New Electric Meter on my house equipped with PV

[peakbagger]

My original electric meter installed long before I had solar was a mechanical meter without a reverse ratchet so it ran backwards when I first installed solar (many meters have "ratchets" that record generated power as positive). After summer rolled around and my monthly readings were negative, they swapped in a new digital bidirectional meter, it still ran backwards when I generated more than I was using but they seemed to be happy but I still had a visitor once a year or so stop by an stare at the meter in addition to the meter reader. Apparently negative power use is flagged by utility fraud software. The utility's billing system definitely didn't deal well with solar and for about 2 years I got a hand printed calculation of my credit every month along with my main bill Eventually they got the software to deal with the solar but it took awhile. Recently the utility installed a multichannel meter with a wireless output. The house is in rural area so for now the truck still drives by once a month. I now have now have one channel for power supplied by the utility and one channel for what I put into the grid and it looks like it has several extra channels. I expect that the meter is also recording hourly interval data for the utilities use. I haven't gotten my first bill yet with the new meter but expect its going to be a long phone call to get my credit right with the changeover. Once I get the billing straight I will inquire on what additional data they are collecting and see if I can get access to it.

I have my own meter installed for my net PV output. I own it so the utility is not allowed to mess with it. I have three inverters and non of them have data outputs so they all supply a subpanel that runs through my private meter which is used to record SRECs. My original inverter has what looks like a Hobbs meter for MWhr production, its slowly been clicking away since the first system was installed about 12 years ago.

 

[jebatty]

Rita Rita Meter Reader! My utility learned quickly. As of the end of 2013, only 19 PV systems in the co-op distribution territory. There were a few problems of correctly capturing PV and grid usage with the early installs, most were solved. Then there was a problem with mine related to a separate "dual heat" meter that resulted in a double PV credit on our bill for nearly a year. That was discovered and corrected, and the co-op said I could keep the double credit, for which I thanked it very much. Since that problem, all is good as far as I can tell.

Like you, I have my own production meter (PM) for PV output reaching the main panel. The PV software shows production at the panel level. The PV meter is recording slightly more than 99% of the power reported at the panels, which amounts to a little less than a 1% loss between the panels and the house, a distance of 220'.

The utility also installed a buy-back meter which only records forward power from the PV to the grid. The utility grid billing meter only records forward power from the grid to the house. The difference between production and buy back = PV used at the house.

Based on historical pre-PV billing records, for the first year of PV my total usage was within a few kwh of the total of billed usage + production - buy back, so I have high confidence that everything is being reported and billed correctly.