Moved in, got the CO, solar panel breakeven

We moved in Friday, Dec 12, based on a temporary certificate of occupancy.

Thanks to the best friends in Charlotte! People in our church and from Karen's homeschooling group helped move every scrap of furniture, from small lamps to a heavy piano, as well as everything we had in storage.

We got our final on electrical on Jan 20, and got our Certificate of Occupancy later that day.

I talked to the patient people at Duke Energy about connecting the solar panels. I finally understand that I can sell two different parts of what is coming off the panels. I can sell electricity, measured in kWH and green credits, measured in Renewable Energy Credits.

All this time I thought I was just selling electricity.

The first question on anyone's lips is: how much will you get?

The answer: it varies. Read carefully, Grasshopper.

Now the electricity can be sold in two different flavors: Option A and Option B. It can be sold using either a bi-directional meter (costs $3.75 a month to administer) or with dual meters ($16.20 a month).

Steve Smith from Duke Energy put a lot of effort into drawing this picture of the different metering options.

I created a spreadsheet to compare the options. Between bi-directional and dual metering, dual metering comes out way ahead. If you look at Steve's picture, you'll see that bi-directional gets you credit for the intervals that you are sending back more power than you are consuming, while dual metering does a "buy all/sell all," i.e., buys all of my residential electricity from Duke and sells all of my rooftop electricity to Duke. It also gets me more RECs.

Now there is one site that calls RECs bragging rights. This allows me to salve the conscience of Al Gore and other environmentalists so that they can say they are using clean energy when, in fact, they are burning bituminous coal to make their electricity and burning gasoline to power their cars.

OK, I can see that you're still waiting to find out how much I am going to get for these solar panels. Here ya go, Grasshopper.

Duke will pay me these rates for kilowatt-hours. The number are in pennies. So the first option pays $0.0239 / kWH.

• Option A Capacity Credit on peak 2.39
  
• Option A Capacity Credit off peak 0.47
  
• Option A Energy credit on peak 5.34
  
• Option A Energy credit off peak 3.87
  
• Option B Capacity Credit on peak 8.40
  
• Option B Capacity Credit off peak 1.30
  
• Option B Energy credit on peak 5.64
  
• Option B Energy credit off peak 4.28
  

So the energy I put on the grid varies on the month (June-Sep are peak months) and by the hour (for example, 1PM to 9PM in the summer months are peak hours). Duke will also pay more for the energy I put on the grid (Energy credit) as well as for power plants that they won't have to build (Capacity credit).

Steve says a handy rule-of-thumb is 6 cents a kWH for Option B. He also mentioned that most of his customers are using Option B.

NC Greenpower will be selling my RECs for 15 cents a kWH.

And the second question is usually: "How long until you break even?" That answer will depend on the kindness of NC Greenpower to continue paying out their RECs. When my contract is up, they could raise or lower (more likely lower) the amount they pay for RECs. I suppose that I could try to sell them on eBay?