I finally got my first PSEG electric bill that covers a full month since the solar panels were turned on.  My bill for the period from November 19th to December 19th was $211.69.  I’ll admit that this was a lot higher than I expected, however looking at the actual usage it makes sense.  

The main reason for the high bill is likely my Powerwall configuration, which was setup to fully charge the batteries during super off-peak (after 10 PM) and then dump the power back into the grid during peak times, to offset the most expensive power usage.  This actually did work, and I ended up with $0 peak usage and 236 kWh peak credits banked with the utility.  However, my super off-peak usage was naturally way up since that’s when I was charging the batteries, and also charging my EV. 

That, coupled with this being the worst time of year for solar production (in the northern hemisphere) led to the higher bill. I included some interesting parts of the bill below; in the first one you can see where I switched from the flat rate plan to the time of day plan in March (the different colored bars).

Below is a detailed breakdown of the bill.

Here are the settings I had in the Powerwall for this month, which enabled the time-of-day arbitrage stuff:

For comparison, my bill in December 2023 was $208.08, December 2021 was $192.10 (somehow there was no bill for December 2022 and that usage got rolled into the Jan 2023 bill), so $211 is actually pretty decent considering we didn’t have the EV charging in Dec 2023.

For now, I’ve changed the settings in the Powerwall to stop doing the energy arbitrage stuff; it will run the house off solar and put any excess into the Powerwall, and then run the house off the battery once the sun sets:

I’m going to leave it this way for a month and see how it affects the bill for January.  I realize none of these numbers are really indicative of what the system can do overall since the solar production is just so low in the winter, so I’ll probably need a full year of data to compare.