Do you not have net metering? I do and it makes no difference (to my electric bill) when I consume electricity.
We have net metering but (laughs out loud) it is MONTHLY net metering, and the utility gives you only a $.07/kWh credit for the electricity they sell at $.14-.16/kWh. One May when we were traveling and not at home we made $2.00 back on the bill. We never planned for cost recovery with our system. PArt of the reason we can’t “make money” on solar is that the utility charges a $30/mo meter fee. So FIRST we gotta make up that $30 and THEN try to get to net MONTHLY metering on kWh. Ain’t gonna happen and we knew that going in.
Solar provides resilience if the grid goes down and allows us to largely avoid the costs of inflation on electricity. ~70-75% of our power is ‘free’ - generated by solar. As we both know solar isn’t free, but it is fixed cost.
Alabama does not have net metering. For the past 10 months I've been selling power to the grid to try it out. The amount my bill is reduced by selling power is increased by about that much with the extra fees that come with the privilege of selling power. So on the 1 year anniversary of selling power I'll crunch the numbers and see if I should just turn the grid sell feature back off like I had it the first 2 years of solar.
When I said that I pull only 18% from the grid over the past year, I meant exactly that. In last month's bill, my inverters showed that I consumed 2,149.9 kWh during that billing period. Both the power bill and my inverters say that I pulled only 27 kWh from the grid. Thus, 98.7% of the power we consumed was homemade power. My power utility doesn't know about the other 2,072.9 of the kWh I consumed last month because it all stayed in house and was neither pushed to the grid nor pulled from the gird. The power utility knows only about the 27 kWh I pulled from the grid, and the 695 kWh I exported to the grid (power I sold). Because we don't have net metering, even with such a huge disparity like that I haven't had a power bill with a credit (saying they owe me). This is because of not just the extra fees I pay just to sell power to the grid, but also because the rate I make per kWh is about 1/5th as much as the rate I pay per kWh. The main thing to me, though is the 2,072 kWh that the grid never knew about because my inverters "hid" all of that power from the grid.
Of course, that is for a summer month when solar is great in Alabama. Over the past 366 days, of the 21,618 kWh our home and EV charging consumed, the power utility never knew about 17,702 kWh of it (81.9%). The power utility "saw" only the 3,916 kWh I pulled from the grid and the 3,294 kWh I exported to the grid.
Thus, my inverters are configured to prioritize incoming solar power to 1) power my load first (my electrical panels), then if there's excess 2) charge my batteries, only if they're fully charged do I 3) sell the excess to the grid. And during the time of day that it's charging my batteries, if my batteries get to at least 55% charged (configurable), then my inverters will power a special electrical panel that one of my EV charger circuits is tied to. The idea is that if the home batteries are charged at least 50%, then I probably have enough battery power to power the home through the night without using the grid. So at that point I'll start using some of the excess solar power to charge the EV further. Basically, at that point in the day I'm charging the EV while still charging the home solar batteries. If the home battery charge level drops to 50% or below (configurable), the inverters will quit powering the extra electrical panel and I'll quit charging the EV (the idea being to save home battery power to use that for powering the home through the night).
Our floor charge level for the EV charge/range is usually 50%. That's usually well more range than we need to drive the next day's chores. But if today's a good solar day I'll charge the EV all the way up to 80% to have enough charge for the next few days (and also have enough home battery charge to power the home through the night). That'll reduce the odds that I'll have to charge the EV from the grid in the near future on rainy days. By having the main EV charger we used powered intermittently in this fashion, only when I have more power that our home needs, we optimize the savings of having both solar and an EV without having to watch the weather and run out to the garage to plug and unplug the EV manually. Of course, if my EV charge is low enough to charge whether or not the power is free, I'll charge it with the other EV charger (the charging circuit that's tied to the normal electrical panel that's always powered).
End result: the solar system's efficiency combined with the EV's efficiency work better together than the sum of their parts. Only 18% of our power has to be pulled from the grid, most of that during the 4 "winter" months November - February. My past 12 power bills averaged $82.77. And that's for an all-electric 2,300 sq ft house, and doing most of our driving in the EV (we drove it 23K miles in the past 12 months, with 15,500 of those miles charged at home with homemade power).