Solar Southwest Florida

FPL has announced that the remaining 2012 solar rebate funding will be released on May 3, 2012 for solar photovoltaic (electric) and solar water heating systems.

If you want any chance of getting in on the best solar rebate in Florida history, you need to act NOW. Call your favorite solar contractor (hopefully Fafco Solar) and they will walk you through the application process. Because the rebates are highly competitive and the amount available will be very limited, it is likely that the funding will run out in the first 10 minutes. The online application process requires advance planning and detailed information about the system you intend to install.

FPL Solar Rebates can cover over 30% of the cost of a solar electric installation up to $20,000 for residential and $50,000 for commercial systems. Paired with a 30% Federal Tax Credit and the lowest component costs in history, the total installed cost of a solar energy system has never been lower.

Utility electric rates in Southwest Florida vary quite a bit depending on how much electricity you consume. I created a spreadsheet to calculate what your utility electric rate would be with different utilities depending on the amount of energy consumed.

What you will find is that the effective rate for LCEC is higher for typical residential customers because of the higher fixed customer charge. Another interesting fact is that LCEC netmetered customers with solar electric generation pay more that regular LCEC customers until they consume at least 1,342 kilowatt hours (net). Again, this is because of a higher customer charge.

The rates are current as of April 16, 2012 and include all charges, fees, and taxes.

Note: The Franchise Fee will vary by municipality. I have used 3% to provide a reasonable approximation and comparison. For example, the Lee County fee is 3% and the Cape Coral fee is 3.173%.

SWFL Utility Rate Comparison

Southwest Florida Utility Electric Rate Spreadsheet (Requires Excel 2007 or greater)

The Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) reported that Florida dropped from #8 in 2010 to #17 in 2011 for the amount of solar electricity capacity installed. In addition, total installations decreased by 60% from 35 megawatts to 14 megawatts.

Why the big decrease? It’s my contention that the FPL rebate program is stifling the market. That’s right – a rebate intended to encourage solar energy installation had the opposite effect!

The interesting thing is that solar prices have never been lower, even without a rebate involved. The perception about solar needing rebates to be successful is an outdated notion. Getting this message out is on the shoulders of the solar industry, but our reliance on rebates over the years has misplaced our focus.

Let’s hope that we can make a better showing in 2012!

For those of you who don’t know, the largest utility in Southwest Florida, FPL, is giving away money – lots of money! If you ever had an interest in solar panels, NOW is the time to act. There is money available for solar electric systems and solar water heating systems, and combined with record low prices on solar panels, this is an amazing opportunity. The program is a huge success, but I want to talk about how FPL can improve the Solar Rebate Program, especially the rebate for solar electric panels.

FPL is offering $2 per watt of installed system rating with a residential limit of $20,000 (for a 10 kilowatt system). Smaller systems qualify for the same $2 per watt rebate amount. Most homeowners install around 5kW and receive a $10,000 rebate. How can this be improved? REDUCE the rebate amount!

What?! Huh?! No – don’t say that!!! You’re in the solar business!

Stay with me here as I explain. The first round of rebate funding ran out in under 15 minutes. That’s how much demand there was. That’s how unbelievable this deal is. That’s great, but there are some serious downsides to the program as it stands:

• Only 310 lucky people received a rebate reservation in the first round of funding.
• The first-come first-served system isn’t really fair – it benefits mainly people who can type their application fast on the FPL website. With this level of demand, a lottery would be a more fair distribution of funds. (Note: a lottery could have negative consequences for solar dealers who would not be able to predict future business.)
• Solar contractors must race to get all of their sold systems installed in a 90 day window to have the rebate paid, then there is almost no work for the next 9 months. Who is going to buy solar without a rebate if they know one is right around the corner. This makes it very difficult for qualified solar installers to stay in business and employee people year-round.

If the rebate program can “sell out” in under 15 minutes to 310 customers, how long would it take to sell out at $1 per watt? 50 cents? 25 cents? How many more people would install systems?

If FPL’s goal is truly to get more installed solar capacity in Florida, they would get the best bang for their buck by reducing the rebate amount to maximize the amount of solar electricity installed! Under the current scenario, FPL actually reduces the amount of solar energy installed in Florida, and essentially controls the market. They can predict quite well how much solar will be installed in a given year, and maybe that is their intention. The math is quite simple – if they devote half of the $15.5M annual program budget to photovoltaics, somewhere around 3.75 megawatts per year would be installed and interconnected to the utility.

Imagine the impact if the rebate amount were reduced. I’m willing to bet that if the rebate amount were cut to 50 cents per watt, 1/4 of the current amount, that four times the number of systems would be installed, especially if the installation window were increased to 9-12 months. This would help bring much more solar power to the utility’s system, and would keep solar dealers humming along installing systems year-round, employing more people and creating a greener future for everyone in Florida.

What is FPL’s motivation? What constraints exist from the Public Service Commission approved program? I don’t know all of the answers, but I’d sure like to hear from FPL about my proposal!

I recently set up a Wattvision meter on my Fort Myers, FL home to evaluate its effectiveness. I have to say, I love it! It definitely clues you in to how much energy you are using, when you are using it, and what appliances cost to operate. The device pays for itself by identifying power hogs. For example, I cut down the time my pool lights come on each night because they were consuming 600 watts! On the other hand, I decided to run my fountain longer each day because it uses next to no energy.

The charts on the Wattvision website are excellent. You can view real time, hourly, daily, and monthly data, and can download raw data to use in spreadsheets for further analysis. Take a look at this chart from last Monday.

What can you learn from the chart? Here is my analysis of what happened on Monday (list numbers correspond to numbers on the chart):

1. The baseline load for my home is around 400W at night when we are sleeping. This energy goes to digital video recorders, chargers, TVs, coffee maker, and other appliances that draw a small amount of energy constantly, plus some outdoor landscape and security lighting. The little bumps show the times when the refrigerator is running.
2. The water heater starts up about 4-5 times a day just to keep the water in the tank hot. Around 6:00 am we got up, took showers, and got ready for work. We used a substantial amount of hot water, and the water heater ran for a long period of time, costing us about 50 cents per hour of operation. Around dinner time the water heater worked during cooking and dish washing, and came back on as we got ready for bed.
3. My variable speed pool pump is scheduled to run at low speed from 9:00 am to noon, and again from 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm.
4. The pool pump ramps up speed from noon to 2:30 pm to give the automatic cleaner time to work and get adequate pool filtration.
5. The baseline during the evening increases as we use lights, watch TV, and use computers. The fountain and outdoor lighting also comes on at dusk.

My New FPL Smart Meter

FPL is in full swing installing Smart Meters around Southwest Florida.I had mine installed last week, but the communications network is a work in progress, so there’s no benefit to me yet. Despite all of the complaints and fears about Smart Meters, I believe the benefits will be great, allowing a granular look at your energy consumption down to your hourly usage, all available from FPL’s website. It’s not as good as some of the energy monitors on the market that can give you a per-second look at your consumption, or even monitor individual appliances or circuits, but it will provide significant insight into your electricity usage.

Some claim that the meters are bad for our health, are inaccurate, or disorient bees. Seriously!

I’m not going to make a call whether some of the claims out there are accurate, but I can tell you one thing for certain – understanding your energy consumption by learning when you use energy is key to reducing your utility bills. As my father-in-law says, “just like a business, you can’t manage energy without an accounting system.”

Unfortunately, those with solar electric systems that are under a netmetering agreement will not get the new smart meters. It is unclear whether the meters are bi-directional, or whether FPL or the manufacturer just hasn’t tested the accuracy measuring energy fed back to the grid. I’m trying to get clarification on that matter from FPL and will let you know if I hear back from their netmetering department.

Here’s a video from FPL about the new Smart Meters:

I guess I’ll weigh in on the highly publicized FPL rate increase request that would add about $7 to each residential account’s monthly bill starting in 2013.

FPL representatives say that the increase will pay for increased costs of doing business and a new “efficient” natural gas fired plant. The increase amounts to $695 million per year. Expected savings from the new plant – $600 million over it’s LIFETIME!

Does something seem very wrong here?

The problem with a public utility is that they are entitled to make a net profit, but that guaranteed profit is a percentage of costs. Costs increase, profits increase. There is no incentive to keep costs in check when you can go back to your customers and get a government mandated bailout from them!

Unfortunately, this is not a rate hike, so there is nothing you can do to avoid it by reducing usage or producing your own power. They want this amount added to the monthly customer charge, which is a base cost before you even start using power from the utility. This directly impacts solar energy sellers (netmetering customers), as they would likely be forced to pay this additional cost even if they consume no net power from FPL. On the other hand, that could just create more of an incentive to reduce the usage part of your bill with solar energy.

In my previous post about plug-and-play solar panels, I discussed the realities of this technology in terms of current product offerings. The US Department of Energy just released a request for information from parties interested in developing plug-an-play technology.

The US government is about to spend up to $30M of taxpayer money to partially fund development to make this technology viable under the “SunShot Initiative.” The idea is to make solar electricity economically viable without incentives and make installation as easy as plugging in a TV. In other words, they want to put solar electric contractors out of business.

That last comment was a bit facetious, but it would have that effect. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on what side of the fence you are standing, I don’t see it happening. Solar electricity is no less dangerous than electricity from the utility company. In fact, it’s more dangerous to handle in some ways. The concept of an appliance that simply plugs in is very nice in theory, but in practice is much more complicated.

When household generator backup became more popular in Florida over the last few decades, there were many fires and deaths attributed to people trying to connect the generator output to their home using an electrical outlet. Similarly, connecting a generator to your circuit breaker panel is extremely dangerous without a proper transfer switch to protect both the household wiring and utility line workers that are repairing systems during an outage. The difficulties with the plug-and-play solar panel concept are similar in many ways, with the added complexity of physical mounting of panels on a roof or ground rack.

In any case, a licensed electrical contractor is going to be required to make a home ready for any future plug-and-play technology that is developed. The physics involved with a standard electrical outlet will not allow safe operation of parallel sources of power on existing wiring systems. It’s like trying to fit four lanes of traffic on a two lane highway. It’s not going to work – at least not safely!

The SunShot Initiative seeks to remove some of these barriers through new product design, standardized connectors, utility and building department cooperation, and building/electric code changes. Regardless of what innovations come out of this project, don’t expect solar panels to be available at your local retailer that you can take home and plug in without some sort of major upgrade to your existing electrical distribution system.

Hopefully there will be significant cost reducing technologies that come out of this initiative. We very well may be able to reach solar cost parity with the utility in the next decade, with or without this project, and without turning every homeowner into a solar installer.

The full text of the RFI can be found here:

DE-FOA-0000634: Plug and Play Technologies and Systems Request for Information (RFI)

You may have seen the promise of plug-and-play solar panels coming to a store near you. I’ll try to make sense of these “new” products and tell you what they will and won’t do for you. There are two kinds of “plug-and-play solar panel” promises floating around out there. There is the solar panel that you can plug into your house and use or sell back to the utility, and there is the solar panel system into which you plug devices directly.

The first “plug-and-play solar panel” product promises that you can plug your solar panels into an existing outlet and feed power back into your home. This is completely unsafe and will not meet any building code in existence. This would require that the system have a male plug that you insert into the outlet. Guess what – that plug with exposed metal conductors could have live power on it (unless the inverter is listed to UL 1741 – let’s not get too technical here!) Even if the proper inverter were used, there are numerous National Electric Code sections that would not allow its use in this manner. No utility company would allow this power to be sent back to the grid. This is not an approved interconnection method, and it is completely unsafe.

Consider that you have a 15 amp circuit breaker feeding a string of outlets in your home. The wire and outlets on that circuit are capable of safely supplying 15 amps of power. If you plug a solar panel’s output into an electrical outlet, you have increased the amount of power available to that wire and all receptacles on the circuit. Furthermore, there is no way to restrict the number of solar panels that a homeowner would plug into a circuit. The homeowner could theoretically install dozens of solar panels into power strips on a single circuit. Hopefully the closest fire station is close by…

The second kind of “plug-and-play solar panel” is really nothing more than a complete mobile off-grid solar electric system. The components include a solar panel, an inverter, and possibly a battery. With this system you can plug devices directly into the inverter output using a standard AC receptacle. There is nothing wrong with this concept, except that it has serious limitations in usefulness, efficiency, and value.

A new product of this kind from Onyx Service and Solutions Inc promises to revolutionize plug-and-play solar. There is really nothing new with this product except that it is larger and higher powered than most other portable solar power devices. I use the word “portable” loosely here because it’s hardly something you can pop in the trunk for an afternoon outing. The included 330 watt solar panel is at least five feet long by three feet wide. The premise of this product is to include a solar panel, a battery, and an inverter in a single box with a standard AC outlet. That’s great, but the amount of power generated and stored isn’t even enough to run a laptop computer for 24 hours.

This system cannot be attached to your home’s electrical system and it cannot sell electricity back to the grid. Don’t be misled!

This type of product is fantastic for small power needs, like charging phones, tablets, or other small devices, or using some higher powered devices for shorter periods of time. They key is to make it portable enough. There is a nice consumer product line from Goal Zero that is perfect for modest power needs, and it does exactly what the Onyx system does, albeit on a much less powerful scale, but it is truly portable.

The promise of “plug-and-play solar panels” is a long way away. There is hope. The best opportunity for a plug-and-play type system may be using a transfer switch similar to the generator input to a home. One thing is certain – you will need to upgrade your home wiring or provide a proper receptacle that in some way makes this type of installation safe, and it will need to be done under the current or future requirements of the National Electric Code.

The best bet in solar electric today is still the basic grid-interactive solar electric system. Don’t be misled by promises of new revolutionary products that can’t deliver. If you want a portable consumer grade solar energy system, educate yourself on the limitations, and if it meets your needs, by all means, proceed!

Don’t panic! It’s not here yet!

Time-of-use metering allows a utility company to charge you different rates based on the time of day. This billing approach is popular in places like California and the Northeast US where there are large peaks in electricity demand. Utilities deliver power by producing a “baseline” amount of power that corresponds with the lowest amount of total expected power demand for their customers at the lowest possible cost. It costs more to meet power needs that are above this baseline amount of power because production costs are higher to meet the peaks. Total demand changes based on the time of day and the time of year.

One way to think about it is how you drive your car. If you are cruising along at a constant speed, your fuel consumption is steady, predictable, and relatively low. When you accelerate and put the pedal to the metal, it costs a lot in terms of fuel consumption, and it’s a very inefficient way to consume fuel to get where you want to go. The same concept applies to utility companies’ power production. A utility’s dream is to be on cruise control, delivering a constant amount of power throughout the day and night.

LCEC's Southwest Florida Annual Load Demand Curve. January 2009 was particularly cold, causing a huge demand for electric heating.

Current electricity rates for PG&E customers in California with time-of-use metering can vary from 9 cents per kilowatt hour to over 47 cents per kilowatt hour! Depending on how much energy you use each day and when you use it, you could pay over 4 times the rate we pay in Southwest Florida!

Florida does have a relatively steady annual power demand because the population swells in the cool season. Even though less air conditioning is required per capita in the cool season, the sheer number of people here helps to level out the total amount of energy consumed each month. See the LCEC Annual Load Demand Curve to the right to illustrate this phenomenon. Nonetheless, demand throughout the day does vary significantly year-round.

The scary thing about time-of-use metering in Florida is that rates would be highest during the day in the summer when air conditioning is typically used. Electricity bills could skyrocket in Southwest Florida for annual residents and businesses unless habits are drastically changed. Commercial customers would be hit hard, as offices and shops consume the vast majority of their energy during peak hours. Retirees who are home during the day would also be hit with higher air conditioning costs. Lower income seniors may need to forego the luxury and comfort of temperature controlled surroundings.

The good news is that utility rates for off-peak times may actually be reduced dramatically. The other way for electric utilities to lower total cost of production is to actually raise the baseline. That means they want you to consume electricity during the off-peak times. One potential boon for this approach is electric cars. Imagine millions of electric cars charging up in garages overnight across Southwest Florida, flattening out the power demand curve!

Is time-of-use metering coming to Southwest Florida? Based on the status quo, we will probably not see time-of-use metering as a requirement in the near future. However, it is almost inevitable that some changes will be made to electricity rates in the mid- to long-run. It is totally impractical for utility companies to maintain a low baseline power production and meet peak demand with more expensive production options.

How does this relate to solar energy? Well, solar energy systems produce the most energy when the sun is out (surprise!) and this time generally corresponds to the peak power demand times for utility companies in Florida. If your solar energy system is reducing your usage during peak times, your bill will be reduced dramatically. You would be cutting down your usage of the most expensive power required for your home. Furthermore, any electricity that you sell back to the utility (power produced in excess of power concurrently used), would be sold back to the utility at premium rates!

Time-of-use metering is generally hated by the average consumer, but it is a more fair way to charge for electricity because it is tied to the cost to produce the power at the time it is consumed. If (when) time-of-use metering does come to Southwest Florida, one way to be prepared is to use a solar electric system to eliminate the most expensive power you will need.

Lee County Electric Cooperative (LCEC) places a paper insert in utility bill envelopes for netmetered customers (those with solar photovoltaic systems). This insert is a bit confusing, and it is no wonder that customers come to me asking if their solar electric system is meeting expectations. Months ago I made recommendations to LCEC on how to reword the information presented to make it more accurate and understandable, and they have made some improvements.

So how do you read the LCEC netmetering bill insert? Here is picture of a recent statement from a customer’s utility service. Let’s break down each line.

Example of a LCEC Netmetering Insert

1. Kilowatt hours consumed (from LCEC): This is the total amount of energy that your home used from the utility company. It is NOT the total amount of energy your home used. Your home also used some energy produced by the solar electric system.
2. Kilowatt hours returned to LCEC (the grid): This is the excess energy that your solar electric system “sold back” to the grid when it was producing more power than your home was using.
3. Kilowatt hours net from/to the grid: This is how much energy for which you will be billed. It is the difference between the energy you used from LCEC and how much you “sold back” to LCEC.
4. You have reduced your LCEC billable consumption by: This is always the same as #2 above. I don’t understand the need for this item, and it is the most confusing item on the statement. The asterisk should actually be next to this item. Without the asterisk, it would be easy to mistakenly assume that this solar electric system only produced 281 kilowatt hours during the billing period. The bottom line is that LCEC has no idea how much energy your solar electric system produces. The utility meter can only measure energy drawn from the grid and returned to the grid. It cannot measure power produced by your solar electric system that is consumed by your home concurrently. This is where the use of a solar energy monitoring system is helpful.
5. Reserves (accumulated) kWh to date: If the amount in #3 above is negative, it means that your solar electric system produced more energy than your home consumed in the billing period. This line is a running total of the “banked” kilowatt hours that you have in your account. If there are accumulated reserves at the end of the year, LCEC will cut you a check for the net amount of energy “sold back” to the utility.

It is unfortunate that this has to be so confusing, but it is a limitation of the bi-directional netmetering approach that local utilities have adopted. FPL uses the same type of bi-directional meter. Some utilities actually require a second meter that just measures energy produced by your solar electric system. This is called a revenue meter. You are billed the difference between your regular usage meter and the revenue meter. In this approach, the utility can tell you how much solar energy you produced, because you effectively sell all of your solar energy back to the grid. It also allows for varying energy prices. For example, you may be able to sell solar energy back to the grid for a higher price than the consumption rate. It also allows for a variety of time-of-use billing practices.

While the revenue meter approach is better for a number of reasons, the bidirectional meter is cheaper and easier to implement for the utility and the homeowner. The revenue meter would typically be easier for the solar contractor to install because integrating with some existing electrical distribution systems is troublesome. A revenue meter also allows you to compare you independent solar monitoring system to the revenue meter to ensure you are being credited properly for your solar production.

The LCEC bidirectional meter should accurately measure your net electricity usage. It allows you to sell your excess solar electricity back to the utility company at the same rate for which you purchase electricity. It may be a bit confusing, but ultimately it gets the job done!