Behind-the-Meter Strategy

Glossary

Behind the meter

The customer's side of the utility revenue meter, where generation and load are connected and power is consumed on-site without first crossing the utility's boundary. It is the domain the customer owns and operates, as opposed to the front-of-meter grid the utility runs.

Capacity factor

The share of the year a plant actually runs relative to running continuously at full output. Because capital cost is spread over the energy produced, a high capacity factor lowers cost per unit, while a plant throttled by a run-hour permit carries heavy capital per megawatt-hour.

Combined heat and power

An arrangement that captures the waste exhaust heat from an on-site engine or turbine to serve a process, steam, or heating load. By extracting useful energy from fuel already burned, it can raise total fuel utilization toward the seventies or eighties percent and sharply lower effective energy cost.

Demand charge

A component of a large electricity bill keyed to the customer's single highest short-interval power draw in a billing period, rather than to total energy used. It can be a third or more of an industrial bill, so shaving peak demand is a primary way behind-the-meter plants create value.

Front of the meter

The grid side of the utility revenue meter: generation that sells into wholesale markets, transmission and distribution planned by the system operator, and the tariffs and interconnection studies that govern them. Power here is a market transaction rather than an on-site engineering choice.

Interconnection queue

The backlog of generators and large loads waiting for the system operator to study their impact on the grid and assign network upgrades before they can connect. Wait times of several years have made the queue the binding constraint that behind-the-meter, non-exporting projects are built to avoid.

Non-exporting island

A behind-the-meter generation configuration sized to serve only on-site load and to push nothing back onto the grid. Because it avoids the heavy scrutiny triggered by exporting power, it is the fastest path to energizing on-site generation.

Standby charge

A fee a utility charges an on-site generator to keep backup grid capacity available for the hours the customer's own plant is down. It is a real cost of remaining grid-connected and must be included in any honest comparison of behind-the-meter power against grid power.