Number crunching

Well, we made $0.57 worth of electricity today. Not bad given that the authorization to operate the plant came in at 3pm. I'll have to see how it does tomorrow.

 

3.2kw/h produced between switch-on and sun-down yesterday, local rate is about $0.18.

The reporter app tells me we've already produced another 3kw/h this morning and there's barely any direct light on it yet.

The house meter started showing the <--- export pattern around 9AM.

Sunrise hasn't been this exciting in a while. My coffee tastes a little better right now.

 

Another white truck with a yellow blinky light and parking cones today.

This one was the metering department. They reprogrammed my meter so now it has two accumulators, one for them and one for us.

From the stats, we produced about 42kw/h today. We have been credited with exporting about 9kw/h. The rest we either used or gave away.

 

In a nutshell, I have a legal agreement with my local power utility that enables me to sell them electricity whenever I am making more than I am using.

We installed a big solar panel in the yard. It's hooked up to the house. When the panel makes more power than the house needs, the excess gets exported to the grid and is consumed by my neighbors.

My electric meter now counts power I buy from the grid (import) as well as power we sell to the grid (export) and the two totals are canceled against each other to determine my bill (or payment) as the case may be each month.

If we did it right, our exports will equal our imports for net zero energy cost.

 

Yes, in real time. We aren't doing anything special for that; this is a natural property of electricity in a contiguous circuit- it will flow from where it is to where it is needed. The import/export balance and degree changes all the time with normal household activity + sunlight availability.

That's exactly what it is doing. All that sophistication has been boiled down to a couple of chips controlling the inverters. The future is now. Part of the legal agreement I signed is that my power has to be good enough for their standards, coming from approved inverters only.

No storage; completely grid interactive. Any power I produce in excess of what I'm consuming goes out on the wire to my neighbors houses, and ultimately reduces the amount of fuel used at the local gas turbine plant.

 

I understand that one area of competitive improvement is in time-to-sync. Older inverters would have to listen to the incoming power for a long time before they were really certain they had the phase correct. Newer ones seem to be faster about getting on the line.

 

Tied to the grid with no battery is the new thing for me.

We've had solar panels on the family vacation cottage for almost 40 years now, but that is strictly off grid. The panels charge batteries and we keep the resulting power for ourselves.

A necessity there; there is no grid at that location.

Now I'm learning how to do solar in a much more social fashion.

 

When the utility technician set up my meter for bi-directional accounting, they reset the accumulators to zero.

So now I can almost call it like a ball game.

Right now, the Photons are leading the Gasflames* 59 to 13.


*it should be noted that my imported electricity is known as "RFC East" which is about 50% natural gas fired turbine, 36% nuclear, 9% coal and 5% everything else.

 

We generated 53.5 kw/h today.

Thing is, it should have been 71.3.

5 of my inverters (25% of installed capacity) did not wake up and generate.

I'm waiting for my electrician to troubleshoot.

 

Thanks, never thought about it.

Funny: the / key is broken on my keyboard. I actually had to go out of my way to make that mistake.