77 Paying for power

She got her first electricity bill after adding her lovely solar panels. To this stage it had all been a very positive experience because it included boasting rights on the local Canberra TV news and looking very green standing in front of her solar array. She was carbon neutral to envious watchers.

The bill was interesting. Naturally the first thing she looked for was the graph of greenhouse gas production which she had expected to now be negative. It had risen more than 2-fold since pumping her power into the grid. This didn’t seem logical but was carefully explained by the local electricity authority spokesperson. It’s based on total electricity at your house, uploaded and downloaded and then that number is converted into greenhouse gas equivalents. We don’t differentiate between green and non-green power in the calculation. Really quite simple.

She hadn’t looked at the charges at this stage which should have declined. After all she was now generating more electricity than she used. They had gone up quite substantially. Again this was carefully explained. You have to pay to upload power to the grid the spokesperson said. It’s a fixed amount every bill. Unfortunately, this charge is greater than the value of the power you are uploading.

At that rate, she would never ever pay off her bright sparkling solar panels. And she was apparently a much bigger polluter than before. The feel-good feeling didn’t now seem quite as warm.