Solar Power Redux

In Alberta, our electric utility bill is broken out in to Administrative Fees* and Energy costs. Our Admin fees are further broken down to distribution elements but it's still annoying how little our cost /kWh really matters. With solar, since we get a credit for producing electricity on to the grid, I was much more interested in being able to predict our bill to determine how much we actually save with solar panels. Predicting is how we'll figure out our ROI as we need to know how much we didn't pull of the grid as well as how much we get from putting on the grid.



We did two things to lower energy costs; reduce use and install solar panels. Reducing use included simply turning off stuff we we're using (printers, stereo amps, lights!) Since change is hard, we indulged in shopping getting a home mini to control stereo equipment and installing motion detector switches in rooms we tend to leave lights on. We dropped from 367 kWh in 2018 to 303 kWh. Would have been more but we've been using grow lights. Of that only 142 kWh were pulled from the grid because we shift our activities to take advantage of the energy we're producing. Not bad for April - a month not associated with a lot of sun.

Residential rebates is just one element of government incentive energy saving, there's also using what's available to consumers. Incandescent bulbs are no longer available - that's a governmental thing that cuts energy use without really affecting the consumer. The Provincial gov't used some of the carbon levy to offset the cost of LED bulbs to encourage people to switch from incandescent before the bulbs burnt out so we took advantage of that as well. We didn't think much of it until we switched on some outside flood lights and watched our power use spike. We immediately switched those lights over to LED.

Not sure of the year data collected.

People really protest about making changes, claiming that holding industry accountable is more important (then saying we can't because jobs 🙄) Canadian residential use is 34% (50% transportation/50% in home use) so we can make a difference. 

*Paying Admin fees is still cheaper than buying a home battery back up system.