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You may pay electric companies for electricity you produce as a new product category become available to consumers. This new product category is residential plug in solar systems, where the system is designed to be plugged into a wall outlet. Some consumers will purchase and plug in their panels expecting to lower their electric bills but instead will see an increase. This may be as a result of the electric meter the electric company installed to deter the theft of electricity.
For most home owners, they assume the number displayed on the their home's power meter represents the amount of electricity they have consumed from the grid, which was a safe assumption until the advent of plug in solar devices. Now that plugin energy production systems are being introduced to the consumer market, this assumption is no longer valid. Excess power being generated by the home can be processed in three ways: 1. ignore power produced by the home, 2. measure separately 3. measure all electricity produced by the house as if produced by the grid.
How it works
Due the the theft of electricity electric companies may install meters that are incompatible to plug in electricity production. In these meters electricity provided by the grid is counted as elecricity comsumption. Electricity produced be the solar panel may also be counted as consumption. Whenever solar panel electricity production is greater than the electricity currently being used the metered home excess electricity flows to the grid but the meter counts it as consumption. As a result of this meter operation the bill paying home owner provides electricity to the grid and pays for the privledge of doing so. In honor of the first meter found with this behavior, this mode of operation is called 'non-dented' operation.
Why it is a problem
Most consumers purchasing plugin solar devices do so in order to reduce electric bills and not increase them.
Most consumers are not aware of electric and/or the electric company's electricity theft detection and deterrence mechanisms.
It is benefit of electric companies to not disclose their meters non-dented operation to unaware bill payers as it only help maximize profits.
It is not to the benefit of the electric company to pro actively to change non-dented meters as it incurs expenses of time, labor and materials which must be paid by the bill payer and/or the electric company.
Most consumers assume the electric meter is measuring grid consumption only and the thought that their own electricity production via the plugin solar panel would also be measure for billing purposes would never occur.
Examples
The first example of an electric meter operating in non-dented mode was found in the ITRON C1Sr electric meter technical reference manual as published on the website ManualsLib.[1] It seems this manual may cover all residential electric meters sold.
The ITRON C1SR has 3 modes of collecting power usage data: non dented, dented, and net. Pages 39 & 40 shows displays for meters in each mode and a brief description of how it count produced electricity
From the power usage LED display the power data collection mode can be determined. Page 39 shows the display of a meter operating in non dented mode. The first image of page 40 shows a meter operating in dented mode, the second image on page 40 shows a meter operating in register mode. The third image may be displayed periodically and has no relevance other than verifying LED segment are operational.[1]
Pg. 74 and 75 describe the contents of the display in more detail or non-dented.[1] Page 75 describes non-dented and dented operation in more detail.[1]