How to Read Your Solar True-Up Bill

When you go solar, you’re going to get a statement every month from your utility whether it’s PG&E SoCal Edison or a different utility that you get your electricity from, and you’re going to have a monthly service charge of ten bucks a month plus gas charges if you get gas for them but you’re not going to get billed for electricity except for once a year and that is your TrueUp Bill.

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I have an example of a $0 TrueUp Bill here for a client whose information has been redacted for privacy and basically it’s really straightforward we want to show that whether you have solar or don’t have solar it’s not rocket science to understanding how to read your NEM statement.

NEM stands for net energy metering and that’s the real official term for your TrueUp billing.

Page three of your monthly statement is going to show you your debits and your credits with PG&E, how much power you sent to the grid, how much power you pulled from the grid and what your balance is at that moment in time during your annual cycle.

You’ll see that it’s perfectly normal to have a net debit for a hundred or even $200 for July and August when you run your air conditioner and your solar system is not quite keeping up with how much electricity you’re producing, that’s totally okay because you’re going to build up equally valuable credit in the spring months and in the fall months when you’re producing plenty of power and you’re not really running your AC so you’re building up a big surplus of credits with PG&E, and they show you how much of a credit you have on this page.

So at the end of your TrueUp cycle after you’ve had 12 monthly statements if you’re a client like ours you’ll see that they actually owe you a tiny bit of money and you owe them $0. It’s a beautiful thing and page four shows us everything that is shown on page three in line graph form and bar graph form for those of us that are visual learners.

I’m going to skip page 5 for just a moment.

Page Six is the closest thing that you’re going to have on your monthly statements to your regular electric bill. It’s going to show you that 30 days or 29 days or 32 days, who knows with PG&E they might bill you for 35 days of debits and credits, how many actual credits you had and how many actual debits you had during that cycle.

For instance this client had sent 450 units of electricity to the grid and had pulled 315 units of electricity from the grid that means they had an overall balance of a net credit of 134, almost 135 units of electricity. PG&E owes them $50 for those electricity units.

Now let’s go back to page three for just a moment. That $50 in net credit for the previous 30 days that was documented on page six has made its way onto your year-to-date balance of debits and credits on page 3.

Again page 3 is a high level summary of all of your debits and credits for the year, page six is just a detailed analysis of your debit in your credits for that 30 day cycle

And finally on to page 5 everybody’s favorite page because this is where PG&E shows you your annual $0 TrueUp bill with solar negotiators where we are very confident in our ability to design systems appropriate for each homeowner’s needs and specific set of circumstances. This is the norm it’s not some fantasy it’s actually the most common end result for our average client.

So ultimately everybody fears that big TrueUp bill but really it’s simple, it’s simply just a small paragraph on page five of your statement and this TrueUp bill section only shows up on every 12th monthly statement.

Looking at page three you can see where you stand every 30 days, seeing if you’re trending toward that $0 TrueUp bill and when we talked about our monitoring department next week in next week’s video, we will show you how are monitoring team can help you stay on track for a $0 TrueUp bill.

The last thing is to point out that on page 5 is where they show you that everybody pays the same $0.33 a day to stay connected to the grid, which comes out to ten bucks a month sometimes its 9.50 sometimes it’s 10:50 but it’s 32.854 cents per day they’re really nickeling and diming you there, down to the level of the halfpenny. 32.854 cents per day multiplied by 365 days per year divided by 12 months that comes out to $10 per month on the penny.

Thanks for watching this video by Solar Negotiators we hope to talk to you soon.