So, Austin Energy has a solar rebate that works on Dollar per kWh of PV energy produced, rather than being an up-front amount in Dollar. In addition, they have net-metering, so the customer only pays for whatever electricity they must purchase after offsetting the facility demand and usage by the PV power generation and energy production.
I am currently using a tariff that has the ElectricityPurchased:Facility meter and the BuyFromUtility option. Originally, I also had a tariff that has the ElectricitySurplusSold:Facility meter and the SellToUtility option, so I could buy and sell at different $/kWh rates. I realize I could probably also use the ElectricityNet:Facility meter and the Net-Metering option if the buy and sell rates were the same, as they usually are for net-metering.
However, this does not account for PV energy production itself. So I thought I need a tariff with the ElectricityProduced:Facility meter and the SellToUtility option for that. However, EnergyPlus issues a warning that the ElectricityProduced:Facility meter is not normally used with the SellToUtility option. And, in the EnergyPlus report under Meters, this tariff has a "Selection No" entry. So I think this is being ignored.
Additionally, the rebate stops after ten years, so I was hoping to use an escalation rate for the ElectricityProduced:Facility meter that is 1.0 for the first ten years and then 0.0 for the rest of the life-cycle analysis period. However, this escalation does seem to be ignored as well.
So, I was wondering if anyone had ever encountered the need to model life cycle cost with a rebate that is based on $/kWh and if so, what they might have done to account for it?
