We frequently get asked about, do we have batteries with are solar systems, or what happened to the electricity that if my systems produces more electricity than I can use.

The answer is that any excess electricity for example, in a home when everybody is out at work or school, and there is no body in the house during the day, your solar system is working very hard producing lots of power on sunny days; that power flow’s directly back to the grid and your electric meter actually spins backwards. When you get home after work, turn on your air conditioner or television set; then you start using those credits that you have been accruing all day long.

Similarly with the business which is maybe closed on Saturday and Sunday that all the power that the system on the top of the office building or the warehouse is producing, is flowing directly back to the grid. On Monday morning, when you show up for work you start drawing down some of those credits that you have. Now, generally you will not get a check in California from the utility. It’s a use it or lose it, but typically people don’t have enough roof space that they’re going to generate that much excess electricity that they’re not going to use themselves. If you have credits, the credits do roll over to the subsequent month. So in fact, you have roll over credits. However, on December 31, at the end of the year if you have any credits, they evaporate, they will not send you a check, so it’s a use it or lose it situation.

Now, that could change if we get a feed-in-tariff, F.I.T., which is what they have in Germany and Spain and other countries where the electric utility actually sends checks to their customer for excess production at quite a high rate. Governor Schwarzenegger before he left office signed a proclamation that California would get a feed-in -tariff. The P.U.C., Public Utilities Commission and the utilities are in some pretty steamy negotiations as to what that rate would be and thus far we do not have a feed-in-tariff. My opinion is that we eventually will have one. Most of the advance countries in the world do have them, and at that point consumers or businesses that do have credits excess would get a check for their excess production.