Changing Net Tarriff Rates and Solar Power
PSA on Solar in CT – What Changing Net Tariff Rates Mean for You
For those planning on putting in a new resi system in CT, please be aware that Eversource, the utility that covers most residents in the state, is lowering their net tariff rate to $0 effective 12/31/23.
This means that you as a homeowner won’t bank any credits for excess production in the summer months that you can use to offset heating expenses if you have or were planning to install electric heating, such as a central heat pump. Solar’s ROI now gets pushed out longer, for sure.
As I’m in the process of designing and building a home in CT, I now need to decide if the tax credits I get by going all electric + the IAQ benefits offset the higher heating costs vs. what I could achieve by installing a hybrid system and keeping gas in the home.
Hope this helps someone out there!
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That is not the full story. They also have a "buy-all" / sell-all plan where they buy all your production at $0.32/kWh and sell you your consumption like a non-solar customer. You can get cash payments or offset your monthly bill as appropriate. You don't "bank credits" with the utility because you get cash.
Yes, it is slightly less generous than the "netting" plan so has had low adoption until now, but the fundamental economics is unchanged for now.
That being said, if you know anything about New England ISO, the winter electricity situation is dire. I expect the utilities to try changing the rules of the game in the future.
Thanks for the reassuring words - I totally spaced on the buy-all plan.
It's pretty clear that the generous net-metering plans are unsustainable. As you have more and more customers who pay little or nothing, the cost of providing the grid falls on a smaller and smaller number of customers who don't have solar -- and the greater that cost, the greater the incentive for them to get solar.
What I think would be sustainable, and fair, would be to apply the value of solar to the generation portion of the bill, net metering customers would still have to pay the transmission portion for the electricity they send and receive from the grid. Electricity that they consume and produce at the same time would be free. This would be a benefit, because it would incentivize customers to align their consumption with their production, which would help grid capacity. Right now if you're a net metering customer there's no incentive to do things like charge your car when the sun is shining.
That's an oversimplistic narrative being pushed by utility companies. The reality is at the margin - "grid capacity" is determined by summer A/C load on the hottest days, which is something that distributed rooftop solar actually strongly helps mitigate, apart from a heat wave days that persist into early evening.
The real problem is that electric utilities have gotten fat off of transmission/distribution charges. Despite 20 years of secularly stagnant electricity consumption in the USA with continuously falling generation costs, utility rates kept increasing faster than inflation via massively ratcheting distribution charges. In their view, any "lost" customer revenue is an attack on their rightful earnings because the world is zero-sum to them. Paying nothing for rooftop solar exports / killing net metering doesn't solve the problem of people installing self-consumption solar+battery setups. Instead of having private systems be grid-interactive and work together to get maximum societal value, utilities are pushing consumers to be zero-export because of their aggressive stance on recouping "lost revenue".
I'm in CT considering solar.
Eversource will buy all my production whenever I produce it @.32 kwh or thereabouts? Seems ok to me if that's the case.