Can You Bank Home Solar Power with Net Metering?
Did you know you might be able to bank your home solar power from the sunniest days? Not all homeowners can do this, but it’s called “net metering.” By banking your extra solar power as credits for a cloudy day or a long winter, you can cut your energy bills year-round. It’s one of the best ways to keep home solar costs low.
Can you take part in this program? It all depends on three things: how much home solar power your system makes, how much power you use, and where you live. Our solar advice can guide you through the what and why of net metering and help you turn clean energy into savings.
What Is Home Solar Net Metering?
Here’s the basic idea. You might make more energy with your solar panels than your house will use. If that happens, you can send the extra energy back to your city or town. This is called “net metering.” It can earn you money-saving credits and protect you from outages.
Most homes get their power from the “grid” of their city or town. They pay a utility company for each kWh (“kilowatt hour”) they use. If you have home solar power, you are making your own clean energy kWh. With metering, your area’s grid can measure how many kWh you make and also measure how many you use. If you don’t use all of your kWh, your extra electricity goes back into the grid.
You get “credits” for the number of kWh you send into the grid. They will save you money later. Plus, other houses in your town or city can use that energy to power their own homes! You’ll know any extra energy you generate is helping someone in your community. Wish your neighbor had solar panels? With net metering, your neighbor can power their home with your clean energy. It helps your whole town go green with you.
With all that in mind, it can be smart to install a home solar panel system that can generate a little more energy than you need. That choice might even put actual cash in your pocket. In addition to metering, having overflow power can help you earn money by selling SRECs.
Why Does Net Metering Save Money?
Do you know what happens when you need energy but your home solar power levels aren’t up to the job that day? If you have a system with storage batteries, of course that’s the first line of defense. If you need more power in your home than your home solar panels can immediately make, you’ll use whatever is stored in your system’s battery. After that, your home will automatically draw regular kWh out of the grid. If you don’t have batteries in your home solar system, you’ll start pulling energy from the grid right away. Without net metering, you might need to pay retail rates for all that grid electricity that you use in darker times. With a metering program, the credits from your extra sunny daytime power will help cover your costs instead!
Net metering cuts your electric bills so that you don’t pay as much for power. Instead of paying the utility company money for the kWh you use from the grid, you pay with your bank of credits. This means that if you produce a lot of energy during summer daylight hours but use more energy during long winter nights, your “credits” will help smooth out the year. Some homeowners can cover all of the energy they pull from the grid this way.
Does My State Have Net Metering?
The good news is that most places in the United States do net metering as a way to help make it attractive for homeowners to switch to home solar power. There are statewide programs across most of the country. The only states that don’t have statewide programs are: Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Mississippi, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.
Even with no legislated statewide program, you might still be able to get metering in your city or town. Local regions and power companies will sometimes do it to help strengthen the power grid and meet their own green energy goals. Especially in Idaho and Texas, many smaller regions have created programs or net metering alternatives that have similar goals.
The best way to find out what kind of programs are in place in your area is to contact your own utility company directly and ask about their policies. Online tools can help you find out, but there are also a lot of fast-moving solar power advocacy groups around the US who are pushing for more programs in more towns and cities. That means laws could be changing near you anytime, so your local sources will likely be the most reliable. But even if you can’t get net metering, there are lots of other ways to find home solar savings.[1]SEIA