What is PTO?

Permission to Operate, or PTO, is the formal approval you need to get from your utility before your solar and battery system can be made fully operational.  

Your PTO application will be completed by your installer and may take several weeks to be approved. If you have any questions about this process, you should contact your installer.

PTO must be granted in order for you to earn utility bill credits for any electricity you send back to the grid, and to participate in available VPP programs. If you are in PG&E, SCE, or SDG&E service territory and you don’t already have solar panels, then your rate plan will change to a NEM3 rate (also known as NBT) upon PTO. If you already have solar, then you may stay on your existing NEM2 rate (depending on the circumstances).

What can my Lunar System do before PTO?

System behavior

When you first enter the Lunar App before PTO, there will be an explanation of the behavior you can expect from your Lunar System.

Before PTO, you will not be able to change the battery settings set by your installer. These could be as follows:

• Self-consumption with no grid export:
  Your Lunar System will power your home, but will not send any electricity back to the utility grid. If there is a grid outage, your Lunar System will power your home.

• Backup with no grid export:
  Your Lunar System will charge to 100% and remain full, ready for any grid outage. It will not power your home or send any electricity back to the utility grid.

• Switched off:
  Your Lunar System has been physically turned off by your installer, and won’t power your home whilst on or off grid. You won’t be able to see any system data in the Lunar App.

If you have any questions about your Lunar System’s behavior please contact your installer.

App behavior

Before PTO, some features in the app will not be available. These include:

• Battery settings
  Being able to change your battery mode and battery reserve.
• Insights
  Insights will not be available until you have PTO and your Lunar System is fully operational.‍
• Predictions
  To accurately train our Lunar AI prediction model, we need your Lunar System to be fully operational. This AI training process will start once PTO is granted.

How will I know if I have PTO?

When PTO is granted, your utility will notify you and your installer.

If your installer remotely updates your Lunar System’s PTO status, you can open the app and proceed through the PTO onboarding process. Make sure to enable notifications in Settings to be notified of your installer updating your PTO status.

If your utility has notified you of your PTO but you haven’t seen a change in the app, go to Settings and tap ‘Have you received PTO?’. Here, you can confirm that your system has received PTO and enter the date PTO was granted. This feature may be unavailable for some users, depending on their installer.

What happens after PTO?

System behavior

After your system receives PTO, it should be fully operational and will operate according to settings defined by your installer and rules from your utility. In the transition from pre-PTO to post-PTO, your Lunar System’s battery mode may also have changed based on the settings set by your installer.

Once in the app, you can further understand how your Lunar System will interact with the utility grid by tapping on ‘Your home overview’ in Settings. Here, you can see your Lunar System’s PCS settings. PCS (or Power Control System) settings are set by your installer, and regulate how your Lunar System interacts with the utility grid.

The most common PCS settings are:

• Export Only - the system cannot charge from the grid but can export to the grid
• Import Only - the system cannot export to the grid but can charge from the grid

App features

When your system has PTO, the Lunar App will guide you through some key changes.

Rate plan

You’ll be prompted to confirm or enter your rate plan. It’s important to select the correct rate plan, as this is needed for us to try to maximize your utility bill savings using Lunar AI mode.

When your utility gives PTO, your rate plan will update to reflect this (e.g. enabling you to earn credits for electricity you send back to the grid). If you’re unsure of your new rate plan, please check your utility account online, or check your next utility bill after PTO, to find out. You can always add your rate plan later in Settings.

Battery settings

When you receive PTO, your battery settings may change to ones set by your installer. These changes will be explained in the Lunar App. For more information about battery settings, see the Battery settings section of these FAQs.

Insights

Once you have PTO, go to the Insights tab to see:

• Off grid events 
  A summary of how many times you’ve gone off grid. Click on the card to review further details. 

• Home-made energy 
  This measures how much of your home’s energy usage was provided by solar and your Lunar System in a given month. 

• A relative understanding of how much of your home usage came from your Lunar System vs energy imported from the grid, and how much you exported to the grid.

‍Predictions

When your system is fully operational, your system will start to learn the energy patterns of your home. It will then start generating predictions of your household energy usage and solar generation. Of course, these won’t always be 100% correct: the weather and human behavior can’t be perfectly predicted! 

Lunar’s predictions aim to give you a sense of your home’s energy behavior over the next 24 hours. If your system is in Lunar AI mode, they also inform how Lunar AI will optimize your battery. 

Roughly two weeks after you receive PTO, your system will have had enough time to learn your energy patterns, and predictions will automatically appear in your app. You will receive a notification that predictions are ready, if you have predictions enabled in Settings. 

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