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Running Your Electric Meter Backwards
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jan 23, 2007 02:23 AM
from the power-to-the-peeps dept.
from the power-to-the-peeps dept.
kog777 writes to note a story in International Business Times about "net metering," or generating your own power without disconnecting from the grid. Forty states have laws allowing individuals to do this, and many of them offer subsidies and tax breaks for people who do. From the article: "When the sun shines bright on their home in New York's Hudson Valley, John and Anna Bagnall live out a homeowner's fantasy. Their electricity meter runs backward. Solar panels on their barn roof can often provide enough for all their electricity needs. Sometimes — and this is the best part — their solar setup actually pushes power back into the system."
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You can do the same thing... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You can do the same thing... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Grump
Net metering rules (Score:5, Informative)
Click on a state, look under Rules, Regulations & Policies for net metering rules.
You can also look on my website http://www.jointhesolution.com/mdsolar [jointhesolution.com] so see utility rates.
Click on the map then click on a state. If you see the utility listed you can do net metering there.
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OT, sick day scams... (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely I wasn't the only one who was bothered by this.
Digits (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:OT, sick day scams... (Score:5, Funny)
I think Bill Gates has one with three digits, and it's in kilometers, not miles. The car was custom built, and they explained there wasn't room for more digits. Gates, of course, said (and who doesn't see this coming) "No problem. 640k should be enough for anybody."
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Re:You can do the same thing... (Score:4, Funny)
Thanks god for social security.
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Re:You can do the same thing... (Score:5, Funny)
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What is the story? (Score:4, Informative)
Price issues (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that you would be getting paid retail value for the power you are selling to the company. Looking from their point of view, you should actually have two meters, one to meter the power you buy from them at retail price, and another to meter the power you sell to them, at whatever price they buy power. Otherwise, if everyone started generating their own power part of the time, the power company would go bankrupt.
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Re:Price issues (Score:5, Funny)
So, what's the downside, then?
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Re:What is the story? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:What is the story? (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, when I read the title I thought the story was about some kind of hacking box. I do not remember what "color" is it but I do remember once reading some schematics for a box that modified the phase (or something similar) of the AC in your house when you plugged it and made your meter (only if it was analog of course) go backwards. The only thing I remember about the diagram is that it required a HUGE capacitor.
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realities? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:realities? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats.. most people don't give a rats ass, and so solar panel prices will stay up. Maybe the goverment should make it mandatory that new buildings have solar panels installed (does that already exist)? Here in Aus, new buildings have to have solar powered heating and sunlights.. but then again, we live in an oven of a country..
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Re:realities? (Score:5, Funny)
Have you ever lived in Southern Califorina? If there is ever a could in the sky people run off the street to take shelter in the nearest building. Don't ask what happens in a freak rain shower! Drizzle of doom...
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Storm Watch! (Score:5, Funny)
Welcome to KCAL 9. We're sorry we had to cut away from this evening's high speed pursuit but we have received word that Ventura is experiencing scattered sprinkles. Johnny Mountain is down in the trenches, reporting from the eye of the storm. We'll hear from him after this break, if he's still alive!
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Re:realities? (Score:5, Interesting)
Although solar cells aren't cheap, the prices have come down, and efficiency has gone up over time. It's kinda like buying a computer... If you're waiting for the fastest computer to come out before you buy yours, chances are you're reading this on a TI57 programmable calculator.
If you buy now, your savings start now. If you cover the cost of the cells in saved energy bills and rebates from the power company, then the fact that a 'better' system comes out later doesn't hurt you that much.... Once you have covered the original cost, you can always replace the system with a new one, and you really don't lose anything. (but you get the satisfaction of preventing the waste of a few barrels of increasingly precious oil, and slowing global warming by just a smidgen).
Before you do something, ask yourself "what would happen if a million people did this"?
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Re:realities? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:realities? (Score:5, Funny)
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Prepay your electric bill, or buy the electric co. (Score:5, Insightful)
All you have done is pre-paid your electricity for the next 5-10 years
>>
60 months worth of your electric bill, call it an average of $100 a month, is $6,000. If you "pre-pay" that by rolling it into your home loan ("Build me a house and make sure it has a pool and solar power!"), it will end up costing you more (rough guesstimate is $7,300). If instead of buying photovoltaic cells you buy shares in your local electric company, you'll get about $120 to $240 a year in dividends (power companies often have a 2-4% yield), and your while your photovoltaic cells depreciate every year and require maintenance, your shares will probably appreciate and you'll never have to patch them up. (You'll have to pay the electric company for those 10 months of the year that dividends don't... then again, you get the security of knowing you'll never have to pay them extra just because its cloudy.) When you move in 15 years, rather than uninstalling or replacing them at your expense, you can just sell them and take your profits.
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In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats
>>
I don't give a rat's hindquarters for Green theology but don't mind conservation. Thats why I buy shares in companies which own nuclear power plants. Its cleaner than solar and has economies of scale. Yes, I said cleaner than scale: the energy cost from constructing solar panels keeps them net-energy-negative for about a decade (!) and when they die out after just over a decade (!) you have to dispose of them, and per megawatt hour generated you'll have to dispose of a heck of a lot more solar panels than radioactive waste. I don't invest in solar companies because at the moment they still haven't licked the whole "Making our products net energy producers" problem and until they do my only hope to profit from that investment would be hoping solar's massive government subsidies continue and expand. While I think that is certainly possible, I feel that if the current or a future administration wants to dump a couple billion into the solar industry, my nukes will get a similar largesse.
Sidenote: If you have an aversion to nuclear power, I understand and accept that. I don't eat meat on Fridays in Lent and we can both agree that our separate faiths are mutually harmless. One piece of advice though. Spend your money on a decent job of insulating your house -- you'll require less kwh from the grid, and on a per-dollar basis you'll save more kwh spending on insulation (and installation) than you will on buying solar power.
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Re:realities? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:realities? (Score:5, Informative)
This is however only true on average. If, for example, you live in an area where you get tax-breaks or subsidies for installing, then this can be enough to break even. In Germany, for example they have a "100.000 roofs" program where you're guaranteed a price about 3 times market-price for the power you produce for the next 15 years. That is *more* than enough to make it profitable.
Solar water-heaters on the other hand are beneficial. Especially if you live in an area with plenty of sun *and* have a large family that likes to frequently shower in the summer, it can be a huge win. There are substantial savings from installing them at the same time one installs roofing, so your best bet is probably going to be to install them at the same time your roofing needs replacement anyway, rather than separately.
The *most* beneficial investment however is building/buying a well-insulated house with balanced ventilation. This saves power in summer for AC, and in winther for heating. And a well-insulated house doesn't have higher maintenance-costs than a poorly insulated one.
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Re:realities? (Score:5, Interesting)
From my own experience, I paid to get insulation pumped into the roof a couple of years after I moved into my first house in the early 90's, no tax breaks or subsidies at that time so I paid the full price. It cut my heating bill in half (well, almost) and it paid for itself in less than 2yrs. Not sure about this, but I think it is compulsory for new buildings to be insulated here in Australia, they all seem have it built in.
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Re:realities? (Score:5, Informative)
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Windmill (Score:3, Interesting)
This is far from an impracticable technology. In the days of wooden ships, the Dutch used to buy English ships that had become waterlogged (yes, they do
yeah, but (Score:3, Funny)
Tell that to the boy scout who tried to build a reactor [amazon.com] in his backyard.
Non conventional (Score:3, Informative)
while back here in third world countries we use other non-conventional ways to save on energy bills like
Bribe the Electricity Engineer or
Tap electricity directly from pole without any meter
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Where the icy cold beer is on the house (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Where-the-icy
It really does work. (Score:5, Informative)
The panels generate approximately 7.5kW AC (8.8kW DC). The total cost was $65,000 but with a grant from the State of California and State tax credits, the total cost was reduced to just over $31,000. Since then I have been paying only the minimum price for electricity service (around $5 a month) to cover the cost of the meter rental. As electricity rates have increased a bit (and no doubt will continue to increase) I calculate that I will recover my costs approximately 8 years after installation, and I will then start to save money. The life of the panels should be around 30 to 40 years
It's worth remembering that you need to make certain your roof is good for the years the panels will be operating, so for some it will also mean installing a new roof first. That wasn't an issue for me as I have an ornamental metal tile roof that should last much longer than the panels.
Essentially, I use the power utility as my batteries - during sunny days I generate much more electricity than I use and the excess goes into the grid, and then I use power from the grid on rainy winter days and during nighttime. I get credited for electricity sent to the grid, and yes, the meter really does run backwards.
One neat trick is that I don't have to generate the equivalent of all the energy I use to break even. I'm on a utility company plan where the electricity I use during peak summer times (noon to 6pm) is very expensive - around three times normal rates - but off-peak usage is about 70% of normal rates. But I get credited at the rate in place at the time of day the electricity is generated. Because my installation generates the majority of the electricity during the peak times, I get credited for those KwH at the high rate and when I need to use electricity at night I pay the reduced rate. As an example of how effective this is, last year I generated 12,400 KwH and I also used 3,600 KwH from the utility company. But at the end of the year I had a credit balance of $380.
There's one gotcha there - if you have a debit balance at the end of the year, you have to pay it. But if you have a credit balance, that gets lost. Ideally you want to generate just enough electricity so that your adjusted balance is zero, but that's pretty hard to judge. In any case, you want ample extra capacity just after installation as the panels reduce their efficiency by about 0.5% to 1.0% per year.
Re:It really does work. (Score:5, Interesting)
Government has no right to steal from me, or you, to pay for this guy's pipe dream. If he really wanted to do it, he should have done it with his own dollars, not robbing the tax payer of anything.
Of course the average greenie socialist here would mod me down, but I speak the truth -- there is no such thing as a free lunch, and this guy will get one after only 8 years or so. On your back.
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Re:It really does work. (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason taxes work when they do is that some things fall under the "common good". If we just asked everyone to pay only for services that benefit them personally, we'd have only private schools, few medicines, and likely no roads or traffic lights.
Some things just only work if everyone is forced to pay a bit for them. But look at the benefits in this case. If the government takes some of your tax money to pay all the people who want to make their own power, everyone benefits through lower load on power stations, decreased demand for power (which lowers prices!), decreased pollution and demand for foreign oil.
Obvious win-win.
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Re:It really does work. (Score:5, Insightful)
That might be because taxation actually removes our money from our own use, whereas duplicating digital data does nothing of the sort?
You're right though, it's not stealing. "Taking money/possessions from a victim under threat of violence" Sounds more like armed robbery.
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Greenhouses too (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Greenhouses too (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Also, the generators are thoroughly insulated and because of this particular application (greenhouse), the excess warmth is directly used. This results in an extremely high energy/warmth ratio.
You can do this without solar panels. (Score:5, Funny)
net metering to start your own backyard e-trading (Score:5, Interesting)
A. peak rate at $0.40/kWh and off-peak at $0.20kWh
or
B. fixed rate at $0.35/kWh
Now two neighbours sign up for the two different rates, and start their own little energy trading:
Off peak, Neighbour A buys at $0.20 from utility and sells to neigbour B for $0.35. B resells to utility.
During peak hours, Neighbour A buys from B at $0.35m and sells to utility for $0.40.
With a 400A service, they can 800,000kWh a year and make a profit of $80k!
Have fun
Making money from electric co (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Making money from electric co (Score:4, Insightful)
The forces of nature. That is, physics and economics. Physics because it limits the efficiency of storing energy in batteries to impractical amounts, economics because batteries that size are frickin' expensive.
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Catch Up (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not sure how well Solar Power works here though
Hydro is good for this. (Score:5, Interesting)
I think some time later the regulations might have changed and the power company would no longer pay him, but at least he still had electricity that was essentially free.
I'd sooner go with wind turbines... (Score:5, Interesting)
This would seem like an excellent alternative... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not a million miles away from the cheap inverters and UPSes you can buy. One important point is this - it must have an incoming mains supply to work. If there is a power cut, it will shut down, and most aren't smart enough to just disconnect from the grid and leave you on standby power. Why? Well, because it needs a phase reference for the incoming mains, and if the power goes down it has no w
Re:Not with your home's current electrical setup. (Score:5, Informative)
It would be possible to build an inverter that would disconnect the incoming mains supply in the event of a power failure, and "slip" the inverter until it's in phase before dropping it back in, but you'd need something like a 100A contactor for that to work.
Actually, they drop it because grid-tie inverters are REQUIRED to disconnect from the grid when the grid goes down. This is to prevent backfeeding the disconnected island and frying a lineman who's trying to fix the downed wire for your block and thinks the lines are dead when YOU kept them live. (Those pole-pig transformers work just FINE in reverse, so a lineman might grab a line with 12,000 volts on it and a couple kilowatts to keep it that way while he's dancing and trying to breathe.)
Now the EASY way to do this is just to monitor the frequency and voltage, and shut the inverter off when it goes out of spec (meaning the grid is probably dead and the line only looks hot because of the inverter backfeeding it).
For a couple grand more, in the case of some good inverters that are designed for it (such as some of the Xantrex models), you can add a box with a relay, a phase-difference monitor, and a subsidiary "brain" board (or get an inverter with the function built in). (Actually the box in question usually also has the line monitoring circuit and combines with inverters that are otherwise stand-alone non-grid-tie.) That box will disconnect the inverter-and-keepalive-lodds from the line and let it keep going during an outage, then tell it to drift phase until it matches and hook it back up once the grid is back and has stabilized.
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Re:Slightly off topic, but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
No. Do the math. From the post it looks like you are advocating a 12 volt system for the house. Right now a 20 amp breaker feeds a 12 AWG wire just fine and you can plug in a 1500 watt hair dryer in the bathroom which is maybe 40 feet from the meter. At full load, the voltage at the outlet may drop a couple volts so you are talking 12 amps current at 2 volts in the wire or 24 watts lost in the entire length of wire.
Now the 12 volt version. From 120 volt to 12 volt at the same wattage (Volts * Amps for a resistive load) you will now need to draw 120 amps instead of 12 for the blow dryer for the same 1500 watts. If you were dumb enough to try using the same 12 AWG wire the 2 volt drop is now 20 volts. OOPS.. We seem to be short 8 volts in the negative direction to get 120 Amps to the bathroom outlet at zero volts. Lets see if it were possible the 20 volt drop in the wire at 120 amps would be 2400 watts of heat in the 40 feet of wire. Can you say HOT!. Maybe we need a larger wire size. Maybe a size big enough to handle the original voltage drop of a couple volts. Our original setup at 120 volts has less than 2% voltage drop. At 12 Volts we now have a little under 20% voltage drop. Hmm we need to go to even bigger wire to reduce the voltage drop to less than
You do the math. Find a copper wire table and find out what AWG wire is required to handle 120 Amps with only
When you are done with the math you will understand why we use 120 volts and some countries use 240 volts. You may get electricuted in an accident, but you don't need welding cable for your hair dryer.
My 1KW inverter in my car uses Welding cable for leads and the length is kept to under 3 feet total to keep the voltage drop within limits.
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