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We all have our stories of disappointing SCE policy, but I occasionally find examples from other states that show we should be grateful for the policies in place in CA, imperfect as they are.

From TN:

https://www.knoxmercury.com/2017/03...ering-creates-obstacle-household-solar-power/

Quotes:

Net metering is allowed in 36 states. It is not an option for the 9 million people served by TVA.

The reason offered by the nation’s largest public power utility is that net metering is not allowed by the law that created TVA. The utility generates electricity and sells it to 155 local power companies (LPCs). The LPCs create and maintain the distribution system and sell the power they bought from TVA to us. The contractual arrangement with TVA is a “buy all, sell all” whereby the LPCs can purchase electricity only from TVA. This effectively forbids net metering, because TVA interprets that as the LPC buying power from the owner of the PV array.

Thus, any grid-tied solar system within the TVA region must have dual metering, one to measure power coming off the grid, another to measure power going to the grid. The arrangement with TVA is likewise “buy all, sell all” in that you have no choice but to sell all the power you generate to TVA, then you buy back whatever you actually consume. If you are able to get in under TVA’s “cap” for its Green Power Providers incentives program, you will be paid the retail rate for the power you generate. All others are paid the lower wholesale rate. Everyone pays the retail rate for what they consume. So the home or business owner pays for the PV system, and TVA makes money on the power generated by it.
 
Well that stinks. Thanks for the info tbleakne.

Now what do you know about SCE's plans to force customers to TOU rates that Peak between 4 or 5 pm and 8 or 9 pm?

Do we get grandfathered TOU hours, for how long are we grandfathered? Can a current NEM customer who is on NEM1 select a TOU plan that has more favorable solar hours?
 
I might be looking at going off-grid with TVA. Some places that may not even be possible. Or everything produced would stay in my battery consumed directly.
 
Home solar, either GT or off-grid, IMO, is rapidly becoming an economic reality:

1. Pika/SolarEdge technologies have equipment that can transition easily from grid-tied to high voltage (EV type) battery backup - emergency for now, but eventually economical for off-grid
2. EVs have the potential to become the energy storage of choice (used Leafs are currently the best/cheapest energy storage available). When 100 kWh batteries are common, consumers will have the ability to use the excess energy storage to their economic advantage.
3. V2X is the "missing link" so that consumers have the choice of what works best for them - totally off-grid or grid tied with "smart grid" and "smart charging" apps that maximize their economic return on solar - based on whatever energy contracts available in their area.
4. In Texas, the current economics of GT solar, combined with "free nights" energy provide a significant payback - not there yet, but very close. With the savings of an EV, the economics look even better.

Give it 5-10 years and we'll see - if public utilities and EV manufacturers "wrench the cog" or not.
 
New push from SCE for Time-of-Use

Today a friend showed me an alert she had just received from SCE. She has had PV solar for 2 years next May, but on the standard tiered tariff without Time-of-Use. The letter said she had until Mar 1, 2018 to select one of 3 tariff options. If she did not reply, she would be put into Option 1 by default.

Option 1: A new TOU tariff with highest On Peak summer rate 5 to 8 pm weekdays, other crazy things including Super Off Peak starting at 8 am ??
Option 2: Remain with her current tiered rate.
Option 3. Move to tariff TOU-DT, the standard TOU tariff that I and many of you have with SCE, where the On Peak rate is 2pm to 8pm weekdays.

For each of these options SCE had calculated an annual cost estimate based upon her current usage TOU pattern. This values for the full year are reasonable, reflecting her solar generation, although the letter makes no mention of her having solar and Net Metering.

Option 1 $500.
Option 2 $180.
Option 3 $50.

Her question to me: Why should I not choose Option 3? My answer: yes indeed Option 3 is what you want, not Option 1.

I have not received this letter (yet), but because I am on TOU-DT already by choice, I may not get one.

I have also heard from local solar installers that as of Fall 2017, new PV installations are being forced onto a TOU tariff. Are they given a choice of Option 1 or Option 3? If just Option 1, that is really bad for solar and/or EV charging, because you don't get the high price for generating power before 5pm.
 
A cool document from the CAISO on updating the time of use periods can be found here.

As you can see, with increasing solar, the middle of the day becomes off peak or super off peak. For net metering customers this means you will have to put an increasingly large number of kWh during this time to get a kWh back during the early evening. Even though net metering will continue to exist, a home battery is going to look more and more favorable.
 
tbleakne said:
New push from SCE for Time-of-Use.
I am on TOU-D-A

Summary of rates can be found here:
SCE TOU Rates

The real issue is how much power can you shift to off-peak and super-off-peak. We keep our thermostat pretty high in Summer on-peak and quite low during super off-peak. This cools the house for a good nights' sleep and mostly allows the house to coast through the day without A/C. Dishwasher runs every night on the timer while we sleep. Car charges at night only. Most lighting is LED with dimmers. Laundry gets done on the weekends.

Our energy charge for the year was $260 for using 6,339 kWh from Edison and solar production of about 5,000 kWh.
Net cost from SCE was 4.1 cents per kWh. This was achieved by conserving usage and selling our solar at the on-peak rates and purchasing most usage at super-off-peak rates. I have just 3 kW in solar panels. So much better than the tiered rates.
 
JeremyW said:
A cool document from the CAISO on updating the time of use periods can be found here.

As you can see, with increasing solar, the middle of the day becomes off peak or super off peak. For net metering customers this means you will have to put an increasingly large number of kWh during this time to get a kWh back during the early evening. Even though net metering will continue to exist, a home battery is going to look more and more favorable.
I have been anticipating these changes for a few years. Will be interesting when and how they are actually implemented.
Yes battery to get through the top rate in comfort will be very compelling. Will actually help the system as the timing of supply and demand shift.
 
Yes you want to look at the SCE link posted by smkettner, which is not that easy to find on SCE web site:

https://www.sce.com/wps/portal/home/residential/rates/Time-Of-Use-Residential-Rate-Plans//url

On Peak
TOU-D-A 2-8pm weekdays all year, summer on-peak $.48/kWh, off-peak $.27-.28
TOU-D-T 12-6pm weekdays all year, summer on-peak $.37 Tier 1, $.42 Tier 2, off-peak $.22-.23

However, TOU-D-T is also Tiered all year, with second tier for usage > 130% of Baseline.
I was wrong; I have been on TOU-D-A as well for some time, and it has worked well for me, as I have previously reported, because I break-even on production vs consumption during On-peak, make profit on off-peak.

My friend was apparently randomly selected to be part of "first wave" as explained at

https://www.insideedison.com/stories/q-a-time-of-use-rate-plan-transitions-begin-in-2018:

Southern California Edison is preparing to transition 400,000 residential customer accounts to Time-of-Use rate plans next March as part of a statewide initiative.

Beginning in December, SCE will notify customers in this first wave of transitions that they’ve been randomly selected to participate. These customers will receive multiple communications before the actual transition in March. They will have the option to either remain on their current rate, transition to a specified TOU rate or switch to a different TOU rate offering.
 
Thanks to JeremyW for posting CAISO link about future of TOU. They project forward to 2021. I liked this:
Rooftop Solar PV (ISO’s initial analysis assumed less than 5,000 MW, however the current estimate is in excess of 10,000 MW by 2021

They propose a 4th price, Super On Peak, for 4pm to 9pm Weekdays July and Aug only. Super Off peak 10am to 4pm for all weekends except those two months, plus weekdays Mar and April.

Sure this will incentivize batteries, but it is not clear whether they will really pay for themselves over their limited lifetimes.

I talked to a Powerwall 2 rep at Tesla Buena Park last Saturday. They have begun doing residential installs, 4 to 6 month backlog. To appease SCE and other utilities, Tesla has programmed the Powerwall to only charge from surplus solar power, not from the grid, to minimize the arbitrage. The Powerwall is controlled by an App on your phone. Key parameters you can set include depth of discharge and top of charge. The full capacity of the Powerwall 2 is 13 kWh, but you need to set generous margins at the top and bottom of the battery if you want the battery to last through years of daily cycling.
 
JeremyW said:
A cool document from the CAISO on updating the time of use periods can be found here.
SDG&E switched to basically these TOU periods in December. It's doubled the amount of money I now pay for electricity annually.

Definitely need to do more analysis if battery storage makes sense, but my initially calculations only made it marginal at best at current rates, but that probably means that it will be a no-brainer 5 years from now with the way rates are going.
 
We switched to a TOU program two months ago. Our bill is now a third of what it was. BUT...in the winter we live in our motorhome on our property in Palm Springs. At 8 o;clock we switch the coach to battery and let the inverters do the work. At 10 at night we switch it back. Went from a 115 dollar per month bill to 36. We have 800 watts of solar on the roof. Works well. Kinda like a power wall but not. 8 x 6 volt batteries.
 
I was able to find a SCE Rate Comparison Tool mentioned by Boomer23 at breakfast last Saturday. It supposedly allows you to evaluate and compare several of the new and old TOU rates against your actual usage for the previous 12 months. Of course if you are contemplating adding solar or another EV, this evaluation will be flawed, but if your usage is stable, it should help a lot.

There are several paths on the web site to this tool. One is: home (residential) -> rates are changing -> learn more -> Residential Rate Plans -> Rate Comparison Tool.

I say "supposedly" because I could not run the tool. It requires a customer account of the form: 3-###-####-##. My customer account has the form: 2-##-###-####, so the tool rejects it. Is this because I am already on TOU-D-A ? I believe others on this thread also have TOU-D-A. Do you also have a 2-## account ?

I am overwhelmed with all the TOU choices, but some of them can be eliminated right away if you have solar, because they price daytime at Off-peak or Super Off peak (TOU-D-4-9PM, TOU-D-5-8PM).
 
When I was sizing my solar system I had to write a little program that could crunch my hourly usage data from SCE for the last 12 months against estimated solar hourly production for a year from the pvwatts estimator. I could plug-in different TOU schedules to get an idea how things would work out.
 
Valdemar said:
When I was sizing my solar system I had to write a little program that could crunch my hourly usage data from SCE for the last 12 months against estimated solar hourly production for a year from the pvwatts estimator. I could plug-in different TOU schedules to get an idea how things would work out.

Interesting - in our area there is a provider that bills us based on 15 minute interval actual pricing (energy, not distribution) - for a monthly subscription price ($10). Did you download this type data and crunch it out off-line, or can you do this more or less real time by capturing data, say on an hourly/daily interval? What is astonishing is that some "peak" pricing is 10X "normal" and that "off peak" pricing can actually be a payment rather than a cost!

Also amazing is that so many in my area use copious amounts of energy (pools, kids with doors open/lights on, etc, etc). If they installed a well designed solar system with properly sized energy storage that is bi-directional (Pika Energy) with "smart" usage controls, they could pay back much of the system costs. Having an EV to charge early morning would enhance their savings - especially if they purchase a used Leaf (for next to nothing :) ). IMO, change is coming!
 
It was offline, downloaded 12 months usage history at X minute intervals in CSV format, the value X is escaping me at the moment but at least on an hourly basis if not more granular. Similar for pvwatts estimated production. There should be a software package out there that can do similar calculations, but I couldn't find anything at the time. It worked out pretty close to my prediction, I'm about 3,000kWh net consumer over 12 months and pay $0 not counting mandatory fees. The system is a tad larger than I could have gotten away with but that was a conscious decision. Of course this is only true until SCE changes the TOU rates which may send all my projections down the drain.
 
That is a real worry - as more pure grid tied energy systems go on-line, any use of the grid as storage may not be cost effective. Battery storage can work around this issue - especially if I could get my Leaf to be the "storage" - may be coming.
 
This thread has been dormant since Feb 2018, but I have some news. Tonight, July 10, 2018, I sign on to my account at SCE.com to see how my usage is doing during this heat wave. I click on "View Usage" as usual, but this time I find a completely different graphical display for monthly and daily usage.

I click on Energy Use tab, then individual monthly bars to get daily usage, then day bars again to get hourly [for TOU]. All this looks nice, like SMA Sunnyboy solar production graphs, except negative usage (net production) is NOT shown.

Also, before they would show predicted net $ for the coming monthly period, using actual TOU pricing. Now they only show daily positive consumption in kWh for current billing period.

Has anyone else seen this (perhaps months ago) and talked to SCE ?
 
tbleakne said:
This thread has been dormant since Feb 2018, but I have some news. Tonight, July 10, 2018, I sign on to my account at SCE.com to see how my usage is doing during this heat wave. I click on "View Usage" as usual, but this time I find a completely different graphical display for monthly and daily usage.

I click on Energy Use tab, then individual monthly bars to get daily usage, then day bars again to get hourly [for TOU]. All this looks nice, like SMA Sunnyboy solar production graphs, except negative usage (net production) is NOT shown.

Also, before they would show predicted net $ for the coming monthly period, using actual TOU pricing. Now they only show daily positive consumption in kWh for current billing period.

Has anyone else seen this (perhaps months ago) and talked to SCE ?

Thanks for sharing, just checked and this is a very disappointing interface for solar customers indeed.

Edit: looks like you can still get to the old display via "Go to your SCE My Account.." link above the new graph, but who knows if their plan is to fully retire it at some point.
 
tbleakne said:
except negative usage (net production) is NOT shown. ?

The SCE website is been under near constant update for over a year now on how data and functions are presented.
The updates go very slow during the day. Often with a glitch and new data is delayed for several days.

The net amount does show but not during the update process. I find before early morning (7a) or late evening (10p) is the most reliable time to log in. Yes during the day when the daily data updates are compiled the website often errors out or shows no solar credits. Everything does show correctly once the daily update is complete. Programming must be poor because the entire month gets re-updated every day so SCE is just churning monster data volume every day.

Check it now and should disply correctly.
 
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