Here is my last year on 9.2k, from Sunpower. Still waiting for the upgrade to 11.6k

http://www.enichesoftware.com/media/volt.jpg

We installed Enphase microinverters in April 4/12 9.2kw. Then we upgraded 8/15 to 12.5 kw. the total for 2013 is 12,124.12 KWH or 12.1 MW
Man you sure get great sun there. My 12.5kw system should make about what your 9.2 system makes AZ is a great place for solar power.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...array-2013-jpg

Wow, you guys are really making power!

This summer when my wind and microhydro go in I'm hoping to even out my winter power which is pretty bad. Also this will be my first year with both systems in and I'm exited about how much my PV arrays will do during our long summer hours.

Rob

Rob post an image of you 2013 solar year.

I have made so many changes this year that I still don’t know if we are at or close to netzero.

I need to carry more solar to the winter to cover my heating. The mini splits should help me do this. I won’t know until next year at this time if I need to add a little more solar or I am good.
I would really like to netzero or very close to it.

Mark

Pinball,

Do you suppliment your solar with natural gas? I'm total electric. With a shop and a 5 ton heat pump, some months I don't make it.

I do watch the lights, that is if their turned on or off and no one's in the room. But I leave things pluged in like battery chargers, with their little green light lit. Also I turned off the 30,000 gallion pool, kids are gone. I have a couple out buildings I'd like lights in and access to a 110v outlet for battery charging.

I heard of DC charging for electric cars. That could be a cheaper way of charging from solar, bypassing the inverter, don't know.

We have natural gas heat and hot water. The hot water project is here.
Takagi T-H3-DV with 0.95 energy factor.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/renova...er-heater.html

I had no way to heat with electric so I put in a single zone Mini split 27 seer and a duel zone mini split 21 seer. That has cut my natural gas usage way down. The kid’s rooms still need heat and if it gets in the teens I do not use the duel zone unit.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/geothe...t-install.html

We have a pool also I put in this pump last year. It is 240v and uses a fraction of the power that we were using the year before. Yes it was a self-install. It uses 160watts on low and that is the speed we use.

My old pump cost over $100 a month to run this one is about $5 a month to run.


I would never be truly netzero but I would like to be closer than I am right now.


DC charging is interesting but 240 charging is cheaper. The chargers prices are much lower than they were.

I have parts the build my own 240 volt charger
open-evse - Open Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) - Google Project Hosting

PB,
This is halfway before my 4.2KW system went intertie (end of August) so this year should be better.(the 4.2 system doesn't show up on this chart either so basically this is a 6.44KW yearly summation) Also the roof modules are east/west. (I can't complain, it was a free grant) but may move them off the roof to a south facing position at some point. Once the snow covers them I either have to get on the roof and brush them off or wait for a warm spell and thaw.
With all this I am net zero but I'm not heating fully so it's not really fair. Once the windmills and microhydro go in and I get the mini-split I'll really see where I stand.

Vern,
DC charging won't give you that much more as the new inverters are running 95% plus efficiency. Saving on the cost of an inverter might help but don't you still need them to run the house?

Rob


http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...ay-capture-jpg

Wow snow in the south. It has been a couple years since we have seen this and it is not good for solar power.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...array-snow-jpg

Eh, a little sunshine would melt that in no time. :)

We made 1,202 KWH so far this month so we are ok. But we used all that and another 580 KWH very cold month.

It is going to be 60 degrees on Friday.

Gary,
I have a 24' pole with a soft squeegee on it that I use to clean my modules but it's a pain! With as little snow as you have you won't have to do anything.
Last night it was 15 below here. I think I'm going to move to the Kona side of the big island of Hawaii.
Rob

We have net metering and they zero out any extra power generated once a year. The date is June first. This is bad because it is right after three very solar months plus a time where we don’t have to use much heat or AC.

I have been working with Duke Power to get this changed. It looks like I have made progress but now they want to maybe change it to 11/1 they say a lot of solar users have gas heat so they want to zero out then.

I just installed Mini splits to heat with and put in enough solar so I could carry over extra power to the winter and heat with it. Wow if they zero use out 11/1 that will kill me. I sure hope this does not back fire on me.

I have contacted the biggest solar installer trying to get him on board. He is reviewing his customers to see how many are like me. Duke power had just called him to talk about what date to use.

He seemed fine with march 1 as the date I purposed because even know he uses most of his power in the summer the winter he just breaks even or has to pay some. He wants me to call him in a couple days to talk about it again.


In North Carolina Duke Power wanted to change net metering to only give solar customers wholesale rates not retail credit as we get now. People picketed to corporate office. Duke has raised rates last three years in a row so they back off for now.

It is crazy to think that we invest on solar based on the rules in place but they could change for the worst so quickly.

If you get paid for the excess (above what you pay to purchase a kWh), why does the date matter?

When they Zero us out they keep any extra we have for free we get 0 dollars for extra on the zero out date.They say this is so people only build systems big enough to cover what they use.

Most months we can carryover extra to the other months. I carried forward 200KWH then I used that up the next month. but on June 1 they zero out all carry forward credit and keep it for free.

What I'm reading is that major utilities are starting to really feel the effects of solar customers like us.
You have to realize what's happening. When you or I put in a system we take corporate profits away, basically that's taking money out of the hands of the few and putting it in the hands of the many. Corporations want control and they see individual power as limiting that control.

Now a lot of utilities are starting to rethink their position, they're saying, 'how can we profit from individual PV' basically.

I just read the monthly newsletter from my rural coop. I get paid 10.7 cents a Kwh, which is what I pay for the electricity I buy. I have a contract but I don't know how long it lasts guaranteeing that price. All new installs will be paid what my coop purchases electricity for which is 3 to 4 cents a Kwh. It seems to me that someone is trying to limit installs but as prices of systems and the ease of installations drops along with the rising cost of energy solar installs won't go away any time in the near future.

Alternate energy is the only long term viable future.

Rob

They already have rules in place to not allow more than 1% solar on a line.
Some states require power companies to have % of their power generated from renewables. I guess I can see why they do that now.

On a brighter note my panels are melting the snow off.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...ay-capture-jpg

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/attach...y-capture2-jpg

They are all back to making power.

Yes, they will do that. Once you start to get a part of the panel exposed it will start to heat up and melt the snow. I've seen my panels melt snow in single digit temps.

Rob

Wow single digit temps that is pretty cool. I hope to not see snow for a couple more years now.:)

I wish I could say that!

As someone sitting on the other side of the planet this week (next to the South China Sea), I can honestly say we (in America) are behind in our adoption rate for alternative energy and LEDs.

I agree with Rob that the corporate monopolies that run our US utilities seem to be turning from ignoring renewables and renewable generators to making it a challenge to install or use renewables in an average home. As more people swap from liquid fueled vehicles to plug-ins, I only see electric demand increasing at a time when global demand for all combustible fuels is increasing. Without alternatives, we will be left holding the short straw.

I haven't rolled one kWh over from month to month on my net metering plan in the last 6 months my PV system has been online. My 4400W system takes up every bit of roof my little 1800sqft house had available facing south. As a result, my power bill hasn't gone down to the bare minimum, it's simply been reduced to a manageable amount. Tinkering with net metering rates would really hurt with a system like mine where it was never intended to cover all my electric needs. I went with PV because it was faster to install PV than replace every system in my 50 year old house to reduce my energy needs.

Where2,
I think the wild card is going to be technology. Look at the technology of PV systems, which is a relatively new industry competing with a 100 year old one, fossil fuels. I remember 15 years ago, modified sine inverters were the only ones most of us could afford. Now we're all running pure sine with elite charge algorithms.

Germany is now selling power to France with France's aging nuclear industry that is starting to cost them dearly in maintenance and upkeep. The last modules I put in cost a fraction of the ones I put in 8 or so years ago. Installs are getting cheaper and cheaper. All of a sudden solar is a threat and again, it's an relatively new industry.

It's similar to the technology of sat. dishes. How many of you remember when they had 10 foot diameters? Now they sit on the side of your house. Electronics is changing the world and you can only extract so much oil out of the ground. Guess when the last big oil find was? The year we went to the moon, 1969!

In 2005 OPEC decide that a country can only sell oil quantities equal to their reserves. All of a sudden everyone's oil reserves doubled and tripled, you can check the charts. the thing is no one had any more oil then they had before 2005.
Now factor in the cost of wars to protect corporate oil interests and oil costs can't even come close to solar. It's only a matter of time before the millions of dollars that oil companies put into lobbying loses its effect. Oil is like a guy who just stopped running, his legs are still moving but he's not going very far.

What we're seeing right now with energy providers threatened by us small potatoes is just the tip of the iceberg. By the way this has happen before in history. When whale oil became to expensive we started using kerosene.

The world is looking at Germany, Portugal with a 52% leap in PV, and of course China. They are proving that PV is the solution.

Sorry for the long post.
Rob

I don't know about everyone else but my power distribution company (power generated by TVA) charges a monthly hookup fee of $8, just like natural gas. This is probably just to combat rising costs in other areas "without raising electric rates," but they may be trying to make more money off users who generate their own power.

Right now, TVA is encouraging people to generate their own power by offering better prices per KW they one would pay. This is because it is so expensive to start up the coal fire plants we still have around in the South.

Duke power has a $8.29 meter charge that we cannot off set.
We also have a power bill with Blue Ridge Electric Cooperative their meter charge is $27.
This is very high I bet it is to discourage solar power.



This Jan turned out to be a good solar month we made 1.36 MWH power.

My electric bill in South Florida includes $7.25 in meter charges if you don't use one kWh. I've got a spreadsheet where I track my electric bill based on my meter readings, and it doesn't stay at $7.25 very long. I'm still trying to perfect my formulas on how some of the local taxes are calculated (some appear to be non-linear)

I continue to hope that my electric utility doesn't become like my water/sewer utility where the base billing charge to have a meter is ~$45.

1.36MWh is a good month! Wow!

Raising the base charge concerns me greatly. This last time the our electric went up a certain percent but the base rate went up a much higher percent. Since I am getting closer to netzero the base rate going up would really mess that up.

Wow indeed those are impressive figures!

Guys this is exactly what I'm talking about - Corporate control -. We buy our food, our water, our electricity and our fuel from a very small group of individuals. When that happens you are at their mercy. Sure PV is a threat, they want to find a way to diminish that threat as much as possible. If they control the electricity then they can raise prices to whatever they want.
What do you think fracking is all about? It's about another industry that wants to develop a dependency. They come in low, get people hooked and then they are at the liberty to dictate what they want. And this money is going to the hands of a very few people. It spirals up, the more money they make the more lobby control they have. The API (American Petroleum Institute) spend millions in propaganda and lobbies to maintain their hold. Electric cars are their nightmare!

The Walmart family alone has the equivalent wealth of the lower 40% of the US population. That equates to tremendous control of the masses. what do you think the monopoly laws, that are now pretty much ineffective were about? Stopping this very kind of activity.

What these controlling corporations are afraid of is individual power autonomy, each home creating its own energy, and that is coming. When we can make as much power as we are that autonomy is not far away.

With Rooftop Solar on Rise, U.S. Utilities Are Striking Back by Marc Gunther: Yale Environment 360

Rob

I'm in accord with the basic ideas you are stating. There are several things to mention about the specific example of regulated power utilities. Even though they supply a service to almost every single person in every developed country they still exist as profit centers for shareholders. This may have to change as solar develops, especially photo voltaic.

The problem is that power utilities will always be necessary as long as solar PV is primarily part of a grid tied distributed network. A distributed network of electrical power will always need a command and control network to move power where and when it is needed. This is regardless of whether the electric utility actually provides the power. At some point a critical mass will develop of residential and commercial solar that impacts utilities' ability to provide an income source to shareholders as they provide less and less of the actual power. That is just a fact that we can look into the future and see if one is not blinded by greed to milk a cow that is so weak it can't even stand up.

The answer is not to milk the individual and commercial entities that will eventually replace utilities as producers of powers for their own needs. That's insane. It seems to me that eventually utilities will have to be stripped of their requirement to be a profit center and be treated just like any entity that serves the whole population. The department of transportation will be a better metaphor for what electric utilities are likely to become in the future. It is publicly funded by our tax dollars and we all partake in service they provide, like roads and traffic lights. No one expects them to make a profit because they just provide the infrastructure, not the actual trains, planes, and automobiles that get us from one place to another.

Right now the electric utilities are providing the equivalent of trains, planes, and automobiles, along with the roads, highways, and traffic signals. But how much longer will that be? During this transition phase the vast majority of the population will continue to use the integrated service electric utilities now provide and they should pay for it. But the government should start the transition to a non-profit making, service providing model that will eventually just be an infrastructure provider and not a service provider. If we don't plan ahead for that day this will turn into an awful mess. Sorry for the long comment.

You do realize even now the cow power company only allows for 1% – 3% solar on each line.
In HI some people can’t get solar power because most of houses around them have solar. With the rules in place the cow will always be fat and happy.

What did you think I was advocating?

Never never
 

This will NEVER EVER change. There are a jillion reasons for this, but the most relevant is that electric power utilities will ALWAYS create their own needs, force market scares, and dictate our demands to us from WAAAAY ABOVE. Just like the telecom industry, they satisfy an addiction to way, way, way too many people and industries to ever be divided or controlled.

As we speak, big oil companies, such as Chevron, Shell and BP (not regulated power utilities) are playing on both sides of the fence. On the one hand, they continue to lobby the lawmakers for enormous oil subsidies while bashing solar subsidies. On the other, they are quietly buying into the "back office" of the solar industry. Without this massive capital stimulus, the sheer amount of PV panels installed probably would not measure in the gigawatts per year range today. Their motivations, like the regulated power companies, are both political and profit-based. But they play the game from a more flexible position.

The best thing we can do as individuals is to vote with our wallets. The more self sufficient and energy efficient we can be, the less power the powers that be will have to wield against us. Rooftop PV is cost effective, if you can afford it, as it stands today. Whether or not the average consumer believes it is another story.

Yeah, but then why doesn't some smart person in a traffic center in a major city collude to make all the traffic lights quit working. Or better yet, make the signals conflict to cause collisions between cars, like I saw on an episode of XFIles. It's true that there are a lot of very very stupid people, but even I knew that Enron was messing with us in California and causing a power shortage. I didn't know it was Enron at the time but I knew it was extremely fishy and I was mad.

Actually, a lot of people who are the worst offenders in any civilization make the excuses you are making, though I'm not saying you are one of them. As long as one can make people apathetic, like your comment encourages, then the public can be perfect marks. The point is to try to improve things before you leave the planet rather than join the crowd in taking advantage of others.

Raising my base rate just makes off-grid look more attractive. While I certainly don't like the thought of having to maintain and replace batteries, the thought becomes less of an obstacle the higher my base rate goes. I have reached the point in my life where I recognize everything around me evolves from getting up and working. If it is more productive for me to get up and maintain batteries and set aside money to replace batteries than to get up and work for the shareholders of the utility, then I will get up and maintain batteries.

If my electric base rate was $40+ per month, as my water utility base rate is, that becomes equivalent to quite a bit of my time and energy over the course of 10 years.

A co-worker of mine is in the midst of permitting to connect his house to city water. The time and monthly expense of feeding his water softener, using electric to lift the water out of his well and other expenses associated with maintaining your own water source reached the tipping point for him... The ~$4k connection fee to hook up to city water was not inconsequential. He'd much rather be following in my footsteps making his utility bills smaller each month.

Since we have natural gas I would like to see fuel cells take off. I would more than happy to make my own power with a fuel cell and solar. It just needs to come down in price and get perfected.

Is it that they can't install PV or is it that they can't sell through an intertie to the utilitity?

I think if the utilities wouldn't buy my power I'd run off grid during the daylight hours with a switching arrangement so that my batteries are used minimally during transition from shutting the grid on and off. At night I'd run wind or buy power when the costs is lower.

Right now I'm paying 10.7 cents a KWh and selling at 10.7 cents. The new interties get the 3 to 4 cents off which is what the utilities pay. So it's cheaper to have a set up where the grid is shut off when I'm making enough power to run the house.

This way I still maximize my investment and still use the utility for my benefit (my batteries last indefinitely and I use the grid to my advantage). The grid is stronger due to individual suppliers, like us, and the load on the grid is lower meaning they have to buy less power, so they get a benefit too.

What we have as individuals is flexibility which large companies don't have.

Also, it's good to note that grids aren't as stable as they would like us to believe. When there's a failure they switch over to another station, for example.

The other problem is as nuclear power plants age they become more costly to run, it's like the car with 200k miles and a bad engine. Do you spend for a new engine or do you get a new car? This is what's happening in France now and why they are buying power from Germany with PV and wind.

Rob

The greatest detriment to a democracy is propaganda.

Look up a guy named Edward Bernays, he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. His specialty was propaganda and when the corporations got a hold of him it was a marriage in heaven.
This is a true story:
The tobacco companies went to him, I think in the 20's, and said they were losing half their market because it was a taboo for women to smoke. Bernays had several prominent women all smoke in public during a major parade with the news papers present. He called the cigarettes "freedom sticks" and pronounced that women who smoked were expressing their independence. Bingo, women started smoking everywhere!

With that said, I still think the wild card here is technology. Once we get to the point where you can buy a home with PV in place that will supply all your power new homes will be expected to have those systems in place just like when we got running water and toilets in homes.

Right now Elon Musk from Tesla is making cars that people want. I just saw that Nissan has a lease for the Leaf at $199 a month, I'm thinking of getting it. I drive the car for three years with no concerns about batteries or being stuck with a car I can't sell because technology has surpassed the technology in the car I'm leasing.

The last thing anyone should think is that technology isn't going to far surpass what we have now. When I was building Sinclair computers back in the late sixties people thought it wasn't much more than an geek exercise. When Steve Jobs put the mouse on a computer everyone laughed. Don't underestimate technology. If I sell a new home with a system in place that saves on the rising costs of electricity, people are going to buy it. When you go into a HD or Amazon and buy a system that you plug into your wall that sells power back to the grid people will want it. Amazon sells something right now that does that. What do you think will happen when it improves? Module efficiencies aren't going down they're going up, their cost is going down. That's called free enterprise and when it's combined with new technology it's a powerful thing.


Rob

After a few snow days it is nice to see the sun come back. 72.6 KWH I was very pleased with this day. It is nice to see the panels getting 200 watts again. But I can’t wait to see 225 watts again spring here we come.

I just got done cleaning off my roof modules. I have so much snow there's a perimeter around them two feet high! My ground system is much better. We're praying to the spring God too!
The one good thing is that we do have some sun reflection off the snow. My front modules are rated for 4200 watts and the other day they were putting out over 4400 watts.

Rob

I was able to get on a ladder and clear eight panels. The top part is at enough angle that it sheds snow pretty well when it warms up. But it sheds it to the top row of the bottom set of panels.


4400 of a 4200 watt system that is very impressive. I will never see that my Enphase 215 microinverters stop at about 225 watts the system does not see this very often anyway.

I'm enjoying the third straight day of spring skies. Friday, I had two clouds pass over, according to my enphase graph (only two dips in an otherwise smooth graph). Yesterday, I had a dozen clouds. Today, it's 1PM, and I haven't had a cloud yet. Highest output I saw Friday was 3.49kW from my 4.4kW system. I don't have any snow to remove, or to provide additional reflection, but I'll take all the cloudless sky I can get. :thumbup: 22.0kWh on Friday, 20.7kWh yesterday, and 11.6kWh already today. :)