Government is proposing that suppliers be made to pay something for power exported onto the system by smaller generators.
The move follows widespread condemnation of the decision to remove payments for exported generation at the same time as closing the Feed-in Tariff (FiT) subsidy scheme.
Recognising those concerns, the department for business, energy and industrial strategy (Beis) is consulting to ensure that suppliers pay “the market rate” for exported power. However, it will leave suppliers to determine that rate and the length of contract they are willing to offer.
Beis said the ‘Smart Export Guarantee’ will apply to all generation that qualified for FiTs, i.e. renewables up to 5MW.
Suppliers with over 250,000 domestic customers will have to offer smaller generators a price per kWh for exports. Smaller suppliers can voluntarily offer a guarantee, said Beis.
Suppliers will have to offer at least one export tariff but can set the tariff and contract length themselves. The rate must be “greater than zero [pence] and at times of negative pricing generators must not be required to remunerate suppliers for electricity exported to the grid”, according to the consultation.
Beis wants views on its plans. See details here.
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So the BEIS has realized that it would be wrong not to pay to generators the value of export power generated by solar panels.
A couple of issues spring to mind. There are estimated to be over a million domestic solar panel installations
Currently, the larger suppliers have paid a deemed amount of export generation volume based at around 50% of the energy generated. Is there any publicly available data to indicate this guesstimate is realistic?
Smart meters, so far, cannot help in measuring the export power in the future. And BEIS seem to be saying that suppliers can ignore the export energy payment.
Once households start fitting energy storage to help charge their EV, to reduce the charging costs, the amount of exported power may be too small to worry about!!