October was a dark and dreary month in our part of the world, and the unpleasant weather negatively impacted our solar energy production.

For a third consecutive month, the value of the production from our rooftop solar panels was more or less equal to the cost of electricity our household used.

The optimist in me says our solar panels were doing their job by keeping our electric bill as low as it could possibly be.

But the pessimist in me is concerned our mediocre energy production in August, September, and October represents a lost opportunity to have built up more solar energy credits to keep our electric bill low this winter.

Although our solar energy production has fallen compared to last year for three straight months, we’re still heading into the winter of 2018-2019 with almost twice as many solar energy credits as we had at this time last year.

Our more robust bank of credits this year is a function of very strong solar power production this spring and summer – and the fact we didn’t have solar panels on our roof until June of last year, so we missed out earning potential credits for several months in early 2017.

Although our energy production has been disappointing over the past few months, we still have a bank of solar energy credits that’s twice as large as it was a year ago. I’m cautiously optimistic we’ll be able to make it through the entire upcoming winter with minimal electric bills. Last winter, we ran out of excess credits during January, meaning our electric bills for January through March were above the contractual minimums allowed in our state.
Our home solar energy system was sized to keep our electric bill as low as possible throughout the year. Since this is the first full year for our system, we’ll see over the next several months if the math was correct!