Louisiana Screws Up Net Metering

Don’t Worry, We Can Fix This

After Hurricane Katrina, solar power took off in New Orleans. Long nights without power left folks wanting a little more control of their situation and rooftop solar took off.

How much of that was actually usable when the grid is down and how much was grid tie? I’m betting there was a lot of grid tie.

Nothing wrong with that, especially if you get real net metering. Figure up all the power you made and how much of a net surplus or deficit you had and money changes hands at the retail rate. In other words, if you used 1000kwh (kilowatt-hours) of grid power and the rate is 13 cents, then you sent the power company a check for $130. If you made 1000kwh more than you used, then the power company sent you a check for $130.

This is a really sweet deal, if you can get it. A few weeks ago, the Show and Tell post featured a Texas system owned by Daryl and some add-ons to a South Carolina system owned by Courtney. Both have that deal. Apparently, Louisiana has had that deal and now they want to change it. So much for the payback calculations.

I’m just going to use some round numbers, here, but they’ll be close to the real deal. Under the new deal, that begins with the new year, if you use an extra 1000kwh, you’ll still pay $130, but if you make an extra 1000kwh, you will get $34, based on the wholesale, or “avoided cost” rate the power company pays.

Ok, it’s actually worse than that. If your system makes an extra kwh today, you get your 3 pennies credited, but then tonight when you use a kwh to watch the evening news, they are going to charge you 13 pennies for the electricity they bought from you for 3! It cost you a dime for your own power! Figure, too, that a lot of power companies have extra connection fees for solar producers.

This puts you where I am with my power co-op. Florida law has been that the “regulated power provider” has to do net metering. As a co-op, however, they are exempt, so they make it foolishly expensive to connect grid tie solar.

Fret not, my friends, for there is a way for you to have your solar AND keep the lights on after a storm. It is called HYBRID solar. You will probably have to reconfigure your solar strings and buy some more gear, but what you will end up is not only a more versatile system, but one that makes more economic sense, as well.

If your grid tie system is in the most basic form, you have a number of solar panels in series connected to a string inverter. If this is your system, you remove the Sunny Boy and separate the seriously high voltage string(s) of modules into groups of, say 3, to get the voltages you need for charge controllers. Yeah, you gotta buy charge controllers. Maybe you only need one if you get the monster 300 amp Flex Max.

The output of the charge controller(s) goes to your new battery bank. The size of your battery bank is going to depend on how long you want to keep the lights on with solar power. If you have a lot of solar and a little bit of battery you can cook the life out of the battery in a hurry. A Flex Max can be turned down to accomodate the battery’s well being, but then you aren’t using all of your solar. I know it hurts to write that check for a big battery stack, but you won’t regret having it.

Now, you need a hybrid inverter to replace your string inverter. If you were doing your grid tie connection via a hybrid inverter to start with, then congrats. The “hybrid” inverter is called that because it can do grid tie, it can act as a standalone inverter, it can act like a UPS, it can charge batteries and sometimes they have other tricks.

I’ll tell you how you need to connect this new hybrid inverter in a moment, but you need one more thing. You need a transfer switch. This allows your inverter to connect to SOME or ALL of your house’s circuits. The simplest thing is to use a whole house transfer switch, which of course may cost more and will require that your new hybrid inverter be hefty enough to handle all the loads. You may think that you can pick and choose what you have running to stay within the inverter’s capabilities, but you will likely have someone in your house (I’m not mentioning names) that will want to live his/her life without limitations on the power they use. Count on it.

Otherwise, you can use a transfer switch, such is commonly used with backup generators to run power to essential circuits, leaving the clothes dryer and electric range out of the loop. These switches are cheaper and readily available but may present logistical issues, depending on where your main power panel is.

For a couple of examples, Tom has his whole house switched to the output of his GS8048 inverter pair. One didn’t quite handle it all, but the GS series can be paired for twice the output. With 16kw on tap, he doesn’t have to worry about running anything or everything, saying he has only seen the load go up to 10 kw. If one of GS8048s should fail, he can proceed with care on the other one until the bad one is repaired, but he’s never had a problem with either. He also has a power line connected to the input of his inverters. This is like a giant version of a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) with the switches so set. Change the switches just a bit and the inverter is providing power to the house, with the grid on standby.

During the day, when there is plenty of sunshine, the batteries charge, the a/c cools (his setup has enough reserve power that the a/c starts without a Smart Start), the computers run, the fridge cools, etc. Nothing is going to or from the power company. There is no grid tie meter or agreement with the power company, so make sure the inverter never gets switched to “sell” mode. These modern smart meters will tell on you!

To minimize the load at night, baking and laundry are done during the day. Come night, the modest battery bank gets well into the evening before the inverter decides to switch back to grid to save the battery. The rest of the night, Tom pays his 13 cents for every kwh he uses. Overall, he doesn’t ever buy any of his own power at a markup and he for pay a lot of the bought kwh.

Tom has plenty of solar. By backing off on his nighttime a/c or investing in a bigger battery, he could probably eliminate his grid consumption altogether. He could keep the grid as his virtual backup generator or just give the power company the one-finger wave goodbye.

On my hybrid system, I don’t have the whole house connected and I don’t have one of those fancy interactive inverters. My transfer switch connects my inverter to the circuits you’d want if the grid goes down and a bit more, within the capacity of the inverter. The sun makes the power and I use it to run the freezer, two fridges, home entertainment, computer/internet, microwave, coffee pot etc. And the a/c. And the farm jalopies. There is no grid attached to the solar power system, so consumption has to stay within production. This is mostly determined by how much the a/c is used, as there is much more than enough power for everything else.

I’d use more of the kwh I produce if I had a bigger battery and inverter, but there is no charge for a grid tie connection and no paying out dimes for using my own kwh.

If you are new to solar, consider a hybrid system for both savings and power redundancy. If you are on grid tie and are or will be getting a raw deal, then consider converting to a hybrid system. Sun Electronics should have pretty much everything you need to make the change at a decent price and they back the stuff they sell. –Neal