Another introduction....

[Jason Ready]

Greetings all.....

New guy here, looking for information.

I'm sure I am like the majority of persons on this forum, having finally enough of getting gouged by Hydro One for what I consider an essential service, electricity.

Yes, I too like the idea of using less and helping the environment, but in all honesty, I really don't know how much more a family of 4 can do to reduce consumption, without having to spend huge dollars on little returns. I'd rather spend "huge" dollars to get reasonable returns and it sounds like microfit might be the answer.

I am very intrigued by the microfit program and actually getting paid to generate my own electricity. I don't think we would ever go completely grid free, so grid tie has the greatest benefit to cost to convenience ratio for our situation.

I am very early in the process, but believe in the direction I am headed. My wife is just as dissapointed with our hydro bill, but isn't as technically minded when it comes to solar generation. She does however have much better grasp of financial stuff than I, so if I can prove to her this make economic sense we can move forward.

This forum obviously has a lot to share and I appreciate it. I'll get to reading through some of it and thanks in advance for answers to some of our questions (as I am sure there will be many:laugh:)

Jason

[Ralph Day]

Hi Jason and welcome to the forum

In my house we were consumers of about 22-24kwhrs of electricity every day. Before we went off grid we trimmed that to about 7kwhr per day. I read the meter faithfully for a year during our transition.

We started by changing all the lightbulbs to cfl's, putting things on timers (uv light) or power bars (tv, stereo etc) and replacing old appliances. Shutting off lights and background noise (tv, stereo) helped too. That brought us down to 13-14kwhr per day. After installing solar domestic hot water and a demand propane water heater we were down to 7kwhr per day. The total investment to get that far was probably $10K (the sdhot water was the big ticket item). It can be done.

Getting the power to live without H1 cost about another $50K. It can be done, but not cheaply. Grid tying is the most cost effective...getting paid, but still using. Net metering not so cost effective. I can't do net metering and microFIT because of the 10kw single connection point rule, so still live like off grid, just using H1 as a cheaper source of power for charging batteries (and making toast or microwaving).

Lots to learn here.

Ralph

[Rob Beckers]

Jason, welcome at GPT! :welcome:

MicroFIT does give you reasonable returns on your investment, if you have enough roof surface and it faces somewhat south (the range south-east through south-west works with minor losses, beyond that it gets less ideal). Be aware that many PV installers are tossing unrealistic energy production numbers, MicroFIT revenue, and return-on-investment numbers around. Realistically it takes close to 10 years to earn back the investment, the other 10 years of the contract you make money. In short, in 20 years you double your money, which makes for a 5% ROI. You can do slightly better or worse, depending on your roof, and installer's price. I wrote a thread with things to watch out for (http://www.greenpowertalk.org/showthread.php?t=10455).

Since the expectation is widely that after October the rates are going to change (hint: they won't get any better!), I would urge you to apply as soon as you can for MicroFIT. The OPA takes 3+ months to process applications, and there is no downside: After you get a conditional offer you have 1 year to decide if you want to implement or not. There are no penalties for not implementing. At the same time as applying for MicroFIT you should also apply for a connection with your local Hydro company. For Hydro-One this is called "Form C" (http://www.hydroone.com/Generators/Documents/All%20Forms/Form%20C_Micro-Generation%20Connection%20Application.doc). Reason for applying is that the OPA will wait for the Hydro company to approve the connection before they will extend a conditional offer, so you need that done as well.

I understand your feeling of getting gouged by Hydro. In reality though, you (and everyone else in Ontario) actually have it pretty good: Even with the rate hikes Ontario has one of the lowest electricity rates in the world. In fact, it's cheaper here than many places of the USA, that should tell you something. Despite the opposition party claiming that FIT/MicroFIT are to blame for the rate hikes (it's not; people pay just a tiny fraction of their hydro bill for FIT/MicroFIT), the reality is that decades of neglect in updating the infrastructure are catching up with us. On top of that the Ontario government has been subsidizing hydro rates for a very long time, keeping the artificially low (instead you paid through taxes for your hydro use). That's what is behind it.

The unfortunate reality is that the ultra-low hydro rates over the years have made Ontarians some of the world-leaders in electricity use per capita. We are addicts! Getting off that addiction is unfortunately not cheap or convenient, since we have all those appliances and toys in our houses that use lots of electricity. The Europeans didn't fall into that trap (or not quite as deeply); electricity was always expensive and they are use to living just as comfortably on just 1/3 of what we use on average.

-RoB-

P.S. The forum rules state that if you want to use a picture with your account you should be in it. The reasoning behind that is that we like to know who we are 'talking to'. It also helps keep people civil (seems to be working, as this is a very friendly place to hang out).

[Joe Blake]

Hi Jason, and Welcome from Deep Down Under, (Perth Western Australia)

I'm afraid I can't help you much with your particular set up, living the southern hemisphere as I do, without snow or dark winters, but I can only say that even if for no other reason, there is a great deal of satisfaction in going "alternative" and receiving a bill from the local power utility which says "No payment required. The account is in credit." :nuts:

And without trying to be controversial, current events in Asia will probably make awareness of alternative energy generation much greater.

Good luck, and hopefully your stay with us will be ultimately satisfying.

Ciao,

Joe

[Dave Schwartz]

If you can stand to read through it all, you can read my "blog"ing about my own 4kW microFIT installation last summer here (http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=125342).

[Jason Ready]

Thanks for the welcome everyone :cheesy:

There sure is a lot of info to digest, and like any major undertaking, a lot of decisions to make.

One of the (many) questions that comes to mind is scalability.

For example, lets say I have room on a roof for 5Kw worth of panels. I go through the process and have everything up and running (read money coming into my account).

Then, at some future date, I build another outbuilding on my property (garage, barn, storage, etc.) that would have room for an additional array of panels.

With the original Microfit contract in hand and working, can I just add panels (and associated infrastructure, inverters, etc) until I bring total generation up to 10KWh, or does that have to be reworked through the system?

The example above is actually backwards from what I plan to do. We are negotiating on a piece of property right now. Eventually we will build our house on it, but in the meantime I'm thinking of building a just garage with solar on the roof to take advantage of the full Microfit revenue at $0.802.

The garage will have it's own electrical panel from the pole at the road. Then I'll add a house on the property and draw the hydro from the garage. Essentially the garage acts as the main panel for garage power/solar grid tie. The hydro from the house would be a subpanel feeding from the main panel in the garage.

Sounds backwards, but explains why I might have limited roof space in the beginning.

Oh so much to think about :weird:

[Dave Schwartz]

An expansion would have to be a new application and a another complete pass through the system - and it not clear how the payments for the older system would be affected if the rate has dropped by the time the offer is made for the expansion. For example, currently if you combined solar PV and hydro you would get only the hydro rate for everything.

I don't think you can apply for 10 and only install 5 either. The contract is signed based on the commissioning report (which includes the nameplate size) from the LDC. They do this to prevent people from gaming the system by installing a small system and then hooking a cheap source like hydro in parallel and getting the 80.2 cents for that when they should have gotten much less. They will be able to know how many kWh your system should be capable of producing and if your output is much above that (allowing for annual variations that other local systems would see too) you will put you contract in jeopardy.

[Ralph Day]

Hi Jason
I think I recall that roof mounting had to be on existing structures, not built specifically for pv mounting (who decides that? who knows).

It's been over a year since I really paid attention to the application stipulations, but mounting on existing structures rings a bell.

Ralph

[Dave Schwartz]

The rule was that it had to be a structure that would otherwise have been built for non-microFIT purposes. It didn't have to be necessarily an existing structure but you couldn't just build something with 'a roof' solely for the purpose of supporting a roof-mounted system - otherwise it would be deemed just a fancy ground-mounting.

[Rob Beckers]

Jason, a garage is fine. As long as it's not just 4 poles and a roof. The MicroFIT rules have a little bit of definition in them on what can and cannot be used for rooftop solar, the essence is that it must have walls and a roof, and not be there solely to hold up solar modules.

MicroFIT does allow incremental projects, this is explicitly in the rules . The rules are a bit vague, and I don't know of anyone that has actually tried this though. My reading is that the new part (the incremental part) pays at the rate in effect when the contract gets extended to include it. In effect, they use a ratio of old vs. new to determine what part of generation to attribute to what rates.

-RoB-