Greg vs PGE

[Greg]

Because of solar power, I have only paid one electrical bill the entire time I've lived at the Lair. I had to pay a bill because I switched meters with the neighbor so he could pay for the well which was on his property. I usually carry a credit balance because of the electricity I sell back to PG&E. Not a lot but there has always been a balance.

About the time I bought the back-up battery I noticed a change. My balance was starting to decline rather than gradually increase. I was also notified that I would have a bill come August called the True-up bill. I'm not exactly sure what that means. I guess I'm signed up for a minimum charge and what accrues over that is all paid in August. My True-up has always been zero. 

I was thinking the new charges might have to do with the new battery back-up. Maybe when those were installed, some switch was thrown that didn't send juice to the grid. But according to my control panel on the batteries, it showed I was sending plenty of juice to the grid.

I went online and looked at my yearly bill and all it showed was me buying energy from the grid for the last six months. Blue bars mean I buy from the grid.



Now, that can't be right. According to my app for the batteries, I sent 789KwH to the grid and I bought 183KwH from the grid. I bit the bullet and called PG&E in order to get to the bottom of the mystery. I talked to a young lady and she had me go to myPage on the PG&E website that gives really granular detail on my bill. We looked at the month of March and this is what I saw.(Pic Below) Green is what I sold. Blue is what I bought. Just looking at the chart all I could think was how was it possible I owed PG&E money. There are way more green bars than blue bars. And the green bars are big. I was raising my voice to the girl, not yelling but more agro, for her to explain to me how I owed if the green was so much bigger than the blue. If you hover your cursor over the bars on the website, you are given the actual amount of energy for each day. Each bar corresponds to a single day. Naturally I added them all up and I got 466 KwH sent to the grid and 29.2 KwH used from the grid. Like I said. I felt like I'm on crazy pills. 466 is much bigger than 29, right?




The young lady put me on hold for a minute to go ask a question. That's when I did the addition while she was gone to show I had sold more energy than I bought according to the chart on her website. She came back to say I can't really go by the monthly chart. I needed to go to the hourly chart and look at the hourly numbers. Fine. Let's go to the daily. For reference I pulled up Mar 15 as an average day.



Once again, I saw a lot of big green bars and a bunch of small blue bars. I did the hover. I got the numbers. According to PG&E's own chart, I sold 25 KwH and I purchased 6 KwH. I asked her to explain. She sent me to the bill where it said I only sent 192 KwH to the grid and purchased 249 KwH from the grid, which is why my bill showed a deficit to which I owed money. I needed to pay for those 57 KwH. The next chart is another day that shows green but in a smaller amount.


Again, I did the math and it says I sold 19 KwH and bought 15 KwH. All the green bars showed this. Every day I was selling more than I was buying except for those three days. The crazy pills were really starting to kick in. What wasn't I seeing?  The woman from PG&E kept to the company line that their numbers showed I owed. I felt like I was uncovering some weird conspiracy. It's starting to look to ease my mind, I might have to go through every day and show the actual discrepancy between bought and sold, which is a completely crazy idea. But I am leaning towards it.

Regardless, I do believe the charts on the page are misleading. On the monthly bar graph, each day should show blue and green on each bar and the pop up should both bought and sold amounts, because that is how they are doing their calculations. At the moment, the numbers shown on the monthly don't accurately reflect what is going on.

Another problem is one my representative briefly mentioned but we never focused on and that I think that is where the big discrepancy lies. When I sell my money to the grid, PG&E uses the wholesale price. When I buy from the grid, I get the retail price. I can only assume I am paying much more for energy than I am buying. It would be better if the price for buy and sell were the same.

Still feeling crazed. Still feel like a mistake is happening somewhere and I just can't find it. Probably time to get a cork board, a bunch of yarn, some thumbtacks, and make a design to connect all the clues.