The bad news: solar production incentives for Seattle City Light customers are shrinking, starting with the current fiscal cycle (July 2015 - June 2016). The good news: this is mostly because so many customers have installed solar systems, reaching the incentive cap sooner than expected. Other factors include recent good weather that boosts production and also reduces heating load (lots of electric heat here), and larger average installation sizes. Washington State pays production incentive to residential solar producers, varying from $0.15 to $0.54/kWh depending on manufacture location of the solar modules and inverters. Special 'community solar' projects get twice as much. The program ends June 30, 2020, but is also capped at 0.5% of revenue for each utility. Last year I had heard that Seattle City Light expected to reach the cap in 2016 or 2017, but have now received notice that it expects reach the cap during the current fiscal cycle. Rather than locking out newcomers, SCL has elected to proportionally reduce the incentive to all producers, so newcomers will still have incentive to hop on the solar bandwagon. The reduction this cycle is forecast to be 31%. That amount suggests we are not going just a little bit over the cap, but are blasting through it. I haven't heard about any other utilities in this state reaching their incentive caps. FWIW, I have now reached 10,000 kWh lifetime production (since May 2013). And between June's system expansion, more conservation, and some more travel absence (i.e. temporary load reduction), this house is now at 100% Net Zero for the trailing 12 months. I'll lose that status over the winter, but should regain it for good by late next spring.
54¢/kWh? wow! SoCal utilities won't even 'credit' at our 42¢ tier4 rate - unless you actually over generate into tier4 - some 1,600 kWh's in any month of your true-up yearly cycle. Otherwise - cash back is the wholesale rate that they buy power at. Last time I checked - about a year ago, that was a whopping 2.9¢/kWh. Not that I'm complaining. Prior to Schwarzenegger signing into legislation requirements for utilities to pay for surplus, many utilities in California wouldn't give you squat. The utility is still trying to undo that legislation. .
^ That high rate applies to only made-in-Washington PV modules and inverters. It didn't become available until fairly recently, when local manufacturers finally got working product rolling out the doors. With made-in-Oregon panels and designed-in-California inverters, I get the lowest possible incentive rate of 15¢/kWh, and it expires completely on 6/30/2020. We will still have net metering after that, but I don't know if I'll get any payment at all for annual overproductions. For PV, it does help that we have many publicly owned utilities with different motives than the privately owned operations. I'm not so sure such ownership has worked as well for some other issues.
Just imagine the poor suckers the California PUC keeps on LADP, SDE, SCE, and PGE. You probably are getting paid the wholesale price of ccgt electricity. Think of all those fat margins they are charging on retail that you don't pay. The margin pays for those bad decisions like a botched upgrade that was never approved for san onofre, and high executive saleries. Still a lot more roof top solar would be built if people got payed the wholesale time of use price instead of average wholesale. That would mean the PUC actually was trying to do its job, instead of just building a big staff to help out the big utilities or randomly some environmental group.
