Well I’ve been saying all along, I probably call myself an idiot almost every day at some point, whenever I do something dumb, which we all do.
A couple of days ago, after 13 years of not looking closely at my electric bill, I realized I was losing out on over a thousand dollars per year of excess electricity generation, over my usage. When I bought this ranch, it had a noisily-operating 10 kW Bergey wind turbine on a 120-foot tower. (I learned years later that Bergey had gone through a bad batch of main bearings for the generator/rotors, affecting a number of turbines).
The local installer, the most prolific in the world, and someone I considered a friend at that time, had put in around 150 of these systems in our general area - maybe the most homes powered by wind turbines anywhere in the world. He told me my turbine was still under its 5-year warranty, and had a crane come over to take down the turbine to send it back to Bergey in Oklahoma for a rebuild. (Mike Bergey, the owner, was also a friend of mine, who had even offered me a job. Me and Mike and the local installer used to hang out at wind energy trade shows around the country, having lunch, etc.)
Anyway, this local installer, attempting to tilt down my 120-foot tower with the half-ton Bergey 10k turbine on top, connected two of the three vertical struts to the belt connected to the crane, placing the single third vertical strut in compression, and thereby buckled the attached tower section, dropping my turbine 100 feet, smashing it to the ground. Luckily, nobody got hurt. but this local installer "just happened " to have a used turbine on a trailer with him, which he had bought back from a customer, and “kindly offered” to substitute this used turbine, which he said was also under warranty, for my now-smashed turbine.
Anyway, long story short, I slowly learned that this local installer had a terrible reputation around here as a ripoff artist, going back long before he had begun to capitalize on the incentives for alternative energy, and people would look at me funny when I said he was my friend. I’m now on my third Bergey turbine, because the one he had substituted immediately had a loose piece of leading-edge tape that made a horrendous noise like a Huey helicopter landing in the backyard. When I later insisted he repair that leading edge tape, for which he chose to use a crane again, although there were other ways to do it, he sent a newbie up to connect the wires, and one of the three wires was never actually placed into its terminal, but rather just resting behind the terminal but making contact, so a couple years later, when the wire fell away from its terminal, the generator started single-phasing and burned out the generator.
Luckily for me, a neighbor had another used turbine that had been replaced by the government for free, when they bought 40 acres from him for a drainage project, and he sold it to me even though this crooked installer tried to jump in between us, and acquire it for himself to resell. Due to his continuous dishonesty and incompetence, I am on my third Bergey turbine here, with the second one sitting on a trailer waiting to be rebuilt. Luckily for me, a couple of honest Bergey installers have been willing to help me out with getting my third Bergey turbine, which I refurbished by cleaning up all the bird poop inside the nacelle and flipping one of the slip-ring brushes around backwards, up and running. Anyway, I could tell you endles stories of this local installer’s dishonesty and incomptence, but I’ll stop at tell you one of the last interactions we had with him and his wife was them trying to bilk us out of thousands of dollars to join a multi-level marketing scheme called “Lyoness” (illegal in some countries) that was their latest scam. Apparently, he never saw a scam he wasn;t attracted to.
OK now back to how stupid I have been for the last 12 years or so:
Besides the couple of times I had no operating wind turbine here for months on end, whatever Bergey 10k turbine was on my tower had pretty much paid the electric bill. We are on “net-metering” here, where you get credit for your kWh generated, month by month, with some rollover at the end of your service year, based on your start date. So I had never scrutinized the electric bill beyond a brief glance, knowing the electric bill was paid, and seeing some small excess amount of a negative electric bill value, being “rolled over” into the next year’s tally. My attitude was, who cares about the little details, the electric bill is being paid, so “if it works, don’t fix it”.
The other day, at the end of my service year, I decided to take a close look at my electric bill for the first time. I noticed something about an accumulated amount of “year-to-date-charges $ -1,104.48”
But I did not see where this thousand-dollar-plus excess was appearing on my next end-of-year “Settlement Bill”. So I called the electric company to get an explanation, and learned that the accumulated excess power generation was paid at their lowest wholesale price, rather than the retail price (about ten times as high) that I normally enjoyed as a monthly offset. Below is an image of the page of my next end-of-year “Settlement Bill” where they multiply 3146 kWh (my excess generation) times $ -$0.03600 (3.6 cents per kWh) (their lowest wholesale rate) and end up “rolling over” about 1/10th of the retail value of my generation.
So I asked the lady from the electric company on the phone what was the best way to get my full value, rather than 1/10th, for this excess generation, and she suggested “put up a whole bunch of Christmas lights?”.
I suddenly realized that I had been unnecessarily heating my place with natural gas every winter, when i could have been just using electric heaters for free, using up my excess generation kWh before the electric company confiscated the value by reducing it to the lowest possible wholesale value, rather then offsetting my average retail price.
So I’ve been unnecessarily paying $200-$300 (sometimes more) per month for natural gas heating every winter, when I could have been using my excess kWh credits, that essentially expire every February, for the last 13 years or so, meaning I probably paid about maybe $12,000 in unnecessary natural gas bills over the last decade+, when I could have just used an electric heater or two, for free!
Needless to say, today, we’re running an electric heater!
So, if you happen to be a perpetual newbie in some aspect, after 13 years, don’t feel bad if I point it out, because I am also not immune from being a complete ignorant idiot and a perpetual newbie, by simply not paying attention, and assuming everything was just going great! 