My experience (Score 1)

Contrary to the general gist of this article, I was disappointed that the high differential TOU rate wasn't available when I signed up last year. They had stopped letting people on the PG&E E7 rate, and gave (instead) the E6 rate with less difference between daytime and night time rates. For those with enough solar panels to nearly cover all their power use this resulted in less savings. Apparently at the beginning of 2007 they are letting some new solar customers get into E7 again, but those who were given E6 last year can't switch. I hope they sort this out so it is more of a "no-brainer" to go solar. As far as I know, CA prop13 law does have your property tax go up if you add improvements to your property, but there is apparently an exception being made for solar systems right now. Also, in my case, the TOU meter costs me about $12 per month which is basically a "grid access fee", so I still have to pay PG&E about $140/year even if I generate more power than I use. (If you generate more credit than you can use your bill becomes $0 as they will not pay you for excess power, only offset your usage fees with credits. Even if you get your use bill to $0 you still have to pay the meter charge) The new daylight savings time worked against me. The way PG&E E6 & E7 TOU work you don't get the higher rate in the mornings while generating power since they shift the "peak" price later in the day. So good solar power made in the 9am-1pm range tends to get you the lower $ credits, then you are in the "sweet spot" from about 2pm-5pm, then the solar panels stop producing but you are still on the peak rates until 6 or 7pm. So that "dinner hour" when everyone is home from work, the oven & A/C is running, but the sun is setting wipe out some of the credits gained earlier in the day. To add some insult to this, the recent changes to daylight savings were not reprogrammed into my TOU meter, so (for instance), during the month of April my peak rates started later in the day and stayed until 8pm rather than 7pm so even more credit was lost. It was probably easy for PG&E to decide not to reprogram for the extended daylight savings since it worked out in their favor. I heard in Germany the government offered very good rates for power sent back to the grid, and they allowed you to be paid for any excess not just to let you zero your bill. The rates are so good that banks would loan almost anyone money (if they had the space) to put in solar panels. So now they have farmland and previously empty fields filled with solar arrays and people actually make a living from "farming out" their land to solar. We could get off of burning fossil fuels for power if the US government were willing to offer incentives like that. Germany has been doing and they are more northern with less sunlight to benefit from.