The salespersons for these solar installers usually claim that after installing their solar electric systems, your power meter could run backwards. This may be true of the old spinning-aluminum-disk type power meters. But it isn’t true of the typical new digital readout power meters, at least the ones Progress Energy uses. The new standard digital meters can’t tell which direction power flows. So you get billed for all the power that flows through the meter, whether you are consuming electricity or you are generating electricity and putting it back on the power grid. You need a special bidirectional meter installed which can detect which direction the power is flowing.

All Progress Energy customer charges should be strictly based on how much electricity the customer uses. Therefore, the category of RS-1: xCustomer Charge - $ per line of Billing,x and all its subcategories of charges, such as RST-1, RSS-1, RSL-1, and RSL-2, should be eliminated and the rates per kilowatt hour consumed adjusted accordingly so that all customer charges are based directly on the amount of electricity used.