Metering Types

Net Metering

Net Energy Metering (NEM) is a billing arrangement that provides credit for power generated by onsite solar PV systems fed back to the utility. The NEM financial credit is used to offset the customer's electricity bill.

Traditional Net Metering generally assumes full-retail value compensation on “solar exports,” or energy sent back to the grid. In other words, a solar customer receives the full $/kWh volumetric rate of energy for kilowatt-hours they export back to the grid.

Net Billing

Many newer versions of Net Metering have been developed countrywide and essentially boil down to solar exports getting valued at less than the full retail rate of energy. We refer to these metering types as Net Billing.

In these scenarios, an “exported” kWh generated from a solar or energy storage system and back-fed to the grid is worth less than an “imported” kWh delivered by the utility. This can be due to Non-Bypassable charges being applied to ‘imported’ energy. It can also be a matter of a utility putting specific values on ‘imported’ and ‘exported’ credits under the given rate structure that does not represent full retail credit for exported PV generation.

Historically these new NEM structures had been referred to as NEM 2.0 or even 3.0, but with many versions across different utilities and states, they are now more accurately referred to as Net-Billing rather than true Net-Metering.

Energy Toolbase can model any Net Metering or Net-Billing scenario, anywhere in the country.