I got an email this morning notifying me that my latest PSE&G bill was ready.  The amount was was $30.38, which seemed pretty high considering I had been getting bills in the $15-$17 range since the spring, and (as noticed in my previous post) I still had a bunch of kWh credits.  

I was curious whether I had somehow used up all the credits in a single month, or maybe my previous month’s bill didn’t auto-pay, so I logged in to look and I saw that I had 1,071 kWh banked, used 509 over the past month and still had 562 banked, meaning I had no net usage this month, and the starting balance for the month was $0 – there was no carried over balance.  So why was the bill higher this month?

Well, looking at the bill I noticed a new charge on it. In addition to the $0.54/day “basic service” charge x 29 days, I was charged a “CBC” of $0.033/kW/day x 29 days.  This is the first time I’ve seen this charge in the year that the system has been active.  According to the glossary in the bill, the CBC is “Customer Benefit Contribution (CBC) Charge – the cost of customer-funded public benefit programs. Applicable to net meter customers who connect on or after January 1, 2022.” Huh?

According to this page,

The Customer Benefit Contribution (CBC) charge is a monthly fixed charge enacted by the New York Public Service Commission to fund various social programs, including energy efficiency, solar, and low-income discount programs.

Why is the CBC Charge Being Implemented? In New York State, many public benefits programs (such as those listed above) receive funding through volumetric charges. The public then pays these charges according to their electricity use.

However, due to an increase in the use of net-metered solar customers, some New York-based regulators have proposed the idea that said solar customers are avoiding their share of the volumetric charges for public benefit programs.

As a result, these regulators created the Customer Benefit Contribution (CBC) charge to account for this disparity in costs between solar and non-solar customers and prevent cost-shifting moving forward.

So apparently this is a way to charge solar customers for fees that they would otherwise be “avoiding” by not using grid power.  Needless to say, I was not aware of this charge until I saw it on my bill, and had I known about it I very likely would not have moved forward with my solar panel build, as it means that even if I use no grid power for an entire year, my PSEG service charge would be $197, plus $180 CBC, for $377 every year – to NOT use any power.  The only way out of this would be to disconnect from the grid entirely, which I actually don’t think is legal in Nassau county.

I’m not sure what recourse there is here, but I really do feel foolish after my previous post about how happy I was with my solar system for the past year. Between the NYSERDA loan, the winter usage, and now this permanent CBC charge, I’m actually going to be paying significantly more over the winter than I was prior to getting the system installed. I’m pissed off!