July 2011 PV Revenue Results

In my previous post I show that all but one day had very high PV generation for our system over July 2011. I don't complain about the one lower output day as we desperately needed the rain. On the 20 June 2011 we broke even since the winter where our cumulative revenue exceeded our cumulative loan payments. We had a very sunny June and we continued to add to our surplus so that by 1 July we started the month with $58.60 surplus. Don't forget, this is a surplus on a PV system that was over $31,000 and we had less than 2 more months to earn a little on our investment.
July was a very good month, adding to June's very strong output [and therefore revenue]. My chart below shows the cumulative revenue, loan payments, and microFIT payments we received.

Cumulative revenue, microFIT payments, and loan payments to 31 July 2011, 4.9 kW PV system.

We see the following:

• Revenue has exceeded loan payments by $341 by the end of July
• Return to date is 1.08% [profit over loan value]
• microFIT payments are a little irregular [number of days for each payment has been 49, 70, 68, 43, and 63]. I suspect that microFIT payments are manually processed at Guelph Hydro with "flexible" schedule
• Slope of cumulative revenue is greater during May-July vs. Aug-Nov [clearly showing the tendency of longer days in the summer, less cloud cover]. This trend should continue for the rest of the summer given the long range forecasts, though some rain is forecasted over next 2 weeks. 

I did do a boo-boo in some previous charts. I was showing earlier versions of the figure above with the microFIT payments including HST. The payments from Guelph Hydro includes HST. I must submit this to Revenue Canada so I incorrectly was including that tax as part of my revenue. The chart above is corrected and does not include HST. I shall talk about taxes in a forthcoming blog post.

May 2011 Cumulative

December and January could be a bad memory when you have grid-tied solar panels. But you need to have the long-term view. Even with the dreary May weather, the microFIT program is working out. At this point it is still too early to say what the ideal price is to achieve a reasonable return on investment. We are roughly 3/4 through the year and we are nearly equal to our loan payment [10 yr amortization]. However we are going into the long summer days and will more than exceed the loan. But that is only reasonable - many businesses require a 3 year return on investment so why shouldn't a homeowner have their own small solar business on their roof and get 7-10 year return on investment?
I show the cumulative revenue below.

The blue revenue curve is the daily generation from 24 August 2010 to 3 June 2011. I've discussed the low generation in earlier posts, but here we see there are enough sunny days that we are catching up to the cumulative loan. The net revenue was higher from August to December where it dropped below the loan payment. However, we now how enough data to see the growth in revenue that started in February has allowed the system to virtually catch up to the cumulative loan payments. On 3 June loan payments was $3043 and generated power was $2900. However, we should be expecting a cheque from Guelph Hydro soon - payments received to date have been $1762.