this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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I have solar and use net zero or negative electricity per month. Costs me $28 for zero usage...
Think about the POOR electric company that’s profiting off your negative electricity though!
How it works, at least in Illinois, is that the rates for the electricity itself are capped, and are separate from the rates for delivering the electricity. The latter is for the connection to the grid, and having your electricity (in or out) transit on that grid. This allows you to buy electricity from whatever supplier you like, but you will still pay ComEd (who operates the grid here) for delivery in addition to that.
If your setup produces all the electricity you use and then some, then you could disconnect yourself from the grid and cancel your electric service. However, you would then not be able to sell the surplus you generate back to the electric company (if that's even a thing for you), and you have no electricity if there is a failure in your own generation (unless you have a gasoline generator as a backup).
As it stands, consider that $28 as insurance against failure of your solar, or if you ever need to draw more power than it generates for some reason.
AFAIK it can literally be illegal to not be connected to the grid, because corruption.
This article is about Florida specifically, but I wouldn't doubt that it would be similarly difficult elsewhere. It's most certainly a Fucking Mess™.
If you really want, I imagine you'd notify your local electric company that you are cancelling service and requesting disconnection, disconnect your house from the mains on your side, then just never pay another bill.
That’s actually for the better, it’s wiring and transmission. Generation isn’t the sole cost of the electric grid and you are using it even if just the fees associated with keeping it able to supply power to you. But if it’s net zero and not gross zero you’re also using their storage.
I hate the privatized electric system myself, but we culturally seem to be thinking of the electric grid only when it breaks, and not as a highly delicate system run by specialists.
Shouldn't they be paying you when you produce more than you use? Are you feeding back into the system, or storing in batteries?
It's net metering, no batteries. The solar dumps into the grid and rolls my meter backwards. The house still always draws from the grid and rolls the meter forwards. At the end of the year they cash out any credits on the account and pay me for them at roughly half the rate I pay them per kwh.
I see. I wish we could get solar here and have it be worth the installation expense, but it is heavily overcast for most of the year.
Well fair enough to pay for the connection and ongoing maintenance in case you do use it, unless you generate enough to offset that.
Is that your connection fee or are you getting screwed by peak usage times when you're not producing solar? I got rid of the 2md part by adding a battery to my system. Still have to pay the $13 connection fee though.
It's both. Flat fees are about $20, $5-10 in peak usage fees. They didn't have that billing model until they started allowing solar interconnection.
$5-$10 for peak usage isn't terrible. My utility company did some bullshit where they would take your busy hour of usage and if it was exponentially higher than your normal usage (something that only happens with solar, since your standard usage is usually zero) and then did some outrageous multipliers. Some people I knew were getting near $100 peak usage fees.
They quit doing that a year or two ago, but still made it an easy decision for me to get a power wall just in case they tried that crap again.