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I disagree because eventually, retail rates will be allowed to float and will track wholesale rates. Meaning that what you want to do is run the HVAC during the day to preheat or precool (depending on the season) when electricity is cheap and then shut down the system in the evening, when the price of electricity spikes. This will negate most of the advantage of a variable speed system. Variable speed is for reducing or eliminating cycling, but in the Bay Area, the outdoor temperature crosses through our indoor set point on most days, meaning that the system cycles anyway. Variable speed systems can generally only get down to 20-30% and if the building requires less than that, the system will cycle.


Nah man, my wife sets the AC to whatever she is going to set it at. The whole reason I got the ESS was to become agnostic to TOU.

Plus she complains these condensing units have a ridiculously loud startup.
 
Agree it would make sense for retail rates to be allowed to float and track wholesale rates more robustly, but not sure that is happening/will happen.

I am on the last few months of the phase-out of the PG&E grandfathered E-6 rate plan. There used to be a big differential from peak/off peak rates. Now Tier 1 off peak is $0.30/kWh and peak is $0.42/kWh.

Hope in the future this narrowing differential trend reverses.
 
Agree it would make sense for retail rates to be allowed to float and track wholesale rates more robustly, but not sure that is happening/will happen.

I am on the last few months of the phase-out of the PG&E grandfathered E-6 rate plan. There used to be a big differential from peak/off peak rates. Now Tier 1 off peak is $0.30/kWh and peak is $0.42/kWh.

Hope in the future this narrowing differential trend reverses.

Remember the rates paid by the IOUs is rarely the same as what the wholesale rate is in the open market. Many times the IOUs pay way more than the wholesale rate. You can research the PPAs for solar and how those locked in rates that the IOUs pay are dramatically higher than the spot rates for solar. This is why you may see solar market rates only being worth $0.04 per kWh at noon, but then you know PG&E is paying a lot more.

This is because PG&E has Purchase Price Agreements (PPA) where they guarantee a portion of the revenue stream of a utility scale operator. This guarantees that utility scale operator a customer in advance of them building a generating facility. And with this contract tied to a "too big to fail" utility, the project can receive a AAA rating and borrow money at very low rates. This almost all but guarantees the generator a profit and healthy ROI.

Nobody is dumb enough to take the other side of these contracts... so they cannot be hedged. Like a generic ratepayer out there would have loved if PG&E were somehow hedged so they were passing $0.04 per kWh generation electricity rates to homeowners for energy from noon to 3pm. But nope... PG&E is just overpaying for solar at that time to the solar generators through the PPAs.

PS, PG&E's director of strategic planning has said repeatedly that it was a 'losing strategy' to plan out energy capacity on a MW basis. PG&E won't share how it plans the investment going into the generators, but you can tell it's not efficient lol. Because who would ever want to plan for MW supply to be managed against MW demand? Only a loser would want to try and match supply with demand right? (har har sarcasm).

With PG&E involved, the winners are the ones who receive $ from PG&E's ratepayers and various grifts. Everyone else is the loser with these 'losing strategies'.
 
Nah man, my wife sets the AC to whatever she is going to set it at. The whole reason I got the ESS was to become agnostic to TOU.

Plus she complains these condensing units have a ridiculously loud startup.
In the future, you won't give an exact setpoint temperature, but you'll give a range of acceptable temperatures to your smart thermostat and the times you want those temperatures to be maintained (occupied/unoccupied hours). After loading the day's rate schedule, the smart thermostat will then come up with a way to keep the temperature inside the acceptable band for the least amount of money during the hours required.
 
In the future, you won't give an exact setpoint temperature, but you'll give a range of acceptable temperatures to your smart thermostat and the times you want those temperatures to be maintained (occupied/unoccupied hours). After loading the day's rate schedule, the smart thermostat will then come up with a way to keep the temperature inside the acceptable band for the least amount of money during the hours required.


No way man... in the future when the kids is going down to bedtime, someone's smashing that thermostat to 74F and it better be 74F lololol.

Screw optimizing for the least amount of money spent. I'm optimizing for the least amount of yelling my ears have to listen to.
 
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No way man... in the future when the kids is going down to bedtime, someone's smashing that thermostat to 74F and it better be 74F lololol.

Screw optimizing for the least amount of money spent. I'm optimizing for the least amount of yelling my ears have to listen to.
Meh...my thermostat would be set to a range of 72-78°F, 24/7, except when we're gone. As long as it's always in that range when we're in the house during the summer time, it's fine. In winter, 64-68°F, and 58-68°F at night. In practice this means bringing the temperature as low or high as required to coast through peak hours with no HVAC. It's literally set it and forget it with good enough automation and the utility feeding the schedule for the next 24 hours into the thermostat.
 
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Meh...my thermostat would be set to a range of 72-78°F, 24/7, except when we're gone. As long as it's always in that range when we're in the house during the summer time, it's fine. In winter, 64-68°F, and 58-68°F at night. In practice this means bringing the temperature as low or high as required to coast through peak hours with no HVAC. It's literally set it and forget it with good enough automation and the utility feeding the schedule for the next 24 hours into the thermostat.


Haha if I set my winter Thermostat to 58F to 64F I would be dead come morning. And no, I'm not dying from the cold. I'm dying from falling down a flight of stairs as people did a mini insurrection and claimed the thermostat for themselves.
 
The "problem" with the 12-month true-up, from the utilities' point of view, is that as solar adoption continues, they will find themselves in a surplus situation in the summer months. The eventual outcome will be far too much power on the grid and people banking credits for the winter months. I suspect the solution to this would be to just keep tweaking the TOU rates to make daytime power in the summer close to free, all the way to 6pm or whatever time the demand curve outpaces supply. Off-peak might go from 8am-6pm instead of overnight. Then, backfeeding to the grid will provide owners with no real benefit and no way to bank through to winter. It will also solve the equity situation since people without solar will be getting very inexpensive power for a long stretch in the summer.

Winter TOU rates would likely be.. unpleasant.
Central CA has the opposite problem. I'm off the grid / net exporter during the winter and cannot produce nearly enough to cover my usage in the Summer.
 
do is run the HVAC during the day to preheat or precool

I originally planned to do this, but find it too cold precooling and now, just don't bother precooling by any huge amount.

I have to put on a sweatshirt in the heat of summer if I over pre-cooled. Maybe it's too much of an inconvenience now to lower it daily and if someone has $$, better quality of life to just buy enough ESS and live however they want without having to pre-cool/pre-heat and get through peak.

As someone else posted, probably true in the coast or SF, but anything inland and it's way too hot that the summer months are too heavily AC reliant to not have it on almost all day. We still have ours running at night now to sleep since I don't like leaving windows open at night. From this past winter, it was easier to use 0% grid actually vs. the summer.

I personally don't like any of the "smart" stuff since I don't want outside companies getting into the home. If you look at some of these devices (I have some cheapo cameras), I see they randomly reach out to sites outside (from my firewall).

Maybe similar to VPP, I don't want more folks controlling my stuff.
 
I originally planned to do this, but find it too cold precooling and now, just don't bother precooling by any huge amount.

I have to put on a sweatshirt in the heat of summer if I over pre-cooled. Maybe it's too much of an inconvenience now to lower it daily and if someone has $$, better quality of life to just buy enough ESS and live however they want without having to pre-cool/pre-heat and get through peak.
Well it's not a binary decision. You can pre-cool to the maximum level you can tolerate and then have it set back up at the beginning of peak hours. It won't entirely avoid usage during peak hours but due to the heat capacity of everything in your house (the walls, furniture, etc.) the AC unit will run at a lower duty cycle during that time. If everyone's AC unit runs at even a 10% lower duty cycle, that does gain something as far as suppressing overall usage goes.
I personally don't like any of the "smart" stuff since I don't want outside companies getting into the home. If you look at some of these devices (I have some cheapo cameras), I see they randomly reach out to sites outside (from my firewall).
I feel the same way, and I don't have a smart thermostat. That would change if I could gain something from it (like a thermostat that automatically loads the rates for any given day and adjusts the schedule accordingly). In that case, I actually gain something in exchange for the risk they represent. Right now, there's not really anything to be gained because the utility rate schedule is fixed. Protip: put your "smart" devices on their own VLAN and don't allow them to access your internal network. I do have some IoT devices like Chromecasts, TVs, and my Chargepoint Home, and they go on their own VLAN. For the devices that are controlled directly by devices on my network rather than through central servers somewhere else, I have a Bonjour proxy. This means that phones and computers on my internal network can "see" the Chromecasts, but the Chromecasts can't "see" the devices that are controlling them or access anything except the public internet.
 
NG heating? No Xmas lights?
So far all fellow solar PV folks without heat pumps I have discussed with grossly underestimate the energy they use in winter for home air and water heating. The large majority of homes in the U.S. use substantially more in winter than summer. Hawaii, for example would be an exception.

Our climate has mild winters and brutally hot summers, but we use substantially more kWh in winter to heat the home and our hot water. Our BEVs are also less efficient in Winter including reasons due to cabin heating and rain.
 
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So far all fellow solar PV folks without heat pumps I have discussed with grossly underestimate the energy they use in winter for home air and water heating. The large majority of homes in the U.S. use substantially more in winter than summer. Hawaii, for example would be an exception.

Our climate has mild winters and brutally hot summers, but we use substantially more kWh in winter to heat the home and our hot water. Our BEVs are also less efficient in Winter including reasons due to cabin heating and rain.
Come up the hill a little, and I use LOTS of kWH during the winter for heating!!! Like 60 to 70kwh per day
 
Lololol this article is so whack… no wonder the public is confused about solar net metering.

Solar Panels Don’t Power Your Home and Other Insights From an Energy CEO​


“The power you generate on your rooftop with a solar system, you don’t use a single watt of that in your house,” said Generac CEO Aaron Jagdfeld in an interview with Barron’s.

“Solar is nothing more than a distributed power plant for the utility,” Jagdfeld said. “100% of [the power] goes back to the grid.”

That is why, in an outage, the lights go out for a homeowner with solar panels, just as they do for everyone else. Jagdfeld runs the largest provider of standby home power in the country.
 
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Lololol this article is so whack… no wonder the public is confused about solar net metering.

Solar Panels Don’t Power Your Home and Other Insights From an Energy CEO​


“The power you generate on your rooftop with a solar system, you don’t use a single watt of that in your house,” said Generac CEO Aaron Jagdfeld in an interview with Barron’s.

“Solar is nothing more than a distributed power plant for the utility,” Jagdfeld said. “100% of [the power] goes back to the grid.”

That is why, in an outage, the lights go out for a homeowner with solar panels, just as they do for everyone else. Jagdfeld runs the largest provider of standby home power in the country.
thats nuts
 
Come up the hill a little, and I use LOTS of kWH during the winter for heating!!! Like 60 to 70kwh per day
Family of 4. Everything at home is electric/heat pumps, NG service turned off a few years ago.

Last year (2021) we used 1520kWh for air cooling, 1874 kWh for home heating, and last 12 months ~1700 kWh for hot water heater for showers/dishwasher/laundry (most of that used around winter months). We set AC at ~78°F in summer.
 
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Family of 4. Everything at home is electric/heat pumps, NG service turned off a few years ago.

Last year (2021) we used 1520kWh for air cooling, 1874 kWh for home heating, and last 12 months ~1700 kWh for hot water heater for showers/dishwasher/laundry (most of that used around winter months). We set AC at ~78°F in summer.
I have 10 mini split heads, 4 compressors, even though do not run them all at one time. I set AC to 70 and 68 in the summer. Heat to 70 to 74 in the winter.
 
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