pchilds said:
I think this page is more useful because it shows the actual rates.cwerdna said:
foxwiz said:
+1.miimura said:
I think you went too big on the solar!fooljoe said:
miimura said:I think you went too big on the solar!
SCE is different than PG&E because the Super Off-Peak on SCE is not tiered. You pay a fixed price between midnight and 6am. However, the peak and part-peak are tiered. The solar will have the fastest pay-back if you keep the system small and just cut the usage down to the baseline.
So, if you can just pay the 9-12 cent rates in the table above, you would be in great shape. Anyway, SCE has annual true-up just like PG&E, so you have to look at the whole year in total. A good solar installer can run all these numbers for you. They will be most accurate if they have access to your past bills.
I think minimizing the payback period is a silly way to look at solar - you ignore the decades of pure profit that come after. I prefer to look at the monthly 30 year amortized cost of the system + the monthly electricity bill that remains to get a "true" picture of how much money you're saving. And doing that I just calculated that the cost of energy from my panels amounts to about 8c/kwh, which is less than any rate offered by SCE, implying that zeroing out the Edison bill is the best approach. Also, note that with the new non-tiered super off-peak it pays to get into tier 2 as fast as possible. It's all about maximizing the on-peak to super off-peak ratio.miimura said:
Haha and I had just had a "smart" meter put in for TOU myself, but when I put in solar they had to come out to change it again. You'd think one type of "smart" meter should be able to handle all of these possibilities.yblaser said:
I am on a TOU-D-T rate with SCE and when my solar came on line in February, they didn't have to change out the smart meter.fooljoe said:
I actually agree with you, the "too big" comment was kind of tongue-in-cheek because it sounded like the other guy was generating enough kWh for the Leaf and RAV, when he was probably talking about dollars, not kWh. Sizing to zero out your annual bill is the way to go. I was responding with the earlier poster in mind that was assuming you had to put up 10's of thousands of dollars to get into solar. That is not true. However, I think if people "go cheap" and start with a small system, then they really see how the solar works and they want to go bigger and it's not so easy to add to an existing system.fooljoe said:
This is really the key point with solar and TOU rates. You don't have to get anywhere near zero net usage to zero out your bill. My mid-June to mid-July statement had 385kWh of net usage: 451kWh Off-Peak, -23kWh Part-Peak, -43kWh Peak. The billed energy charge on PG&E E-9A was only $2.81. The same net usage on E-1 (straight billing) would have been $51.93 and the normal solar TOU rate E-6 would have been $30.05Ampster said:
Thanks for pointing that out earlier, it was a concept that I did not initially understand, until your spreadsheet made it clearer. I hope others can benefit from this sharing of information. It is truly the great thing about being part of a forum like this.miimura said:
