PLEASE NOTE – the date this was written was July 15th, 2019, so depending on when you read this, it might be very out-of-date.
I just spent a bunch of time on the phone trying to track down the answer to a simple question, so I’m going to put this out there in the unlikely event that anybody can find this post. My question was – can I get the $0.25 USD/watt rebate that Ameren, the local electric utility, is giving out to people who install solar PV panels on a residence **if I am just adding to an already existing array**? I was told the answer is maybe, depending on whether money become available, sort of. To clarify that answer, let me tell you that we installed an 8.17 kW solar PV array on our home’s garage in 2012 and it has worked almost without incident since then. We would like to add some solar PV panels to the array in order to further decrease our dependence on electricity mostly generated from coal, so we will be adding 1.71 kW with the addition of 6 new 285 watt SolarWorld panels. I wanted to know if we could get the advertised solar PV rebate from our local utility if we were adding to an already existing PV system and the person I talked to on the phone said that although all the money available has already been spoken for (which means no money for me, possibly) that if customers who have already been approved for systems fail to install them in a timely fashion that money might then become available for me. The woman I spoke to about this on the phone said that my application would get in line behind all the other applications hoping to get money, and if enough customers cancelled their orders. So, the answer is quite dependent on the actions of others, but almost certainly I would get no money from Ameren for extending our PV array.
This rebate is/was only available in Missouri, for customers who get their electricity from Ameren.
SolarRationalist 