Clever Accounting Lets Utilities Cash In When You Go Solar

[kristopher]

Clever Accounting Lets Utilities Cash In When You Go Solar
By John Farrell
August 9, 2011

I recently got a copy of a utility bill for a Minnesota business that has a 40 kilowatt (kW) solar PV array. I wanted to learn how quickly he’d pay off his array with the electricity savings.

...Payback time was 30 years. Even if the business owner had received a generous $2.00 per Watt rebate on top of federal tax incentives, it would still take 22 years for her to recoup her investment. It all came down to the way utilities account for solar power under “net metering” rules.

A quick tutorial. Net metering essentially lets a utility customer run their meter backward if they have an on-site electricity generator (like rooftop solar). So if I’m a commercial customer who uses 10,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) a month but my solar panel generates 4,000 kWh, I only pay for the difference: 6,000 kWh. This is supposedly a great deal, because rolling back the meter at the retail rate typically beats getting paid the utility’s “avoided cost” wholesale power rate – the rate the utility pays for more power from nearby power plants.

But the trick is how the meter rolls back. You might think that your electricity bill has simple math: total electricity consumed times the rate per kWh used. In the case of this business owner, that would have been a rate of 21 cents per kWh and a payback period for their solar array of just 9 years.

If you thought it was simple...

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2011/08/clever-accounting-lets-utilities-cash-in-when-you-go-solar?cmpid=SolarNL-Thursday-August11-2011

[DeSwiss]

1. K&R

The reality is that institutional establishments, institutions of codified thought, and institutions of societal influence and power, meaning philosophies, dogmas on one hand and corporations and governments on the other, each have a high propensity to engage in denial, dishonesty, and corruption to maintain self-preservation and self-perpetuation. The result is a continuous culture lag where social progress by way of incorporating new socially-helpful scientific advancements is constantly inhibited. It is like walking through a brick wall as the established power orthodoxies continue to perpetuate themselves for their own interests and comforts.

The profit mechanism creates established orders which constitute the survival and wealth for a few groups of people. The fact is that no matter how socially beneficial new advents may be, they will be viewed in hostility if they threaten an established financially-driven institution. Meaning social progress can be a threat to the establishment. So to put this into a sentence: "Abundance, sustainability and efficiency are the enemies of profit."

Progressive advancement in science and technology which can solve problems of inefficiency and scarcity once and for all, are in effect making the prior establishment's servicing of those issues obsolete. Therefore in a monetary system corporations aren't just in competition with each other, they're in competition with progress itself. That is why social-change is so difficult within a monetary system. In other words, the established monetary system refuses to allow free-flowing change.

~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPmHaTirnCc">Peter Joseph

We will never, ever change things by trying to work within, reform and improve upon the corrupted system we presently have. TPTB will always find a way to insure their survival, even at the cost of our own.

- The day we finally accept this reality is the day we can mark as our true birth of freedom......

"Our failures are the consequence of many factors, but possibly one of the most important is the fact that society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking. This means that the potentially - intergratable - techno - economic advantages are not comprehended integratively and therefore are not realized. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." ~Richard Buckminster Fuller

[Gregorian]

2. Thank you for this.

I'm aiming in the direction of PV arrays. So now I know the truth about net metering. I see in the comments section that a large enough array can avoid the demand charge.

Live and learn. Hopefully not the hard way. Corporate bastards.