TDSF Power Plant Part 6: 81 days in, a status report

This is an ongoing set of posts about our experience going solar. For those of you reading this series for the first time, if you would like to start at the beginning, here is the link to Part 1. BTW, I have not figured out how many posts there will be. I keep figuring out more things I want to say about this.

The story so far: we signed a contract on 2/8/2019 and went operational on 3/26/2029. On June 14, 81 days in we achieved two interesting milestones.

But we will get to these milestones in a minute. First great words of thanks for the support of energysage.com for playing the part of educator and honest broker. (This link contains an affiliate code that pays me, at no cost to you, should you choose to use it).

Second, many thanks to the great folks at Solar Energy World, who sold us our system and have done a stellar job supporting it.

You may wonder what the big deal is regarding post go-live support?

1. They did all the paperwork they had committed to and they did it right. I should also thank BGE, our local utility and Anne Arundel county, as everyone cooperated to get this project operational in less than seven weeks.
   
   I am also receiving communication from Sol Systems, the folks who are tracking and will be brokering our SRECs (Solar Renewable Energy Credits – see previous posts). The timing was helpful as the period we went live was sunny and very solar productive.
   
2. There is a web site and a phone app I use to monitor the production. They set me up with this even before the panels were live. The app depends on communication from the inverter. In effect a cell phone is installed in the system, though just for transmitting data (and receiving software upgrades).
   
   One of those upgrades happened about a week after installation and caused an issue. The system would stop reporting information for hours at a time, sometimes more than a day. The folks at Solar Energy World maintained contact with me the whole time. They came to the house a number of times, even on the weekend to reset the system and get it functional again.
   
   To be clear, there was never a malfunction with the panels. They never stopped producing energy and sending it to my house and sending the excess back through to BGE. They just stopped reporting what they were producing. Really they just stopped reporting the hourly/daily/monthly statistics. The actual production meter, located inside the unit, never stopped working. The problem for me was tracking what was produced.
   
   I was not the only person experiencing the problem, other customers were as well. Solar Energy World had a meeting with the inverter manufacturer and it turned out to be a software bug. After a few tries, they finally came out with a stable version. The maintenance support guy came and installed it on my system and we have been getting data steadily ever since.
   

This post-installation support, resetting my system several times, and keeping in touch with me and getting a stable version installed was why I chose a full service local company. I feel like they did a great job.

Now, about those milestones

Check out the Lifetime energy box in the upper right corner of the picture above – sometime June 14th we passed 3 MWh of production! This was day 81 of operations. This was an important milestone in that this was the 3rd MWh this quarter and we should get paid for this a few months from now.

I wish this would scale. If we produced one MWh every 27 days (3*27 = 81), we would produce over 13 MWh per year. It is reasonable to assume that we will not produce as much during the winter months, when there is much less daylight.

The following picture shows our second milestone:

When we went live on March 26th, the meter read 00012. Since then we have produced more electricity than we have consumed. In fact, we have produced about 1 MWh more! (Read this like an odometer going backwards – from 00000, as we produced the next KWh, the meter went to 99999 – since then it continued backwards to 99005).

So some very simple, rounded math:

Total electricty generated by our panels in 81 days: 3 MWh
Total electricity sent to our Utility in 81 days: – 1 MHh
Total electricity used by us in 81 days: = 2 MWh (or 2000 KWh)
Our KWh daily usage 2000/81 = 24.69 KWh/day

If we were to keep at this usage rate all year long we would only use about 9 MWh per year (24.69 * 365 = 9012). Of course the big air conditioning season is just ahead of us and we both like it cooler than most people, so our usage this summer will increase a bit.

On a humorous note, we just replaced the two light bulbs in our refrigerator (old ones were 40 watt each) with LEDs that are 1 watt each, but seriously, how often is the refrigerator door open?

Still, our rolling 12 months prior to panel installation showed us using 10.5 MWh per year, so maybe we will end up driving that down. This is one of those ‘time will tell’ items.

One last surprise

Our utility, BGE, pays any surplus production once a year in May. Since we went live March 26, our first billing period was through April 25th and we had a surplus of 446 KWh at that time. They sent us a check last month for this surplus:

In Part 2, Show me the Money, I predicted they would pay us less than retail for this electricity, as we were a vendor and they make money by buying low and selling high. I predicted this amount would be about .05/KWh or $50.0 per MWh.

As you can see from the check above, they paid us full supply retail, about .087 perKWh. This is motivating. The more we conserve, the faster the payback.

And finally, and proudly, here is our most recent bill, showing two months of no usage:

So 81 days in, I am a solid fan of our decision to go solar!

I have several thoughts on the next topic I want to write about:

• The social utility of going solar (how it helps the neighbors and the utility company)
• Some samples of daily graphs to show how much power we generate under different weather conditions
• Some whimsical thoughts in the form of rewritten song lyrics about my changing attitude towards the weather. (this one may be the hardest)

If you have any ideas for future posts or other feedback, please leave some comments, or drop a note to tiedyeseniorfi@tiedyeseniorfi.com. Thanks!