Suburban 5-4-and-a-Door Solar: The Stub Bill

Georgia Power send us a stub bill for 10 days (June 20 - 29) to restart our billing cycle under the new solar paradigm. (Actually, they didn't send it. I went on line and noticed it just in time to get it paid. But that's another discussion to have on another day.)

We turned the panels on in the afternoon of July 27th, so this bill covers very little actual solar power generation. The 28th was a great generation day. The 29th was cloudy and rainy. However we do have a few new numbers to play with.

The bill showed that from the 26th to the 29th, we used 98kWh from the grid and generated 11kWh back into the grid. Not shown is how much we generated locally. Making a wild and completely unsubstantiated assumption that we would have used somewhere on the order of 120kWh on those three days (40 per day, three full days), that would mean that we generated about 22kWh on the 28th, 29th, and little bit of 27th. That seems very low (considering the calculations and data from the 28th), but that's the kind of numbers you get when you are working with a small, undefined set. We'll know more in a month.

What was interesting about the bill was that there is a 85 cent "Distributed Generation Meter Charge" that we didn't know to expect. We'll see if that's a flat rate or variable in the coming months. It's likely flat and pro-rated for the stub bill. We also saw that our Distributed Generation Credit (38 cents!) was subtracted after sales tax was calculated. No net metering here in Georgia.

The adventure is just beginning. After a few months we should know more. The July, August, and September bills are traditionally our highest, so they should give us the best numbers to work with and a better idea of expected break-even date and return on investment.

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