How to read your Green Mountain Power bill

Are you a Residential customer? Follow along below.

Are you a Community Solar customer? Click here!

Ok, we’re going to learn 3 things today. How the utility measures your:

1. Total generated solar power
2. Instantaneous load
3. Total power consumption

Ok, so lets talk about how the utility sees your home. The utility sees your home as both using and generating power. You’re a consumer and a producer. As long as you’re solar panels are making power, your house is drawing from that power. We call that instantaneous load. But, once the sun goes down your panels are no longer generating power. So, appliances like refrigerators that run around the clock will instead draw power from the grid.

The utility breaks down these numbers in a couple ways. Here we go!

1What is the total power generation?

Take a look at the bottom of your bill under Generation. On this bill, Jessica’s solar panels generated 426 kWh. This number came from the new meter that was installed with the solar panels. This is the number that is used to calculate the utility’s 6 cent/kWh solar incentive.

2Ok, so how do we figure out Jessica’s instantaneous load?

Scroll up your bill and take a look at the Residential Net Metering section. Here Jessica has generated only 398 kWh. What gives? Remember instantaneous load? While Jessica’s solar panels were generating those 426 kWh she was also simultaneously using some of that power leaving her with 398 kWh. The difference between those two numbers is 28 kWh and that is the instantaneous load.

[426 kWh – 398 kWh = 28 kWh instantaneous load]

3Now, what is your total power consumption?

You’ll need to add two numbers. Let’s go back to the Residential Net Metering section. Under Total kWh Consumed it reads 57 kWh. Add that number to the instantaneous load and you’ve got your total usage for the month.

[57 kWh consumed + 28 instantaneous load = 85 total consumption]

Now you’ve got two totals: total generated (426 kWh) and total consumed (85 kWh).