What happens when you’re met with a surprise bill? You start asking questions, just like this western Chicagoland homeowner did. They had a 20-kilowatt solar array on the roof expecting monthly electric bills to fall close to zero, and instead kept getting charged even as the panels poured surplus power back onto the grid. Across the spring the home returned roughly a megawatt-hour more electricity than it drew, yet the bills ran $90, then $129, then $153, according to Energies Media. The meter read a surplus while the account kept losing money
The billing ran that way for months. Over a five-month stretch the charges landed at $90, then zero, then $84, $129, and $153, and in three of those months the house generated about a megawatt-hour more than it consumed and was billed anyway. One entry drove the confusion: a “Net Metering Credit – Supply” figure that flipped between a credit and a charge, priced anywhere from $0.00383 to $0.09177 per kilowatt-hour depending on the month. The homeowner posted about it in the r/Solar community on Reddit, writing that something felt off.
The culprit was the rate plan, not the hardware. The homeowner had switched onto ComEd’s hourly pricing plan five months earlier, drawn by the logic that panels producing during daylight would catch the best rates. There were two features of that plan, including its hourly export pricing and a separate capacity charge, that come together to showcase how a net-generating home could instead end up owing money.
This might seem like an unfathomable situation for most. But it’s a very situation that now needs to be rectified. Of course, the question needs to be asked: how did it get this way in the first place? And what can be done about it so that it doesn’t happen in the future?
How Hourly Pricing Turns This Kind of Surplus Into a Bill
Any other western Chicagoland ComEd customers here? Bill question for you.
by
u/KRTLART in
solar
On an hourly plan, exported solar power has no fixed value, because the price of electricity shifts hour to hour all day, which is information some of the Reddit commenters provided for the confused homeowner. Panels peak in the middle of the day, frequently during low-demand hours when the grid pays little for what they send back. Power the home pulls in after dark is billed at that hour’s rate, which can be much higher. The result is a timing mismatch: a home can finish the month a net producer and still lose on the math, because the cheap exported hours do not cover the expensive imported ones. That swing from $0.00383 to $0.09177 per kilowatt-hour is the volatility in action.
Most of the country works differently. Standard net metering credits surplus power that rolls forward month to month, and a steady overproducer usually pays little beyond a fixed grid-connection fee, often in the $10 to $40 range.
ComEd’s hourly plan instead settles against live market rates, so the value of what the panels export is never locked in and can fall well under the cost of what the home buys back at night. The homeowner still comes out ahead of having no panels at all, just by far less than expected.