Going Solar in Saxony Estates – July 2023 Update

I am still extremely happy with our solar panels. Since January 1, we’ve produced over 5 million Watt-hours of solar energy! In this post, I talk about some of the things that have come up in our first 6 months of ownership.

Initial Under-production Concerns

The first few months, we had some challenges with our Enphase monitoring where it did not appear to reflect the usage (and maybe production) correctly. Astrawatt was very responsive in addressing this, although it took a couple tries to get the fix right.

Our system’s production was less than quoted in the first couple months, and that started to worry me. Astrawatt was also quick to respond to this concern. Our salesperson said that he, too, was experiencing lower than normal production these months due to unusually higher cloud cover than average, and he reassured me about their production guarantee (based on the yearly average).

As further months have gone by, I have seen the production come closer to, and exceed, the estimated amounts, so I feel better that this will average out over time.

No More Pure Power or Community Solar

Ameren recently announced the retirement of Pure Power (where you could pay an extra penny per kWh to support wind/renewable sources). They are phasing that out in favor of Community Solar. However, I recently learned that Community Solar is not compatible with Net Metering.

This meant that we had to stop participating in programs to buy our grid energy from renewable sources, which was disappointing from an environmental perspective. Ameren also doesn’t seem to make this switch automatically when you request Net Metering: their rep called me, and I had to go into our account and manually opt out of Community Solar in order for Ameren to complete the transition.

On the “sunny” side, this lowers our electric bill even further because we are paying the lower rates for whatever net grid electricity that we do consume. The rep also reassured me that, because they have a waiting list for Community Solar, we were just making room for someone else to support renewable energy.

$0 Electric Bills!

One of the enjoyable things about our solar system has been getting $0 electricity invoices. Once we got the net metering sorted out, we had several months of $0 invoices.

Now that we are into summer, the invoices won’t be zero, but they will be considerably less than they were last year. For example, June, 2023, was $130 less than June, 2022.