Forget 'Baby on board'

[Rick Potter]

Only a young lady would get away with that.

[Jim Koepke]

Duke Energy only pays me back $.025/Kwh of electricity I send back to them as surplus, and now charges $15.6/kWh for usage.

Most people paying a rate like that would sit in the dark with the TV off.

In my county:

Cowlitz County PUD's patrons are charged an average residential electricity price of 8.79 cents per kilowatt hour

We are among the lowest 170 rates in the country.

It seems a bit coercive for them to pay you so little while charging so much.

jtk

[Alan Lightstone]

Whoops. Typo on my post. Duke Energy charges $0.156/kWh. Forgot the decimal point.

That being said, they now only pay back 16% of what they charge you for electricity for surplus you send them, that they then resell. Nice business to be in. Their rates they charge customers went up this year, and the amount they pay you for surplus went down even more.

[Steve Demuth]

Whoops. Typo on my post. Duke Energy charges $0.156/kWh. Forgot the decimal point.

That being said, they now only pay back 16% of what they charge you for electricity for surplus you send them, that they then resell. Nice business to be in. Their rates they charge customers went up this year, and the amount they pay you for surplus went down even more.

The rules on feed in tariffs in this country are a complete mess, with both solar advocates and the utilities arguing for - and in some places getting - absurd positions. The advocates think you should get net metering at full retail, with refunds for production over use. The utilities want to pay so little that no consumer would choose to self generate. None of this is helpful. It's particularly not so in a place such as where I live, where a Rural Electric Cooperative that serves almost entirely widely distributed customers on land parcels that range from 20 acres up to thousands - We should be encouraging levelized solar and wind on every farm they serve, either with on-farm batteries, or by building grid-scale batteries.

Currently, my own REC has basically two options for those who want to have distributed generation (which is mostly, but not entirely solar): you can go full net meter (which means you get a credit for every kwh you feed into the grid equal to what you pay for a kwh taken off the grid), provided you don't connect production that exceeds 125% of your annualized usage, or you can build as large as you want (up to 40kw), but be compensated at "avoided cost" rates set by the REC's wholesale supplier at maybe 10% of the retail meter rate. The full net meter option is crazy: there is no way the power a solar system feeds back into the grid for a couple of hours on a sunny day is worth full retail, and paying that rate just shifts the cost of continuous generation off those with solar to those without. But the avoided cost calculation option is absurd in the other direction: we sould be encouraging responsible renewable production, including levelized production, not strangling it at birth.

The absence of a national grid policy on this stuff is an embarrasement.