Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Go solar, get screwed by SDG&E starting today
But new rate structure's end result could mean less reliance on power co.
Solar power system owners connecting to the grid for the first time are in for a shock as power bills begin arriving, as are existing customers who failed to lock in a temporary reprieve. Effective December 1, San Diego Gas & Electric is implementing a new rate structure for solar customers, moving the "peak demand" window when power costs the most from midday to mid-evening.
Under the new rate structure, residential solar customers will pay 27 cents per kilowatt hour for power from 9 p.m. until 4 p.m. the following day, with prices doubled for the 4-to-9 window. Likewise, solar customers who are able to generate excess power during the late afternoon and evening stand to be compensated more by the utility than for power generated during the day, when the sun is most likely to be shining.
Existing solar customers were given an opportunity to lock in the old "direct rate" flat reimbursement based on the net amount of power taken from or delivered to the grid, or the then-current "time of use" structure for a period of five years from their original installation.
The direct-rate option came with the caveat that it would only be honored if SDG&E was unsuccessful in lobbying efforts to eliminate the more consumer-friendly option entirely (customers who installed solar before June 2016 were told to expect 20 years of plan stability). During a push last summer to drive customers from direct rate to time-of-use many complained of a lack of transparency from the utility.
"A big part of going solar is education about when to use energy — before it didn't matter what time of day you used your energy, you were charged on a volumetric rate," says Daniel Sullivan of Sullivan Solar Power. "Now people need to be mindful of what they're going to do during on-peak hours. You shouldn't be running your pool pump, for example, that's just foolhardy."
Sullivan says solar customers are increasingly including on-site battery storage as a component of solar systems — one of the same battery packs Chevrolet uses in its electric vehicles can store as much as a third of the electricity used by a typical household in a day, recharging during the day and drawing down when consumers would otherwise be stuck with SDG&E's new peak rates and no way to generate power. Inadvertently, Sullivan says, the end result could be even less reliance on the utility.
"We're at the very beginning of a revolution away from the grid. And if the utility keeps going down this path of tinkering with rates in a thinly veiled attempt to shut down competitive technology, we're going to see grid defection. From my view, that's a beautiful thing."
Here's something you might be interested in.
Go solar, get screwed by SDG&E starting today
But new rate structure's end result could mean less reliance on power co.
Go solar, get screwed by SDG&E starting today
But new rate structure's end result could mean less reliance on power co.
Solar power system owners connecting to the grid for the first time are in for a shock as power bills begin arriving, as are existing customers who failed to lock in a temporary reprieve. Effective December 1, San Diego Gas & Electric is implementing a new rate structure for solar customers, moving the "peak demand" window when power costs the most from midday to mid-evening.
Under the new rate structure, residential solar customers will pay 27 cents per kilowatt hour for power from 9 p.m. until 4 p.m. the following day, with prices doubled for the 4-to-9 window. Likewise, solar customers who are able to generate excess power during the late afternoon and evening stand to be compensated more by the utility than for power generated during the day, when the sun is most likely to be shining.
Existing solar customers were given an opportunity to lock in the old "direct rate" flat reimbursement based on the net amount of power taken from or delivered to the grid, or the then-current "time of use" structure for a period of five years from their original installation.
The direct-rate option came with the caveat that it would only be honored if SDG&E was unsuccessful in lobbying efforts to eliminate the more consumer-friendly option entirely (customers who installed solar before June 2016 were told to expect 20 years of plan stability). During a push last summer to drive customers from direct rate to time-of-use many complained of a lack of transparency from the utility.
"A big part of going solar is education about when to use energy — before it didn't matter what time of day you used your energy, you were charged on a volumetric rate," says Daniel Sullivan of Sullivan Solar Power. "Now people need to be mindful of what they're going to do during on-peak hours. You shouldn't be running your pool pump, for example, that's just foolhardy."
Sullivan says solar customers are increasingly including on-site battery storage as a component of solar systems — one of the same battery packs Chevrolet uses in its electric vehicles can store as much as a third of the electricity used by a typical household in a day, recharging during the day and drawing down when consumers would otherwise be stuck with SDG&E's new peak rates and no way to generate power. Inadvertently, Sullivan says, the end result could be even less reliance on the utility.
"We're at the very beginning of a revolution away from the grid. And if the utility keeps going down this path of tinkering with rates in a thinly veiled attempt to shut down competitive technology, we're going to see grid defection. From my view, that's a beautiful thing."
Comments