Percentage-wise, the clouds hit us even worse. Our two best days in August were 38.9 (8/5) and 36.6 (8/30). Our worst was 11.6 (8/31) with a (dis-)honorable mention of 10.9 (7/31.) The days with full overcast completely kill our production numbers - losing up to around 70% of our production. When we get afternoon storms, it's not too awful since it is mostly after 4:00 or 5:00.
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New Tesla 15.12kW Solar / 4 Powerwall order in Orlando
- Thread starter BrettS
- Start date
Yeah, I see that too. Luckily we don’t get many days that are overcast all day, but I did have one earlier this week where I only generated 19.1kWh all day. That was my worst production day by far. I’ve also had a few mostly cloudy days where I only low to mid 30’s.
Ours is similar, but instead of month to month it goes for the whole year, so any excess generation that happens in the summer will show as a credit on my account and can be used in the winter. At the end of the year there is a true up and if I’ve used more power than I generated I have to pay them, if I generated more power than I used they pay me, but they will only pay the wholesale rate of about 3 cents per kWh, which is much less than the retail rate.
That's a relatively fair system as far as these systems go, because it seems like as long as you size your system to generate more than you use, even without Powerwalls, you don't have to "pay them."
What people are worried about, in detail on other threads, is where on a monthly basis its not 1 kwh to to 1 kwh, but its all "money" in that you get credits at like 10 cents per kwh and charges at 20 cents or more (or whatever peak is).
Under those systems even a person who generates, say 500 kwh back to the grid and uses 500kwh at night owes money.
Yeah, I can’t really complain too much. I still have to pay a connection fee every month, which I think is $10 and some change, but other than that if my system was sized to exactly match my usage I would owe nothing. Apparently a few years ago in florida they would actually pay the retail rate for any overproduction, but I guess the utilities were able to get that changed.
I think a lot of the confusion with other utilities comes from TOU rates. If you feed power into the grid during off peak, then how much credit is that worth during peak times? Like I said, in my case my utility doesn’t even offer TOU rates, so that makes it a lot easier. 1kWh is 1kWh no matter when it’s used. (Or generated).
This is how it works for me as well. There is an option to true up monthly I think, but yearly works better for me. Month 1 in my "reporting period" is March, so I start off every year basically getting credit, and then pulling from it later in the year as production goes down.
Its more of a psychological thing, but i love starting the year off in month 1 with a $10 charge for being connected to the utility, but a first month credit of around $120-$150 or so. At the end of the year it wouldnt matter, but from a psychological perspective, it feels better to start off with credit, then pull from it, rather than starting off "in the hole" and then having the positive number (amount you owe) drop later.
EDIT: it works for me this way because I am on a grandfathered NEM 1.0 agreement, and not on a TOU plan but regular tiered one where the more you use the higher they bill you... so I have an incentive to use as little total power from the utility as possible... which lines up to what I want to accomplish anyway.
Right.. because they generate the credit at an off peak rate of 15 cents a kWh, but pull back the electricity being billed at 40+ cents a kWh... so they have to dump in 3 times as much to the grid in order to buy back the same as what they use, if they use it during peak.
So you either have to oversize your system enough to sell back 3 times the amount of power in off peak rates to use it during peak, or... get powerwalls so that you are not pulling during peak at all.
Anyone connecting NOW to SDGE / SCE / PGE will have to do one of the two things above.
Mine is like that as well, but it’s not a significant difference really. They charge about 12 cents per kWh for the first 1000 kWh each month and then about 14 cents per kWh for everything used after that. My solar should certainly be enough to keep me out of the 14 cent tier every month, so that’s good, but it’s not really a big difference anyway.
Here is mine with SCE.... with "baseline" being determined by where you live. I live inland, and my summer "baseline" is something like 408kWh a month...or under 14kWh a day... during the summer... when we get days into the 100s here. They dont expect anyone to stay within "baseline". They expect most to fall into the tier 2 rates. in 2015 when I got solar, there were 4 tiers and the 4th one was 40c+ a kWh.
They "simplified" it. which means they ended up charging more people into tier 2 and tier 3. I only leave tier 1 maybe 1 month a year, either august or september, because my solar offsets enough of my load for me to stay within it.
Also, since I am still on this plan, I have very low NBCs as most can be offset with production. If I am a net producer, I pay $10-11 a month. If I am a net consumer for a month, they only bill me about $1.50 and then subtract the rest from my credits on file from earlier in the year, and I get credited for all production at tier 1 rates.
So, in my case, reducing reliance on the grid and staying in tier 1 means I actually have 1:1 net metering.
I think so too... but just for reference, my mom and sister have a home thats 2 miles from mine, and 300 sq feet smaller. Last month their electricity usage was around 1750 kWh. during the same billing cycle I managed to end up with negative kWh usage, but I am both more measured with things like AC, and have the solar and powerwalls.
interesting! I have an identical size array and I’m averaging mid 80s with clouds and hit 100+ on peak days. Socal location. Weird.
It likely has to do with panel orientation, shading, and/or ambient temperature. I have 12 panels facing south, 15 panels facing east and 18 panels facing west. Unfortunately I think the fact that most of my panels are facing west is hurting my production a bit because it seems like in general the mornings tend to be clear and the afternoons tend to be cloudy.
I also have a bit of shading from a palm tree that affects 3 of my panels
And, of course, here in Florida it tends to be pretty hot through the entire day.
My first day of official operation with PTO turned out to be a nice cloudless day. Interestingly, my only other cloudless day was almost exactly a month ago and at that time I generated nearly 82kWh. It’s interesting to see how much of a difference 33 days can make.
~80% of my panels face Southwest; the rest face Southeast. Practically everything is the same as yours except I use LG panels.
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darhall993
Member
May I ask what your total output of $$$ was? I sooo want to get the power wall.I got an email early this morning stating that my application is complete. I was hoping that complete meant that I had PTO, but I suspected that was not the case. I called to see where I stood and discovered that complete just means that my application has made it through the project manager review part of the process. They will now send someone out to do a field inspection sometime within the next 10 business days and after that send someone out to replace the meter.
It seems to me that it would be considerably more efficient to have the people doing the field inspection also replace the meter, since they will be here on site anyway, but I’m, just a lowly customer. What do I know?
The good news is that they said this project manager review stage could take up to 10 business days, but it was actually only done in like one. Hopefully the field inspection will also be done within a few days.
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