I just opened my October electric bill. Since I have solar, my bill is usually SIGNIFICANTLY reduced. In the summer, I even get a credit.
What will it be this month? Let’s open it up and find out.
Even though it’s getting late in the year, I STILL managed to earn a CREDIT this month! The power company owes me nearly $27. The best part is that I’ve been earning credits all summer and rolling them over to build up to $296.99!
There’s a couple of things that I’ve done to make my electricity as valuable as possible. The first, is simply to conserve. By not wasting my electricity, I have more to feed out to my neighborhood and get credited for it.
The other significant thing that I do is that I’m on a time of use plan. Electricity is COSTS MORE during the day and LESS at night. Many utilities do not allow you to have grid-tie solar AND be on a time of use plan. When I found out that mine did, I went onto it right away.
Because I’m evenly credited the cost of my electricity, it’s worth MORE for me to export it during the day. That’s perfect, because that’s when the sun is shining! At night, electricity costs less, so that’s when we plug in the electric cars to charge.
Even if we are using a fair amount of electricity during the day, it first comes from our solar, where it’s effectively “free”, and only after that are we buying higher cost electricity from the utility.
Solar, Time of Use, and Electric Vehicles are a perfect match! We’ll see how far I can get into winter with our built up credit. We are NOT annual net-zero, but we do produce a significant amount of our own electric energy.
As always, you can check out solar production at: https://enlighten.enphaseenergy.com/public/systems/PqBp1213167
Until next time, stay charged up!
-Ben Nelson
