Do Solar Panels Totally Eliminate My Electric Bill? [Video]

Interview with Sam Weaver I did at his office in Boulder Colorado. Sam is with Cool Solar Inc.

SolarDave: Let’s say I produce the same amount of energy that I consume, do I still owe Xcel Energy any money?

Sam Weaver: That is a good question. That is based around Xcel’s policy and the answer is yes you will just owe them just the service to your home. At the very least you are going to owe them what has just gone up to $7.25 (per month) from about $6.50 a month.

So there is a monthly charge just to have the meter at your home and for them to provide service.

If you were to exactly match your power production to your power usage during the year totally perfect and you would owe them any more than that.

But the truth is that they start their billing cycle in December. In December your solar panel is going to produce the least it is ever going to produce during the year, so January 1st you may not exactly meet the usage for that month and then send you a bill for that month based on the net import that you had - then as you go through the year you finally get in to the periods of better sunshine and you save month after month and the summer you are not actually paying anything and you are building up a forward balance. They roll it forward, but they don’t roll it backwards.

So sometimes in the winter months you will have to pay and you will hit the summer months you won’t pay anything and then you come to the end of the year and you produce a surplus and they pay you the wholesale rate for the surplus.

SolarDave: So let’s say I am buying from Xcel at 9 cents a kilowatt hour what do they pay back?

Sam Weaver: 4.5 cents a kilowatt hour.

So if you exactly match the energy production for a year so there will still be a residual bill to it. It will not completely wipe out the bill - but it will take out the bill at today’s rates as they were raised in April at 9.5 a kilowatt hour is the avoided cost.

So that is one reason not to oversize any one system of the customer, if the system is over sized for their use, you know their pay back time goes down quite a bit. We try to pay close attention to the customer the best system that will work for them.

Sometimes that means working with the customer to guesstimates, they might want to install a plugin hybrid in the future - they might say I want to have it a little bit big now for a couple of years because I know I am going to transition to this heat pump or I am going to transition to a plug-in hybrid (car). We will work with them to guesstimate.

You don’t want to do these things twice because you can save money if you put the right size inverter in the first time.