original. PG&E doesn't know when I'm pushing or pulling energy, they just
know what the net effect is once a month.

The radio meters are supposed to be coming next year.

I have had a couple of negative bills so far this year. My current
running account, to be cancelled or paid to PG&E next January, is $36.36.
That should go lower, maybe negative, over the summer, and then be around
zero in January.

The PG&E meters are started at 50,000 to avoid that problem.
I'm about 500 below "zero" now.

http://cdold.home.mchsi.com/Solar-generation.htm

 

'Avoided cost' was a term used in NY when we were still a regulated utility
state. The cost of generating one extra MWhr of electricity is the 'avoided
cost'. Think of it as the 'marginal' cost of electricity. Certainly during
peak periods, it can be quite high. But such 'peaks' don't happen all that
often and between peaks, the 'marginal cost' is much lower. At times like
2:00 AM on a spring night, it can be as low as $0.03/kWhr.

So that brings in the question of time variability. Should the utility
always pay the highest 'avoided cost' rate, of course not. Neither should
it pay the lowest. Up until the last five or eight years, having detailed
hourly generation costs and detailed hourly meter readings was a luxury that
few could afford (meant time-of-day chart recorders and lots of hand data
entries). The utilities told the PSC they wanted compensation for all this
labor and calculations and the PSC saw that it would be quite a burden.

So in many states like NY, the PSC would say either the IPP had to pay for
extra metering or accept a flat-rate set by the PSC (was $0.06/kWhr in NY).
The idea being that $0.06/kWhr was a sort of weighted-average of the avoided
costs during peak and non-peak times. The PSC expected that that price would
be a bit high in the first couple of years and attract a lot of IPP's (it
did), but that the avoided costs of electricity would rise with increasing
demand and be a 'bargain' after a few years. Problem was, demand didn't
rise as expected and avoided costs never reached $0.06/kWh. In NY, Niagara
Mohawk realized that they could actually produce electricity cheaper than
the $0.06/kWhr most of the time and told the PSC they were screwed up.
Eventually the NUG's (non-utility generators) would have to renegotiate a
price with the PSC and NIMO, or let NIMO buy them out of their contracts (at
considerable cost to the rate payers).

Now with electronic meters and de-regulation in NY, any sizeable IPP can bid
in an 'open market' and the price fluctuates with demand. The utility has
very little to do with the pricing and passes the average cost of power from
that market through to its customers. But home power systems are really too
small to get into that market. And the price is usually *not* high enough
to be very attractive. After all, how many 15-minute blocks a year does the
price reach $1/kWhr?

When the utility in NY credits for a small home system, they credit just the
energy cost. (NY bills are 'unbundled' and have the costs of energy and
delivery separated). This is only about half of the retail price. But NY
only allows 'net-metering' on solar systems, not other renewable/micro
installations.

'negawatt trading' is still practiced, but a bit differently. The NYISO
(not the New York Power Authority, they are two different things) charges an
extra fee for 'congestion' that is related to peak demands. If a large
customer and their IPP can coordinate to not use a lot of power when
'congestion fees' are high, they can save themselves a fair amount of money.
And the NYISO can pay some registered customers for 'voluntary curtailment'
(they will 'shut off the lights' when asked).

daestrom

 

That's what my neighbor did. He has a "bi-directional meter", which is a
label affixed to the meter which was already there. I think TOU is an
advantage to me. He must not. It depends a lot on A/C load in the summer,
I think. I am running behind the last two days.

My net generation specifically does not offset $5.77 per month in fees.
Other than that, at the end of the year, can you get money back? I can't.
A bill net consumer bill is paid once a year, a net generator credit is
lost.

 

My PECO friend says peak electrical energy sometimes goes for $5.20/kWh
down here in PJM-land

That negawatt trader rarely bid...

That depends on how you interpret the supreme court decision. Utilities are
obliged to meet peak demands, no? It won't always do to say 'we can't
provide your electricity now, but we'd be happy to help at 2 AM."

Nick

 

My pre-sale analysis has a large differential in the projections for TOU
verses non-TOU. The projection for June is non-TOU: -$2.25 TOU: -$44.67.
For the actual June bill, I have -176 kWH Peak, 326 off-peak, billing
-$25.77. If that was straight rates, it would be 150 kWH overall usage, at
$0.11430. That's a difference his month of $42.92 between TOU and non-TOU.

The meter installation for TOU was $277.00, but that should amortize in the
in less than the first year.

But you can never get money back, right? Overgeneration credit is lost in
the annual trueup.

And of course, we aren't with the same power company... I was just
wondering about the payback for a credit on trueup day, which doesn't exist
for me. (Sometimes I think we're in different states.)

 

Detroit Edison had a program a few years back where you could connect
certain high power loads to a 'black box' of theirs. Things like electric
hot-water heater and central air. The box allowed them to shut off power to
the box during severe peaks in order to reduce demand. The program put a
flat-credit on your bill every month that it was activated during the month.

Of course, some folks might try to get around the box and still get the
credit. There were some problems like that. Program was terminated in
favor of TOU tariffs and some other ideas.

daestrom

 

That was probably on the 'spot market'. Yes, according to NYISO, the
'real-time' market price in NY has gone that high on a few occasions.
Usually that high a price only lasts for 30 minutes or so.

http://www.nyiso.com/public/market_data/pricing_data.jsp

Look under real-time market and archives for the summer months and you'll
see similar 'peaks' in pricing.

But if the IPP only produces power between 12 AM and 6AM, should they be
paid the 2PM rate? Of course not, but that is effectively what was
happening. IPP's were not being built to meet the peak demands of customer
usage. They were built by non-utility business decisions to make money.
Many were co-generation designs whose primary purpose was to supply energy
to a nearby industrial customer. Some were built to supply process steam to
an industry customer on first and second shift, then when the industrial
plant cut back on third shift, the steam went to generation. So the only
'avoided cost' for the utility was base-load power. Or the IPP produced
electricity for use in their mill during first and second shift and sold the
power on third shift.

Because small IPP's were not required to provide 'firm commitments' on power
production, they did little to reduce the utility's problems meeting peak
demand. This was the basis for the utilities challenge to the issue of
paying 'avoided cost'. It was actually *increasing* the cost to consumers.

Some utilities like Niagara Mohawk were able to demonstrate to the PSC that
customer electric rates would be *lower* if NiMo simply bought out the IPP
and shut the plant down and then operated their own base-load units to
supply the power. Even if the cost of the buy out was 'allowed' and passed
on to the rate payer. At the time, NiMo was being forced to curtail
base-load plant operation (at $0.022/kWhr) because so many IPP's were
supplying power that NiMo was forced by law to purchase (at the state
mandated $0.06/kWhr).

What seemed like a good idea (giving IPP's equal access to T&D) had the
'unintended consequence' of raising the cost of electricity for everyone.

daestrom

 

Agreed. They should be paid the going rate at the time of day.

Nick