Last Month of First Year of Solar

Can you believe it’s been a year since our solar panels were installed? If you’re not interested in solar, it probably seems like 10 years, right?  🙂

Also, can you believe it’s been 4 years since Vince moved to Texas? I didn’t move til August so it’s been a bit less time for me but this is his 5th summer here. Hard to believe! New people move here fairly often and as soon as Vince tells me someone is moving here, I say a prayer that they don’t have as much trouble as we had finding a house. But . . I’d say to get what we got, it was all worth the confusion and frustration.

Back to solar . . things are a little different in the electric department in Texas. We choose our REP (retail provider but our line carrier (I think it’s called TED) is something we have no control over and we were lucky (NOT) to have the most expensive line carrier in all of Texas .. and they readily admit that they are the most expensive. The only way we can avoid paying their line charges is to go completely off grid and that’s probably not going to be economically feasible in our lifetime.

When we signed our contract with the REP about this time last year, it had a provision that we must be a “net user” of their power, meaning we had to purchase at least some amount more than we sold back to them. It isn’t going to happen but they’ve removed that clause from the new contracts and they are not going to penalize us for sending back more than we purchased. Yay!

We’ve purchased, on average, about 650 kwh per month and we’ve sent back, on average, about 700 kwh per month. This past year, we paid .065¢ per kwh and they paid ups .075¢ per kwh that we sent back. I still can’t get over that they pay us more than we pay them but I like it!  On top of all that, we have to pay the line carrier .081¢ cents per kwh that we buy. As of today, we’ve purchased 7872 kwh so we’ve paid the REP $508, but we’ve gotten credit from them for about $630 so overall, we’ve made money from them. But, based on the kwh we’ve purchased, along with the per kwh line charge and the $10/month customer charge, we’ve paid the line company about $757, meaning our average monthly electric bill has been about $53.

Here’s the best way to compare it:

Scenario #1:  Suppose we didn’t have solar and purchased all our power and used 1800 kwh in a summer month.  We would pay 1800 x .065 to the REP, along with 1800 x .081 to the line company, along with a $10 customer charge, but because we used over 800 kwh, we would get a $15 credit from the line company. Our bill would be:

REP – $117
Line Company – $140.80
Total Bill – $257.80

Scenario #2:  We have solar panels and we kept records of how much we used. The electric company doesn’t keep up with how much we generate and use – only what we buy from them or send back to them so we have to monitor our solar production via the solar meter or via online records. I’m using a month when we used 1801 kwh.   We produced 1578 kwh. We sent back 598 kwh (so we used 980 kwh of our own power), we purchased 821 kwh.

Here’s what our bill was:

REP charges  (821 x .065) – $53.36
REP credit (598 x .075) – <$44.85>
Line Company (821 x .081 + $10) – $76.50
Total Bill – $85.01

You can see that we saved about $172.80 that month. 

When we initially began figuring our potential savings by using solar, we only took into account the savings per kwh and not the savings on the line charges. We’re doing even better as far as reaching our payback within our projected period.

We’ve signed our new contract for next year and the rate we pay the REP has gone down! Instead of paying .065¢ per kwh, we’ll be paying .054¢. Unfortunately, we are not able to negotiate with the line company so that rate stays .081¢ per kwh, along with the $10 customer charge.

We’ve had way more cloudy days this winter/fall than I would have imagined we would have here. In fact, every day for the next 4 days, we have rain predicted,with overcast, cloudy days. I’ll never complain about rain but we have had more cloudy days than we’ve had the previous years we’ve been here. Again . . I’m not complaining. We’ll take all the rain we can get and cloudy days are so much easier than sunny days when it comes to working outside or keeping the house cool

As we near the end of our first year using solar power, we’re thrilled the system is doing exactly what we thought it would do. We’ve been so happy with Longhorn Solar and would definitely use them again!