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California residents are more and more pairing battery storage with photo voltaic installations, in response to the most recent preliminary knowledge in our Month-to-month Electrical Energy Trade Report.
The share of recent residential photo voltaic photovoltaic programs paired with batteries has elevated since we started amassing knowledge in October 2023. In April 2024, greater than 50% of residential photo voltaic photovoltaic installations had been paired with battery storage, in contrast with simply over 20% in October 2023.
The shift towards extra battery storage at photo voltaic installations eligible for web metering got here after adjustments to California’s compensation construction. Internet metering compensates prospects for the distributed era output that’s returned to the grid by crediting their electrical energy payments.
In April 2023, California revised how family turbines with put in rooftop photo voltaic are compensated through web metering. The brand new construction, generally known as a web billing tariff (NBT), presents a variable compensation fee. The variable fee incentivizes pairing photo voltaic capability installations with battery storage as a result of batteries allow prospects to ship electrical energy to the grid throughout hours when demand is comparatively excessive, sometimes within the night when photo voltaic turbines produce much less.
Photo voltaic paired with battery installations makes up about 9% of all put in residential web metering capability in California, with over 40,000 new installations added between October 2023 and April 2024. These installations accounted for 232 megawatts (MW) of recent battery storage capability within the state.
The growing quantity of battery storage comes after California residents put in a report quantity of photo voltaic capability eligible for compensation from electrical energy utilities within the third quarter of 2023.
California residential photo voltaic capability eligible for web metering elevated by 22% within the third quarter of 2023 in contrast with the identical interval of 2022 as prospects put in capability earlier than the compensation construction modified. The speed of development slowed within the fourth quarter, after the adjustments went into impact, however web metering-related capability continued to extend. California now has greater than 12,000 MW of put in photo voltaic capability in residential web metering programs smaller than 1 MW.
Beneath the brand new NBT construction, the reimbursement fee varies all through the day relying on when the photo voltaic electrical energy is generated. This fee is, on common, lower than the sooner compensation construction generally known as web power metering 2.0 (NEM 2.0), which credited turbines at a flat retail electrical energy fee.
Capability installations elevated initially after the California Public Utility Fee introduced a grandfathering scheme for NEM 2.0 prospects for 20 years, which led to an interconnection utility backlog in the course of the first quarter of 2023, in response to an evaluation of the impacts of the brand new coverage by the Lawrence Berkeley Nationwide Laboratory.
In California, residential items account for greater than 70% of the online metering put in capability and roughly one-third of whole photo voltaic capability within the state. Our knowledge present that in the course of the third quarter of 2023, 83,376 new residential web metering photovoltaic programs had been put in, in contrast with 70,152 programs related beneath the outdated NEM 2.0 rule throughout the identical interval in 2022. Nevertheless, we can not differentiate the programs that requested to be grandfathered to NEM 2.0. The primary quarter of 2024 noticed an extra 46,631 programs put in. Since January 2022, a median of 21,000 photo voltaic programs had been added each month.
We gather the capability of distributed assets which are web metered and non-net metered after which publish that knowledge by utility and state in our detailed knowledge information.
Principal contributors: Alex Gorski, Katherine Antonio. Initially printed on At the moment in Power.
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