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California residents are more and more pairing battery storage with photo voltaic installations, in keeping with the most recent preliminary information in our Month-to-month Electrical Energy Business Report.
The share of latest residential photo voltaic photovoltaic techniques paired with batteries has elevated since we started accumulating information 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 modifications to California’s compensation construction. Web metering compensates prospects for the distributed technology output that’s returned to the grid by crediting their electrical energy payments.
In April 2023, California revised how family mills with put in rooftop photo voltaic are compensated through web metering. The brand new construction, often called a web billing tariff (NBT), provides 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, usually within the night when photo voltaic mills 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 latest battery storage capability within the state.
The rising quantity of battery storage comes after California residents put in a file 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 modifications 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 techniques smaller than 1 MW.
Underneath 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 often called web vitality metering 2.0 (NEM 2.0), which credited mills 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 software backlog in the course of the first quarter of 2023, in keeping with 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 web metering put in capability and roughly one-third of whole photo voltaic capability within the state. Our information present that in the course of the third quarter of 2023, 83,376 new residential web metering photovoltaic techniques had been put in, in contrast with 70,152 techniques related beneath the outdated NEM 2.0 rule throughout the identical interval in 2022. Nevertheless, we can’t differentiate the techniques that requested to be grandfathered to NEM 2.0. The primary quarter of 2024 noticed a further 46,631 techniques put in. Since January 2022, a mean of 21,000 photo voltaic techniques had been added each month.
We acquire the capability of distributed sources which are web metered and non-net metered after which publish that information by utility and state in our detailed information information.
Principal contributors: Alex Gorski, Katherine Antonio. Initially revealed on Right now in Power.
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