Drawing from grid and exporting at same time

[quinny]

Can anybody tell me why I show that I am drawing from the grid AND exporting at the same time in the middle of the day. Was changed over to NET metering a couple of months ago.

Seems like a way for AGL to make money, Charge for power at a high cost and give me a lttle money for the export at the same time, when I should be using all my solar and not drawing from the grid.

Please explain???

Or would this just be a technical difficulty the AGL have every day with everything?

[quinny]

I gather nobody from AGL can explain or to busy trying to make the usage site work??

[jayden_AGL]

Hey quinny,

Thank you for reaching out!

It sounds like there may be inconsistencies in the data you're seeing, which is definitely worth looking into further! First of all, we'll ask that you ensure that this is actual data that you're seeing, as some customers have been experiencing delays in receiving actual data as of late, and have been provided estimated data in its place.

If the data is displaying as actual, I'll ask that you send me a screenshot of this as well as your account details to and we'll be happy to assist where we can!

Kind regards,

Jayden.

[quinny]

Reaching out..... I just spent 61 minutes 35 seconds talking to 5 different people at AGL at not one knew what to do, even one said "What do you want us to do about it..." before transferring to someone else and I had to start again. In the end the last person in metering tells me I need to talk to Activestream as they did the job. I phone Activestream 19 min 47sec telling me they cannot do anything without AGL looking at it and to go back there and would not give a job number "they don't do that" so who knows if any of that is on record.

The screen shot will be sent in a moment, hopefully you can do something without passing on again

[jayden_AGL]

Hey quinny,

Sorry about the unhelpful level of service on offer today, this is absolutely not the standard that we strive to provide. Thank you for sending this through! We'll be sure to look into things and be back in touch ASAP.

Kind regards,

Jayden.

[NeilC]

Quinny,

I don't know if  you got an answer to the simple question.

Your solar power is Generation and you use as much of this as your house is consuming. Any excess is exported to the grid. If your consumption exceeds your generation then you will consume all your generation and then import power from the grid.

1.    If you are producing 4kw and using 5kw the net result is that you are IMPORTING 1kw.

2.    Producing 4kw and using 3kw you are EXPORTING 1kw.

3.    Producing 4kw and using 4kw you are NEUTRAL.

If you are looking at your inverter it shows the power it is generating not what you are exporting to the grid. See above items (1,2 and 3) as an example.

Cheers

Neil

[Palmplex]

Can AGL point me to the contractual definition of net metering when the house is connected to 3 phase but the solar inverter is only connected to one phase please.  How is net metering worked out.  If my Airconditioning is consuming 5kw on a different phase to my solar Inverter that is also producing 5kw , am i billed zero or am I billed for 5kw on one phase and a FIT of 5kw on another phase .  

I'd like to see the contract that defines how net metering works for AGL and smart meters.

[NeilC]

@Palmplex 

These are community pages.

If you want a contract definition go to AGL themselves.

The answer to your question was in my last post on this posting.

What you draw from the grid is metered.

You have three phase plus solar.

The solar is connected to one phase. If your consumption on that phase exceeds the output of your solar at any given time it will be classed as consumption.

If your Solar output exceeds your consumption then you will export to the grid and get paid for it.

The other two phases will only report consumption.

If you are using 5kW on each phase you will be charged for 15kW.

If you are generating 5kW, but still using 5kW, on that phase, then export is 0kW and import charge is 0.

If on that phase you use 0kW and generate 5kW then you will export 5kW at your FIT payment.

Simple!

[GregAGL]

I too have this problem where in the same 30 min billing cycle I am charged for 1.8kwh and credited for 1.6kwh whil  my solar 3rd party meter tells.me.I am producing enough power to meet my needs. Production 6.5kw, consumption 3.7kw, yet I am billed and credited at the same time. The bill costs more than the solar produced. AGL has not been able to solve this, they just offered me $150 towards my bill, for me to go away

I too had the AGL contact line hangup regularly. No answers

All I want to know is if I am producing almost twice as much solar as my house  requires, how I get a solar feed.in and a bill from the grid as.well

[NeilC]

@GregAGL 

Here are 7 days of my half hourly export and import figures. To enable you to read the data I have also broken up into mornings and afternoons.

The exported total is the sum of the columns in each of the rows.

Now what I cannot show you here is the amount of power that my solar panels generated, but this is irrelative any way because it was consumed by the appliances.

You can see though that most of the time I exported more than I imported. However we only used an average of 5kWh a day over our last billing period.

Anyway lets get down to some basics.

You need to take into consideration all of the facts.

For ease lets work on a days billing all figures include GST where applicable.

Above is sample from my Electricity Used Spread Sheet.

You have a supply charge say $1.00 a day, you get paid $0.10c a kWh for Export then you have different rates for different times of the day.

Peak $0.40, OffPeak $0.30 and shoulder $0.20

So using the figure for 5th March the result would be

Supply ($1.00) + Peak($2.07) + Shoulder($0.16) + Offpeak($0.51)  = $3.75 - Exported ($0.92)

So that one day costs you $2.83

On the 6th March

Supply+Peak+Shoulder+Offpeak = 1+.9+0+.24 or $2.24 then subtract your exported $2.18

Costs then $0.06 for the day.

Now look at some actual data for my last billing period

So Quarterly bill would have been $21.87

Now lets remove solar from the equation. I used 412,47 kWh of my solar generation so I need to add that back into the equation. I cannot add any to the Offpeak as that is non solar time. So have to add it to Peak and shoulder.

lets say that solar can be generated from 7am to 6pm (11 hours). Now shoulder is 10am to 3pm or 5 hours.

So we add 5/11 of the 412kWh to shoulder (45%) and 55% to Peak.

The change is very apparent (Yearly bill now $1500 not $88).

If you want you can PM me and I will give you an email address to send your meter data to me and I will convert it into the industry standard NEM format file which if understand spread sheets is very easy to manipulate the data.