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California NEM rules changing to allow energy storage arbitrage

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Yonki

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Mar 31, 2015
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Pacific Grove, CA
CleanTechnica reports:
The early February breakthrough in California energy storage rules under Net Energy Metering will still take time to be codified, but the great news is that energy from storage can be sold to utilities as long as the storage equipment meets a new Underwriters Laboratory standard. Under Time of Use rates, households with certified storage capacity can store energy during the day and sell it back to the utility during peak periods in the evening.
This sorta seems to be what Tesla Energy Sales has been promising I would be able to do since we initially started talking in November 2017. Except that I thought Powerwalls (without solar) could already do this - was it not allowed in CA? Will it still be verboten for us with solar due to the ITC?
 
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Still have not heard from anyone at Tesla Energy about my powerwall questions, got a call from someone last week trying to sell me Tesla solar and told him I already had solar but could he help me with some powerwall questions. he asked me if I had sent an email on the web site and I said yes then he said you are in the que. sent an email yesterday and no response.
 
I'm actually not sure that all customers are already allowed to export. My PG&E Interconnection agreement for the Powerwalls specifically called the Powerwalls a "non-NEM-eligible" storage system. My interpretation is that this means I cannot export energy from the Powerwalls, even if the energy originally came from solar. Do you think that that terminology allows for export of energy that originally came from an NEM-eligible system?
 
Hmm, PG&E customers have the regulatory option to interconnect their PV + storage as "NEM Paired Storage", in which case PG&E allows the customer to export power from their storage at any time, as long as the storage was charged from solar. I handled my interconnection with PG&E myself, and that is the option I chose. If Tesla chose a different way to handle your interconnection, so that you are not supposed to ever export from your storage, that is an extra limitation Tesla has created.

Of course, the Powerwall doesn't support the option to export from storage, so the regulatory distinction is currently moot.

Cheers, Wayne
 
Thanks, that's very interesting. I guess the two options are analogous to the "no grid charging" and "no storage export" use cases in the new decision. That would imply that Tesla is more interested in grid charging than storage export (presuming of course they thought this through). It'll be interesting to see what Tesla does five years down the road when a significant number of installations are fully vested in the ITC, removing the grid charging restriction.