Marlin has been wanting to put a 10 kw panel system up for a couple of years , on an out building, on his farm.

at breakfast the other morning he was talking about the energy companies and how they want to stop offering incentives.

He told us about some of them not making enough money.
instead of giving a person with solar panels the exact same credit ,
some of them want to charge you one price for using grid electricity and then offer you 50% less for the power you provide for the grid.

in addition,they want the government to scale way back , the credits that it offers to home owners that want to install new p.v. systems.

he could not confirm it but there is info on the www that electricity bills might go up to off set the losses of the companies , " they have to consistently upgrade, update, upkeep maintain and replace the system and labor costs are not getting cheaper"

can any one here confirm substantiate or add contradictory information to this?

I see no objection to power companies buying and selling power at different prices. That is the reason that many power companies designed meters that were capable of working differently when going in reverse (selling power to the utility). Just allowing the meter to run backward would effectively put the utility in the condition of buying electricity from the consumer at "retail" prices when that obtained from other companies was at a "wholesale" rate. (Kind of like taking spinach you grew in your backyard garden to the supermarket and trying to sell it to them for the same price they sell it to other customers--not going to happen. Why should the power company do it?)

flashguy

I'm in Palm Beach County FL and have a 8.2 KWH PV system. FPL basic charge plus the fuel supplement is 0.09086/kwh. At the end of the year, I had a surplus, I had supplied more current than I used so they paid me for the excess. For 736 kwh, they paid at a rate of 0.016970 for a total of $12.49. I do not occupy the home during much of the summer and the A/C is set to about 80 and hot water is turned off so my usage is abnormally low for Florida. They do not pay anything near what they charge!

quote:

Originally posted by Trooperdan:
I'm in Palm Beach County FL and have a 8.2 KWH PV system. FPL basic charge plus the fuel supplement is 0.09086/kwh. At the end of the year, I had a surplus, I had supplied more current than I used so they paid me for the excess. For 736 kwh, they paid at a rate of 0.016970 for a total of $12.49. I do not occupy the home during much of the summer and the A/C is set to about 80 and hot water is turned off so my usage is abnormally low for Florida. They do not pay anything near what they charge!

Build your own transmission infrastructure & sell it elsewhere. You could make all of 67$.
I bet they're actually giving you a decent price - the marginal cost to dick around with your 100s of kW-hrs is huge compared to the cost of the multi-MW-hrs they produce.
Just like the gas tax & EVs - somebody still has to build the roads, and surprisingly, that costs money.

NREL is to publicly release a tool called REopt from r the residential customer that determine what renewable energy sources work in your area. I have played with the commercial tool a little and it should show you what is cost effective.

Incentives vary by State, but last I knew the feds only had incentives for solar and wind. Several years there like geothermal were taken away. However, I don't remember if they apply for residential, commercial or industrial scale.

I wonder if this is a nation wide thing or just a few companies

there is a bit of a push to go PV here...been solicited by a few different companies over the past month

Yes, government mandates produce a percentage of renewable energy, that goes up as years go by. This costs more, they still will make money. Ends up costing the customer more.

The utility still has to build power plants and transmission and distribution networks (T&D) for those times in which you're not generating power. Those cost are shared across all customers. So when you purchase less (because you generate solar kWh), you're not paying for the T&D. Hence, they want to compensate you less for the power they purchase from you so that they still have a margin to cover T&D.