genability.com | Tariff News

Notice on SMUD Tariff R-TOD-SSR, March - July 2022

Sacramento Municipal Utility District (“SMUD”) introduced a new Solar and Storage tariff for solar customers (Rate Schedule “R-TOD-SSR”), which took effect on March 1, 2022. SMUD published documentation regarding the revised tariff structure on their website: https://www.smud.org/-/media/Documents/Rate-Information/Rates/01_SSR.ashx
genability.com | Tariff News

California Net Energy Metering 3.0 (NEM3)

California is updating its Net Energy Metering policies in 2022, commonly referred to as NEM3.0. Genability customers can rely on Genability providing full support for them. Ahead of the publication of the final NEM 3 tariffs and rates, Genability has publishing a set of Tariffs with the latest proposed rate structures for customers to use. Once details are available, the finalized tariffs and rates will be published for all to use. In this blog post we track updates as the policies and rate changes firm up. We recommend checking back hear from time to time to get the lastest.
genability.com | Company

Whats new with Genability

Like many companies, the start of a new year is a time when Genability’s goals and objectives are updated and plans are set in motion. Here’s a summary of what we are up to in 2021.
genability.com | Tariff News

California Residential Electricity Rate Changes - January 2020

Southern California Edison (SCE), Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) all released new tariff rates on January 1, 2020 improving the economics of residential solar for all three utilities.
genability.com | Products

Solar Incentives Data

Genability Switch customers no longer need to maintain their own database of residential solar incentives. As of October 15, 2019 Genability’s Solar Incentives API has graduated from Beta to V1 and is now available under general release for Switch customers that wish to license it. We’ve also built a new user interface within Switch’s Dash web application to view this data along with your savings analyses.
genability.com | Tariff News

Review of Southern California Edison's New Post Solar Electricity Rates and its Impact on Savings

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genability.com | Products

Savings Analysis API Support for Non-bypassable Charges

Genability has just upgraded both our Savings Analysis API and our Calculate API to better support Non-Bypassable Charges (NBCs). What are NBCs you ask? Well that’s how the California utilities refer to the customer’s annual NBCs that cannot be offset by Net Energy Metering (NEM) Credits under NEM 2.0. These NBCs behave as a second minimum charge calculation that’s performed during the customer’s annual true-up.
genability.com | Tariff News

Review of California's Proposed Commercial Time of Use Electricity Tariffs

In 2019, both Pacific Gas & Electric (PGE) and Southern California Edison (SCE) will introduce new Time-of-Use (TOU) periods for commercial tariffs. Both utilities are moving highly-priced peak hours later in the day, from mid-afternoon to 4-9 PM. If you are selling solar, storage and/or energy efficiency in California, you want to be sure to calculate savings using these new tariffs. Thanks to Genability’s new Proposed Tariffs product for enterprise customers, now you can!
genability.com | Products

Proposed Tariffs included in Genability database

Our Proposed Tariffs feature allows you to use our complete set of tools to calculate the costs and savings of tariffs that are not yet published and live.
genability.com | Products

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genability.com | Products

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genability.com | Tariff News

Solar Incentives in Illinois, Net Metering Ends for Duke Energy South Carolina

The roller coaster for solar in the U.S. (call it a Solar Coaster?) keeps rolling this summer.  The state of Illinois has finalized the credit values for its Adjustable Block Program, which provides solar owners with an upfront payment for 15 years of estimated solar production.  Meanwhile, in South Carolina the state legislature failed to increase the net metering cap and Duke Energy has met its 2% limit. Starting on August 1, 2018 full net metering closes for Duke Energy SC customers and will be replaced by the Purchased Power Rider. First the good news for solar developers:
genability.com | Tariff News

Solar Incentives in Massachusetts

Later this year, Massachusetts will close out it’s SREC program replacing it with the new Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) incentives. While there are still a few details left to be finalized, Genability is able to model the proposed SMART incentives for our customers and has made the new incentives available via the Incentives API.
genability.com | Tariff News

Duke Energy North Carolina Solar Incentives

At 9 AM this morning (July 9, 2018), Duke Energy North Carolina started accepting incentive applications for their Solar Rebate program and Genability has made the new incentive available via our Incentives API.
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Genability Open for Business for Commercial Energy Customers

We have an exciting announcement. Genability is now open for business to any and all new energy companies servicing commercial and industrial customers. Today we have lifted all restrictions that might have prevented you from working with us in the past.
genability.com | Tariff News

Hawaiian Smart Export and Customer Grid Supply Solar Programs

Starting on 2/20/2018, the three Hawaiian investor-owned utilities will offer two new programs for customers with solar: Customer Grid Supply Plus and Smart Export. Both programs offer export credits for power provided to the grid, an option that has not been available in Hawaii since the Customer Grid Supply programs closed in 2017. Genability has just made these two programs available for Hawaiian Electric Co (HECO), Hawaiian Electric Light Co (HELCO) and Maui Electric Co (MECO) for use in your solar proposals.
genability.com | Products

Estimating Energy Usage from Customer’s Bill Amount

Do you have a potential solar customer’s 12 months of bills or their annual bill amount for electricity? If so, we can now estimate energy usage from that information!
genability.com | Tariff News

New York Public Service Commission Guidelines on Presenting Solar Savings

Effective December 1, 2017, solar developers in New York are required by the New York Public Service Commission (NYPSC) to meet precise guidelines (PDF Download) when presenting savings estimates.  Genability has reviewed these requirements and we have made some data upgrades for New York so that our solar customers can comply with these new requirements without any change to their API integration.  First, let’s review the new savings requirement:
genability.com | Products

Run Down of Genability Developer Website Updates

A quick rundown of the latest and greatest updates on GDN, our developer website.
genability.com | Tariff News

The Methodology Behind our Monthly Residential Rates Newsletter

Every month Genability updates thousands of tariffs. These changes can be as small as a simple rate increase or as large as a whole new rate structure. For just over a year now, around the 10th of each month, we have sent out a summary of those changes in our Monthly Residential Rate newsletter to help our customers better understand and anticipate these changes.
Tariff News

Investigating the Effect of California’s NEM 2.0 on Solar Savings

By

| Reading time 5 minutes

Update: On May 31, 2016 PG&E closed the residential time-of-use tariff used in this analysis (E-6) for new enrollment and added ETOU-A and ETOU-B as new options for residential customers. Genability Switch was updated on that day to reflect the current options for customers switching to time-of-use. More information about the new tariffs is found here on PG&E’s website.

In January, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved new net metering rules, which define how utility companies bill customers with rooftop solar. Largely hailed as a victory for advocates of the distributed solar industry, the NEM 2.0 policies change how the utilities calculate costs and credits for solar customers.

Through 3,000 simulations, Genability investigated how these new rules will impact solar savings. Note that these simulations are based on the NEM 2.0 versions of the utilities’ residential tariffs as of February 2016; updated analyses will be provided soon based on recent changes to the relevant tariff schedules.

From these simulations, we found that NEM 2.0 can have a relatively small effect on savings on average. And more interestingly, NEM 2.0 may lead to greater savings in certain cases.

NEM 2.0 rules

Once the NEM 1.0 rules expire in 2016 and early 2017, potential solar customers served by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E) will have their solar savings impacted in two major ways1,2:

  • All electricity delivered by the utility company is subject to higher charges (“non-bypassable charges”; e.g., nuclear decommissioning charge); these charges cannot be offset by solar energy credits.

  • Customers must switch to a time-of-use (TOU) rate schedule in which the cost of electricity delivered by the utility company varies over the day.

Per the CPUC’s January ruling, both of these factors are resolved hourly, meaning the utility calculates charges from hour-to-hour. Note that SDG&E customers will not need to switch to a TOU rate structure until a later date (several months after the onset of NEM 2.0).

The analysis below focuses on the rules approved in January’s CPUC decision and February tariff schedules. We will publish follow-up analyses as needed with new electricity tariffs including those still requiring approval by the CPUC.

How will NEM 2.0 affect solar savings?

Using Genability’s Savings Analysis product (our Switch API), we ran 3,000 simulations to compare savings for new solar customers under NEM 1.0 and NEM 2.0 rules. These simulations reflect randomly-selected combinations of monthly usage and solar production levels that are typical of cases run through our Switch API. These scenarios generally feature total annual consumption between 9,000 and 17,000 kWh, and solar installations that offset between 60% and 100% of this annual consumption. A more detailed explanation of our simulation procedure is included at the end of this post.

Ultimately, we found that NEM 2.0 has a relatively modest effect compared to NEM 1.0: over all the simulated savings analyses, there was only a 2.8% difference on average in first year solar savings ━ and this was a 2.8% increase in savings.

The chart below breaks down these annual costs by utility. Specifically, it illustrates utility costs for a year without solar, with solar under NEM 1.0 conditions, and with solar under NEM 2.0 conditions. (These values are averages across the simulations by utility.)

Similarly, the bar graph below shows the average amount of savings in utility costs per year thanks to solar (i.e., what you avoided paying the utility).

Both the chart and bar graph highlight the relatively comparable savings seen under each of the NEM conditions. That said, PG&E and SCE customers can actually benefit from the NEM rule changes: nearly 95% of the simulated PG&E customers and more than 95% of the simulated SCE customers saw higher savings under NEM 2.0 versus NEM 1.0. More specifically, annual savings increased by 5.7% ($146.20 in the first year) on average for the PG&E scenarios and 5.3% ($149.80) on average for the SCE scenarios.

SDG&E customer simulations saw lower solar savings under NEM 2.0 versus NEM 1.0. That said, the effect was small ━ only a 2.5% decrease on average ($85.27 in the first year). Even in the most extreme SDG&E case, there was only a 4.0% decrease in savings due to NEM 2.0.

We also assessed the effect of the new rules by examining the rate a customer pays to the utility for power after having gone solar (i.e., yearly amount paid to the utility divided by the total kWh delivered by the utility). The plots below depict the distribution of these post-solar rates:

As expected, the plots indicate that solar customers would pay higher rates to SDG&E under NEM 2.0 versus NEM 1.0 conditions, while the reverse is true for PG&E and SCE.

Altogether, these relative patterns of savings indicate that the positive effect of the TOU switching rule in NEM 2.0 (delayed for SDG&E) outweighs the negative effect of the higher non-bypassable charges.

Integrating NEM 2.0 rates into Savings Analysis calls

Overall, the non-bypassable charges appear to impact solar savings only slightly. In the PG&E and SCE NEM 2.0 scenarios, the switch to a TOU rate generally has a much larger, and often positive, effect on savings3.

How we ran this analysis

We determined 500 usage and production scenarios that are representative of potential rooftop solar customers served by each of the three California IOU utilities.

As a single hypothetical example: we used Genability’s APIs to create an account for a customer, John Smith, at 123 Genability Drive, San Francisco, California, 94114. We then created annual usage and solar profiles and uploaded them to the John Smith account.

For the John Smith scenario, we then ran a Savings Analysis call where the pre- and post-solar tariffs were the same ━ both PG&E’s E-1: Residential rate schedule; in other words, pre_master_tariff_id = post_master_tariff_id = 522 in the API call, where 522 denotes PG&E’s default residential tariff in Genability’s database. The results of this Savings Analysis call represent the NEM 1.0 case.

Next, we ran a nearly identical call, but set the post-solar tariff to the NEM 2.0 version of E-6-TOU: Residential - Time of Use. For this, we also set useIntelligentBaselining = true in the API call, which interpolates hourly usage data from a single monthly kWh reading (as described in a previous blog post). Altogether, this second Savings Analysis call predicts costs and solar savings under California’s new NEM 2.0 rules. We then compared savings under the NEM 1.0 and 2.0 conditions.

1 A one-time interconnection fee is also now allowed, but this is not part of the electricity tariff.

2 The invester-owned California utilities (PG&E, SCE, and SDG&E) have recently asked that charges be resolved at a sub-hourly level. The CPUC is expected to respond in the coming months.

3 Particularly for cases where the solar customer’s annual utility charges were above the annual minimums.

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