[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - electricity=*

stevea steveaOSM at softworkers.com
Wed Nov 11 20:49:00 UTC 2020


I hope this doesn't throw too much additional confusion into electricity:grid, but in many parts of the world (including where I am, California) a frequent method for connecting solar panels to both one's house / commercial building and the grid is to do what is known as "grid-tie," sometimes called "net metering."

Grid-tie means that during sunshine, the solar panels generate and "spin the electric meter backwards" (creating a credit to the customer with the electric company) and at night, when electricity use / loads create a debit (by drawing power directly from the grid / electric company), the meter "spins forward" as usual during power use.  Of course, the idea is that generation and load balance each other out during a billing cycle and this "net metering" nets out to about zero, so the customer has a near-zero bill.

That is prevalent enough in the world that if OSM is going to design a tag for electricity:grid, it really needs a syntactic accommodation for "grid_tie" or "net_metering" (which are essentially the same).  Especially as I'm not sure if this would go under electricity or electricity:source (which introduce at the same time), I haven't any specific suggestion on a key, tag or namespace, but I think it important to mention what I haven't seen in this discussion.

SteveA


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