Net Metering at the Washington Electric Coop

Worcester Family Takes The Bait For Net Metering

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PSD Information on Net Metering

Andy Flagg hasn't quite gotten used to the changes in his life. The most important one, of course, was the birth of Duncan McIlwaine in December. Duncan is Andy's son, who joins four-year-old April and Andy's wife, Sharon McIlwaine, to make the Worcester residents a family of four.

Almost as exciting, though, is all the new stuff on the rear, south-facing slope of Andy and Sharon's roof, and HAL 9000, who lives in the cellar. The 12 120-watt photovoltaic panels atop the house enable Andy and Sharon to generate 1.44 kilowatts of electricity, at peak production, from sunshine. And HAL, the inverter that changes the solar DC electric current to AC current appropriate for household uses, decides what to do with it. What Andy likes best is when HAL - sensing that the solar rack is producing more electricity than the family is using - sends the excess electricity out of the house to Washington Electric's power pole near the driveway, up through the Co-op's meter, and into WEC's electrical distribution system.

Andy hasn't gotten used to that yet.

"I'm still giddy," he admits. "When the sun is shining I like to go out and watch the meter spinning backwards. There's a well-beaten path to the utility pole."

The path is there because of Vermont's new net-metering law. Passed by the Legislature in 1998, the law went into effect in July 1999. For the first time, the law allows electricity consumers who also produce power - through solar, wind, methane or other renewable technologies - to channel electricity they don't use into their utilities' lines. With net metering, power, for people like Andy Flagg, is a two-way street. They give as well as receive.

The solar-generation system is the culmination of a long ambition for Andy, who earned three college degrees in subjects related to the environment and conservation.

"Some people went solar in 1999 because of Y2K," he says. "That didn't have anything to do with it for us. This is a dream I've had for at least 15 years."

The couple bought their house, situated in a remote clearing just over the Middlesex town line in Worcester, in 1995. It's a roomy house, 10 years old, with exposed beams, an open downstairs that combines the living, dining and kitchen spaces, and a stone fireplace and chimney. No sooner had they moved in did Andy and Sharon turn their attention to concerns about energy consumption. They bought fluorescent bulbs for every lighting location, taking advantage of WEC's discount offer found regularly in Co-op Currents. They borrowed the Co-op's digital test meter to measure the specific electricity usage of their appliances, which led them to replace the refrigerator that came with the house with a new Energy Star-rated unit that cut consumption from 5.5 kilowatt hours (kwh) per day with their old unit to 1.4 kwh/day.

Ultimately, though, Andy's ambition was to tap into the solar potential of the house. The advent of Duncan McIlwaine and Vermont's net metering law, both in 1999, were all the encouragement he needed. He considered self-generation of electric power to be a way to moderate the impact of his growing family on environmental resources, and under the new law all equipment purchased to construct and install a net-metered renewable-energy system is exempt from Vermont's 5-percent sales tax.

Andy sees it this way: "Net metering allows a residence to make a contribution to the solution of the regional energy problem by feeding back energy into the system. That means reducing the need for new power plants, thereby also reducing CO2 and sulfur emissions, which contribute to acid rain and mercury deposition."

And besides, he finds his new solar equipment and its on-again/off-again relationship to the WEC's distribution system interesting, and downright fun.

Making hay

At one time, going solar meant choosing to be energy self-sufficient - and that required an investment in the necessary equipment not only to make power but to store it for later, when the sun wasn't shining. And while Andy and Sharon have made those investment (including a bank of batteries for backup purposes in case of an outage), net metering makes it easier for alternative, home-based systems to be "utility interactive."

"We didn't really want to go completely off the grid," Andy explains.

Andy and Sharon work outside the home, so frequently on weekdays, when the sun is shining and the system is producing, the only ones home to enjoy it are Eli and Daisy, Labrador retriever siblings. HAL 9000 (more on HAL later) uses the solar energy to keep the storage batteries fully charged and the household's base-level energy needs met.

And if there's power to spare, HAL sends it into WEC's electric distribution system.

At night, when the family is home but the sun is shining in places like Krasnoyarsk and Peshawar instead of Worcester, they draw their power from the Co-op like other members. But the difference shows up in their monthly electric bill. Every kilowatt-hour spun backwards on the meter lowers the meter reading and thus reduces the amount of electricity they have to pay for.

And if in some given month the meter should reveal that Andy and Sharon have actually supplied more kilowatt hours to the Co-op than they have drawn from it, WEC will extend credit for that power toward the family's bill in the following month.

(There is a limit to this advantage. At the end of the year, by law, any unused power credits revert back to the utility. Thus, Vermont utilities do not actually purchase power from their customers through net metering, nor do home net-metering energy producers generate a cash income from their own power.)

But Andy Flagg understands another potential financial impact for his family. Washington Electric Cooperative provides every member's first five kilowatt hours of electricity each day at a low rate of about 7 cents per kwh. With his new PV system and the conservation measures he has taken in the house, Andy's goal is to reduce his average daily power purchase to that magic number.

He's getting close! Andy and Sharon's Co-op bill in January 1999 showed that the family had used an average of 17 kwh/day. A year later (January 2000) their Co-op power usage was down to 6 kwh/day. And that, Andy notes, "is in one of the worst months of the year, when a household in Vermont typically uses the most energy."

There could be any number of factors involved in that contrast of January bills. But don't try to convince Andy that his PV system, with HAL calling the shots from the basement, isn't one of them.

"Open the pod bay doors, Hal"

HAL 9000 is a famous movie star - known among film and science fiction buffs as the villainous computer in Arthur C. Clark's "2001: A Space Odyssey." Undoubtedly, Trace Engineering had that in mind when it named its DC-to-AC inverter. A tiny plaque on the inverter's front panel bears the inscription HAL 9000.

This HAL 9000, though, isn't scary at all. In fact, Andy has grown quite fond of it, for it does a lot more than simply inverting the solar-produced current (and ensuring that the AC power is "utility grade"); it decides when to feed power to WEC's system and when to draw power from it. And in case of a utility power outage, HAL sees to it that the household continues to be supplied with electricity by activating the connections to the storage batteries.

"HAL knows," says Andy. "You can't even see it happening. When the system was first hooked up, Leigh Seddon (from Solar Works in Montpelier, the company that sold and installed the equipment) turned the utility power off to test whether the auxiliary power would kick in, and there wasn't even a flicker."

The battery system, connected to the nine most important circuits in the house, can supply virtually all the family's electricity needs for at least three days. That was a feature Andy knew he would value after Tropical Storm Floyd hit central Vermont in September and the house lost power for three days. Sharon was seven months pregnant.

"We had no water because the well requires a pump," Andy recalls. "We had no heat except the wood stove. I thought to myself, with two little babies this is not a good idea."

Solar Works completed the installation in December, a week before Duncan made the scene. And though he had been eager for that moment, when it arrived Andy suffered a little trepidation. Despite his environmental convictions, he wasn't sure he'd like the looks of all that new equipment on top of his roof.

"The day the solar array went up I went outside and looked at it, and I asked myself, 'Do I like that?' And then, Andy grins, "I said, yeah."