General

Utilities, Rates, and Consumption: The Engine Behind Your Proposals

Every dollar figure in a proposal traces back to two things: how much energy the home uses, hour by hour, and what the utility charges for it. The utility setup is where you describe the second half of that equation. It is the most involved part of Powerlily to configure, because real utility tariffs are genuinely complicated: seasonal rates, time-of-use windows, tiered pricing, net-metering credit rules, escalation, and minimum fees all change the 30-year savings number your customer sees.

This article explains the whole system: how a utility is structured, the three ways rates can be defined, how consumption is modelled, the per-quote settings, and how all of it feeds the hourly projection that produces the savings on a proposal. It is long, because the topic is. Use the section headers to jump to what you need.

Two layers: the utility template and the quote's copy

Powerlily keeps utilities in two places, and understanding the split is the key to everything else.

The Utility is a reusable template that lives in your company settings. You build it once for each real-world utility tariff you sell against (for example "BC Hydro Residential" or "FortisBC TOU"). It holds the rates, fees, escalation, net-metering rules, and any time-of-use or tiered structure.
The Quote Utility is a copy of that template attached to a single quote. When you pick a utility on a quote, its values are copied onto the quote so you can tweak them for that specific customer without touching the template or any other quote.

This is why two quotes on the "same" utility can show different numbers: one may have been customised. Editing the template does not retroactively change quotes that already copied it, and editing a quote's rates does not change the template. The quote always wins for its own projection.

A handful of things only exist at the quote level, because they are customer-specific rather than tariff-specific: the starting month for year one, demand charges, and any quote-specific rate periods or tiers that override the template.

Setting up a utility: the fields

Basics

Field	What it means
Name	What the tariff is called when you pick it on a quote. Required.
Description	Optional notes for your own reference.
Metering Type	Net Metering, Feed in Tariff, or Net Feed in Tariff. Describes how the utility treats energy you send back to the grid.
Minimum Monthly Fee	The fixed charge the customer pays every month regardless of usage. Added to every monthly bill in the projection. Required.

Rates: flat, seasonal, or time-of-use

The base of the tariff is an Import Rate (what the customer pays per kWh) and an Export Rate (what they are credited per kWh sent back). You can define these three ways, and Powerlily checks them in a strict priority order each hour (covered in the next section).

Single rate. One import rate and one export rate that apply all year. The simplest setup.
Monthly (seasonal) rates. Turn on Use Monthly Import and Export Rates and you get a separate import and export rate for each of the twelve months. Use this when a utility charges more in summer or winter. All twelve import and twelve export rates are required once this is on.

Escalation

Annual Escalation Rate models how utility prices rise over the 30-year projection. A value like 4.5% compounds every year, so the rates in year 10 are meaningfully higher than year 1. This matters a lot: a higher escalation rate makes solar look more valuable over time, because the customer is avoiding ever-rising grid prices.

Escalation can also be phased. Instead of a single rate forever, you can define a schedule such as "flat for 5 years, then 4.5% for the next 25." This is useful when a customer has a fixed-rate contract for the first few years. Phased schedules display as a chained summary like "5yr @ 0.0% then 25yr @ 4.5%."

Net metering: how export credits are handled

This is the part that trips people up most, because it determines what happens to the energy a solar system sends back to the grid. Three settings work together.

Credit Rollover (credit compensation). Decides when accumulated export credits are cashed out:

Monthly. Surplus kWh are sold at the export rate at the end of each month rather than carried forward. The value is added to net savings each month. Simpler accounting, but summer overproduction cannot offset winter shortfalls, so it generally shows more grid purchases.
Yearly. Monthly surplus carries forward through the year and is cashed out once, at the renewal month. Summer surplus can offset winter deficits within the same year. This usually produces better numbers for systems that overproduce in summer.
Indefinite. Credits never reset or cash out. They accumulate across all 30 years. Because they are never compensated, the bill-deduction option below has no effect.

Renewal Month. For yearly rollover, this is the month when accumulated credits are remunerated at the export rate and the count starts again the following month. It is the customer's true-up date.

Annual kWh Credit Cap. When on, yearly net savings cannot exceed what the customer would have paid without solar. It prevents the projection from showing the customer "earning" more than their actual electricity cost. Turn it on for utilities that do not pay out net-positive generation.

There is also a quote-level option to apply the value of export surplus directly against the monthly bills, rather than only reporting it as savings. With it on, the credit a system banks reduces the bills the customer actually pays, and a heavy-production month's bill can go negative, representing net earnings. In yearly rollover the annual surplus value is divided across the twelve monthly bills, so the credit is spread evenly through the year; in monthly rollover each month's own cashed-out credit reduces that month's bill; in indefinite mode it has no effect, since credits never cash out.

The three ways a rate is determined, in priority order

For every one of the 8,760 hours in a year, the projection picks the import and export rate by checking these three layers in order. The first one that applies wins.

1. Time-of-use (TOU) rate periods. The most specific. A rate period defines its own import and export rate plus exactly when it applies: a start and end hour, which days of the week, and which months. Periods can wrap past midnight (for example 22:00 to 06:00 for an overnight rate). If an hour falls inside a defined period, that period's rates are used. This is how you model peak, off-peak, and shoulder pricing.

Each rate period carries:

Field	What it means
Name	A label like "Peak" or "Off-Peak."
Import Rate / Export Rate	The per-kWh rates while this period is active.
Start Hour / End Hour	The daily window (0 to 23), wrapping midnight if start is later than end.
Days of Week	Which days it applies to (all days, weekdays, weekends, or a custom set).
Months	Which months it applies to (all year or a custom set).

2. Tiered rates. "After X kWh this month, the rate changes." Tiers are built right on the import rate field: the base import rate is Tier 1, and each added tier kicks in once cumulative monthly consumption passes its threshold. Tiered rates affect the import rate only; exports fall back to the flat rate. This models utilities that charge more once a household crosses a monthly usage step.

3. Flat monthly (or single) rates. The fallback. If no TOU period covers the hour and no tier applies, the projection uses the month's flat import and export rate, with escalation applied for the year. Every utility has this layer, even if it is just one rate.

A single utility can use all three at once: TOU periods for the hours they cover, tiers for the rest of import pricing, and the flat monthly rate as the floor. They are not mutually exclusive, they are a priority stack.

Consumption: how usage is modelled

Rates are only half the equation. The other half is how much energy the home uses, and when. Powerlily supports two approaches.

Monthly totals shaped by a consumption profile

The default. You enter the customer's twelve monthly kWh totals on the quote (usually straight off their bills). Each month's total is then spread across the 24 hours of a day using a consumption profile, a curve that describes the shape of a typical day.

A consumption profile is 24 values that sum to 1.0, one weighting per hour. A flat profile spreads usage evenly; a more realistic profile concentrates it in the morning and evening. Profiles come in two kinds:

Global presets, available to everyone, including a built-in Flat profile used as the default when none is chosen.
Company profiles, which you create or clone and customise for your market.

A quote picks a weekday profile and a weekend profile, so usage can be shaped differently on weekends. The profile matters because it decides how much consumption lands during expensive TOU peak hours versus cheap overnight hours, which directly changes the savings on a TOU tariff.

Interval data upload

When a customer can provide real metered interval data, you can upload it: a full year of 8,760 hourly kWh values. When present, this uploaded data supersedes the monthly-total-times-profile model entirely. It is the most accurate input, because it is the home's actual hour-by-hour usage rather than a modelled shape. The projection reads it directly hour for hour.

Per-quote settings

These live on the quote's copy of the utility, because they describe the deal rather than the tariff.

Starting Month. For year one only, the month the system switches on. Months before it produce no solar in the first year, so a mid-year install shows a partial first year. Later years are full.
Demand charges. Some commercial tariffs bill on peak kW, not just kWh. When enabled with a demand rate, the projection tracks the monthly peak demand both with and without solar and bills the difference. This captures the demand-charge reduction solar provides by shaving peaks.
Custom rate periods and tiers. A quote can override the template's TOU periods or tiers for one specific customer, then be reset back to the template if needed. The projection always uses the quote's effective set: quote-specific if present, otherwise the template's.

How it all comes together: the hourly projection

When a proposal calculates savings, it runs an hourly projection across the full horizon: 8,760 hours times 30 years, which is 262,800 individual hour calculations. For each hour it does the following.

Production comes from the design (the combined hourly output of every PV array), reduced a little each year by the panel's degradation rate.
Consumption comes from either the uploaded interval data or the monthly total shaped by the consumption profile.
The rate for that hour is resolved through the three-layer priority stack (TOU, then tiered, then flat), with escalation applied for the year.
The energy balance is computed: production minus consumption plus any carried-over credit. If the result is positive the home is exporting or banking credit; if negative it is buying power at the import rate.
Credits and their dollar value are tracked hour by hour at the actual export rate in effect, then cashed out according to the credit rollover setting (monthly, yearly, or indefinite). The bill-deduction and credit-cap options are applied on top.

Rolling all of that up by month and year produces the monthly bills, the kWh purchased and exported, the credit balances, and the net savings that appear on the proposal. The hourly granularity is what lets the projection correctly value a TOU tariff: it knows whether each kWh was used at a peak or off-peak rate, rather than assuming an average.

Utility switching (pre-solar comparison)

If the customer is also changing utilities, you can set a pre-solar utility on the quote. The projection then runs a parallel calculation of what the customer would have paid on their old utility, so the proposal can show the savings from switching tariffs separately from the savings from solar itself. This uses the same rate machinery (TOU, tiered, flat, escalation) applied to the old utility.

Quick reference: building a utility that produces a sound proposal

At minimum: Name, Minimum Monthly Fee, an import and export rate (single or monthly), an escalation rate, a credit rollover mode, and the credit cap setting. These are required for the projection to run.
For a TOU tariff: add rate periods with their hours, days, and months. Make sure the consumption profile is realistic, since TOU savings depend heavily on when power is used.
For a tiered tariff: add tiers on the import rate, set by the monthly kWh thresholds where pricing steps up.
For accuracy: upload interval data when the customer has it. It overrides the monthly-and-profile model.
On the quote: set the starting month for the install date, add demand charges for commercial tariffs, and set a pre-solar utility if the customer is switching.

Tip: If a proposal's savings look wrong, work down the stack. Check the twelve monthly consumption totals first, then the consumption profile (a flat profile on a TOU tariff is a common cause of off numbers), then the rate periods and tiers, then the credit rollover mode.

Incentives, Rebates, and Discounts. The other input to a proposal's final price.
Adding Batteries to Your Catalogue. The battery analysis models the same time-of-use and self-consumption savings.
Team Members, Roles, and Permissions. Utility setup is admin-only company configuration.
Loan Structures and Financing. The financing option weighed against the savings.