Introduction

The new regulation is being well publicized, but only offers a few good points for the potential grid tie participant. It has succeeded in making grid tie in Alberta possible, it also gives quite a bit of time for things to actually start happening. We have read through the document in detail and say that the interconnection process, as far as we can now tell, from the new regulation will be as follows:

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What it gives you

• A form (which has been established by the Commission) needs to be filled out and submitted to the wires owner.
• The wires owner must install a bidirectional meter or two meters, which will separately record the incoming and outgoing electricity.
• All costs of operating the micro-generation facility will be borne by the consumer
• Costs of metering will be borne by the wires owner and essentially recovered from other consumers.
• If there are “extra ordinary” costs involved for the wires owner, the wires owner can recover those costs from the consumer.
• The wires owner must provide the data management and relay the information to the retailer etc.
• There is now exclusion for these systems from the power pool. This is good so that the consumer does not need to have those costs or complications to become a power producer.
• The consumer must provide a notice to the retailer of the micro-generation system
• Unless agreed otherwise the following rates apply to energy fed into the grid
• Retail energy rate
• The retailer must provide net billing to the micro-generator (check out what this actually means towards the end of this discussion)
• If there is an excess produced by the micro-generator, the credit will carry forward
• Once a year, any unused credits must be settled
• This regulation comes into effect January 1, 2009 and the forms for it must be established by July 1, 2008
• This regulation does not need to be reviewed until Dec 31, 2013. This means that likely no progress will be made until at least then.

Analysis

• The way the document is worded, the net billing only refers to the actual cost of electricity, not the transmission or other charges. While this is fair to the various companies involved, it will do very little to encourage renewable energy installations, since the only thing the consumer is able to do is reduce a relatively small portion of the bill. This is especially true for those people who have already done what they can to reduce their electricity consumption. Take for example a household that is using 20 KWH per day. They install a 7 KW solar system (which would be enough to net them out during the year). If they typically use 5 KWH during the sunshine part of the day and the remainder the rest of the day the following would happen.
• During the day, they would export 15 KWH (the excess)
• In the evening and night, they would import 15 KWH
• Now the retailer will zero out the electricity charge but the wires owner will still charge for the incoming 15 KWH. (Again, this is fair for the wires owner since they are providing the service, but it will keep the total electricity bill fairly high.

• One issue is that the owner of solar or wind power is paid retail price, and not at the “Green” power rates that utilities charge a premium for.

Overall, in our opinion, this regulation, has made grid tie possible, but will do very little to encourage renewable energy in the Province of Alberta. It appears to have made some of the interconnection process a bit better (we will have to see what the forms look like) and taken out some of the hoops and loops to jump through. This part is good, though, and this is really only a partial step, this regulation may actually harm the process of getting people to move towards renewable energy, as is still discouraging anyone from producing power for others.

What we really needed, as we had proposed to the Stelmach Government, was a fundamentally new regulation that would have based the actual cost of electricity on an integrated price per KWH, so that people could actually zero out their electrical bill. The wires owners and various companies involved would be compensated for this by distributing the lost revenue among all customers.

If you would like to read the Boyd Solar Proposal presented to the Stelmach Government (final proposal on Dec 17 07) Click on our logo

 If you think that this legislation makes sense and is fair to all parties, Feel free to contact your MLA and direct them to it, or give them a copy.

Find your MLA through this link      

Thank you for reading all of this,