SAN DIEGO (KGTV) - With skyrocketing energy bills, everyone is looking to save, including those with solar.
“It's still happening and it's pretty robust,” Ryan Gallentine, California Solar & Storage Association
There have been changes to the cost-saving energy that some new system owners may not be aware of. It’s a change from 2023, called NEM 3 or the net billing tariff.
“The change is really around when you receive credit for the solar energy you produce,” Brian Grems, Founding Partner at Stellar Solar, said. “Whereas in the past, solar was most valuable in the middle of the day and you received that one-for-one credit, and now with electricity being more expensive in the evening.”
ABC 10News spoke with Grems and Gallentine from the California Solar & Storage Association about NEM 3.
“If you went solar before April 2023, nothing changed for you. You keep your original deal for 20 years from when you were connected,” Gallentine said. “The basic way to think about it is that it reduced the credits that solar homeowners get for sending power back to the grid.”
Gallentine tells me that reduction was fairly large.
“It cut those export generation credits by about 80%. So, um, in everyday terms, the power that your panels send to the grid now earns about a quarter of what it used to,” Gallentine said. “So, the smart move and what we've seen the industry move to is to use your own solar power instead of exporting it.”
So how do you do that? You get a storage battery for your system.
“In the past, we used to use the grid sort of like a battery, and now customers can take advantage and really take control of the situation by installing a battery, pairing that with the solar system, and deploying that electricity in the evening when electricity is the most expensive,” Grems said.
But the batteries are expensive on top of an already expensive system that costs a lot of money upfront.
While I’m told there are programs to help with the cost, a typical solar battery costs more than $14,000 in California, according to Energy Sage.
“So, what I really encourage people to do is to talk to the salesperson that you're talking to about, you know, what those prices are,” Gallentine said. “There, there is a payback period. It's now a little bit longer than it used to be, but it does still make economic sense.”
