Tariffs and incentives library
Curated utility tariffs and incentives your models point at.
Reviewed
What this is for
What a financial model bills against. The library is curated: a schedule in it is the same schedule for every team, and only an administrator writes one. A customer who is missing a schedule uses Request a tariff and sends the document their utility publishes, or the address of the page it is on. Prices are indicative until somebody has reviewed them. A tariff is never edited in place once anything has been quoted against it: a change creates a successor so last year's quote still reproduces.
This is not the price book. A tariff is what the utility charges the customer. A price is what this firm pays its supplier.
Steps
- Open Tariffs. Three tabs: Utility rates, Requests, Incentives.
- Rates open on Who publishes - one row per network, how many current schedules it has, and the oldest review in that book. A network is only as checked as its least-checked schedule. A row attached to no network is offered on no project until somebody attaches it.
- Open a network. The book lists schedules: what the bill calls the utility, name, effective from, how many charges, how many versions, Current, Superseded or Not yet in force, when it was reviewed, source. Default is In force. Every version is the history. The Versions column stays on the default view so a family of ten years does not look like ten schedules, and the history is one click away.
- Open a schedule. A bill is a sum of charges, not a rate per kilowatt-hour. Energy (often seasonal and tiered), a fixed monthly amount, a capacity charge: generation does not remove the fixed ones, which is why the bill does not fall as far as consumption does. Fields are disabled for a customer; the service would refuse a write anyway.
- Export is whether this utility accepts exported energy, and how it settles. With export off, everything the array makes beyond what the site is using at that moment is given away. The report states how much that came to - which is the number that says what a battery would be worth. What export pays is a charge on the Charges tab, not a field here. Provenance on the schedule says when neither source prices a feed-in rate.
- Requests lists what this team has sent in: Waiting, Loaded with a link to the schedule it became, or Not loaded with the curator's reason.
- Incentives are rebates and allowances this firm claims. Empty is "No incentives yet". Order matters: a percentage taken after an earlier incentive is worth less than one taken on the full cost. The cash flow shows the basis each one was actually taken on. New incentive is this team's list, unlike the curated rates.
The project's tariff is set on the site (Grid connection), not picked on the financials screen. Change the site's schedule to compare two tariffs. Two financial models on one site cannot hold two different tariffs.
Tips and common mistakes
- Never reviewed (or a date nobody earned) is the honest label. Structures are real; prices are unchecked until a person records a review.
- Do not collapse the schedule into one number in your head. The fixed and demand lines are why solar "only saved 40%".
- Request a tariff when the book is wrong or missing. Do not type a rate into a template.
- Tax is added at the rate this deployment uses. The library's prices are as published.