How do solar panels work in the sense of billing? Do you not have an electric bill? Are you just paying for the panel itself?
In: Engineering
It depends on what state you’re in and whether or not you purchased your panels or leased them.
You can have a company install solar panels on your roof, all the electricity it generates belongs to the installer because you didn’t pay for anything. You sign an agreement with them called a power purchase agreement where you buy electricity from them for a set amount of years for a discounted rate.
The other method is purchasing the panels yourself, there are 2 main ways you’re billed through this, one is net metering and one is gross metering and it depends on what the laws are in the state you live in.
In a net metering agreement, 1kWh of energy is 1kWh, it doesn’t matter who produced it, the electric company or you. If your solar panels produced 30kWh of energy and you consumed 30kWh of energy your billed for 0kWh, you still pay a connection fee but you pay for no energy.
In a gross metering agreement, all the energy you produce that you don’t use right away gets sold to the electric company at a wholesale rate so you’re incentivized to use as much energy as you can while the sun is up and as little as you can when the sun sets. This generally comes with a time of use rate schedule as well where electricity is cheaper at night than it is in the daytime.
In every scenario, as long as you’re connected to the grid you get a bill.
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