Insights – Industrial demo 12

What the 2026 grid-fee reform means for C&I rooftops

posted by: Industrial Solar
June 12, 2026
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Insights

The reform published by the regulator in March takes effect on 1 January 2026, and it changes how commercial and industrial sites are billed for the grid, not just for the energy they draw. Until now, most C&I rooftops in our service territory paid a demand charge set on a single monthly peak — one bad fifteen-minute window in July could define the bill. From next year that charge splits into a coincident-peak component tied to the utility’s own system peaks and a lower non-coincident component. In plain terms, the grid stops penalising you for being busy and starts pricing when you are busy.

We have modelled the new tariff against 42 of our operating sites, from a 220 kWp warehouse roof in Hamlin to a 3.1 MWp cold-storage array outside Glenmere. The pattern is consistent. A flat solar-only roof shaves energy volume but barely touches the coincident-peak charge, because our regional peaks now land between 18:00 and 20:00 in winter — after the array has stopped producing. On several sites the demand-charge line item falls by less than 8 percent even where self-consumption tops 60 percent.

Where storage rewrites the bill

The math changes the moment you add batteries. On the Glenmere site we paired the existing 3.1 MWp array with a 1.2 MW / 2.4 MWh battery and dispatched it purely against the four forecast coincident-peak intervals. Annual demand charges dropped from roughly 118,000 to 41,000 in the model — a 65 percent cut — while the energy arbitrage was almost incidental. The storage was not there to move kilowatt-hours; it was there to be invisible during four hours a month when the grid is most expensive.

Who wins, then, is straightforward. Sites with steady daytime loads and no storage see modest gains. Sites that can shift or shave their evening coincidence — through batteries, thermal mass, or simply rescheduling a shift — capture most of the upside. Who pays is the operator who assumes a rooftop array alone still clears the demand charge the way it did in 2023. That assumption is now roughly a decade out of date.

There is a timing wrinkle worth flagging. The coincident-peak windows are published day-ahead, so dispatch has to be forecast-driven, not rule-of-thumb. We have retrofitted our monitoring stack on twelve sites to pull the utility’s day-ahead signal automatically; manual dispatch left about a fifth of the savings on the table in our December pilot.

Our read is simple. If you are sizing a C&I rooftop for 2026 and beyond, model the demand charge first and the energy yield second, and treat storage as part of the base case rather than an upgrade. We are happy to run your last twelve months of interval data against the new tariff before you commit to a design.

Bifacial + trackers: our yield data after 24 months

posted by: Industrial Solar
May 9, 2026
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Insights

When Cascade Grid Holdings brought us the Thornapple project in the Columbia Basin, the brief was narrow: they wanted to know, before financial close, whether the bifacial premium was real or a spec-sheet promise. So we built the plant to answer that question and instrumented it to prove it. Two years of clean data later, we can.

Thornapple is a 96 MWp array — 262,000 modules on single-axis trackers across 140 hectares outside Moses Lake, energized in June 2024. We paired bifacial modules with a 1.2 gain-to-loss tracker algorithm and left a reference block of 4,800 monofacial panels wired to a separate meter. Same inverters, same string lengths, same soiling schedule. The only variable we cared about was the back of the glass.

Where the 9% comes from

Over 24 months the bifacial-plus-tracker blocks produced 218 GWh against a monofacial-fixed baseline modeled at 200 GWh — a 9.1% uplift, holding steady across both summers. It does not arrive in one lump. Roughly 5.5 points come from the trackers following the sun through the long Basin mornings; the remaining 3.6 points are rear-side gain, and that fraction is where the site does the work. Ground cover of native bunchgrass and pale silty soil gave us a measured albedo near 0.30 for eight months of the year, climbing past 0.55 when snow sat on the field in January and February — exactly when the low sun angle throws the most light under the racks.

The rear contribution is not uniform, and pretending otherwise is how yield models overpromise. Edge rows out-earn interior rows by close to two percentage points because they see unshaded reflected light. We set tracker torque-tube height at 1.6 m and held row pitch at 6.5 m specifically to buy back some of that interior shortfall, and the monitoring confirms the trade paid for its steel.

Degradation matters more than the headline number, so we watch it closely. The bifacial fleet is tracking a first-year loss of 1.4% and roughly 0.42% annually thereafter — inside the module warranty and, notably, no worse than the monofacial reference despite the added rear exposure. Bifaciality of the cells has held near its rated 70%.

What we tell the next client is plain: bifacial and trackers together earned their premium at Thornapple, but the 9% is a site number, not a product number. It was underwritten by ground albedo, row geometry and a latitude that rewards tracking. On a dark-soiled site with tight pitch, we would forecast closer to 5%, and we would say so before anyone signed. The data is the point. We would rather commit to a figure we have already measured than sell one we hope to hit.