This year I have recently installed solar panel and battery to combat my stupid electricity bills.
I haven't experienced this before this week, but it seems that I have been getting way too much sun during the day as spring has come. I did so many loads of laundries, charged my EV, and switched on my AC. It seems that I can't be doing this forever though.
Is there any other tips to saturate the power? I felt like curtailing the solar power should be the last thing I do.
Crossed my mind but I only got 5m extension cable haha
Do your neighbour's laundry.
i recall there was bloke in the news a while back, doing that to minimise the cost of his solar panels
force your neighbours to take free electricity
Turn on Air conditioner (cooling), space heater, oven at the same time.
'Feed in Tariff Is Negative' you on a plan where they charge you?
I've recently switched to Amber wholesale and whilst this hasn't happened yet, I have seen it happen to others a few times.
This will become very common soon, I believe mid next year most retailers will have 2 way tariffs, where your solar generated at non high demand times would be charged. It’s to incentivise battery uptake and using your solar energy.
This will be the same as Time Of Use pricing which started as only having peak demands on Weekdays, now suddenly everyday between 3pm to 9pm is “peak” even on a Sunday! It starts like this but I have a feeling they get more and more greedier as time goes on.
https://www.ausgrid.com.au/Your-Energy-Use/Understanding-tar…
Crazy.
At the moment, I don’t have solar but benefit from free electricity from 11am to 2pm.
Hopefully they will expand the hours lol
So thank you solar panels owners.
Haha I’m in the same boat! No solar panels as house facing wrong way from the sun to get a decent ROI in VIC. But I also use the free electricity during peak times.
I would think it more sensible to simply do the incentivised thing - install a battery, get the rebate… and then immediately go off grid entirely - you would save the daily supply charge at a minimum, as well as be able to use your solar power or battery in a blackout (something you cannot do with solar alone).
If I have to install a battery because the lovely retailers are charging me to feed-in, there is precisely zero chance they'll be getting any energy from me in future, especially when they want to charge me a supply charge daily as well. You'd have to be a mug to go along with such terms.
I agree, and I think that’s the reason they are doing this, implementing two way charging will incentivise battery uptake which is exactly what the government and the retailers want.
They want stored energy to be used at peak times and all this excess energy at non peak times to be charged as it’s basically useless wasted energy.
How Do You Use Your Excess Solar Panel Energy When The Feed in Tariff Is Negative?
Don't sign up to Amber unless you can reduce your exports to zero.
but it seems that I have been getting way too much sun during the day as spring has come
It only gets worse from here. See point above, time to change providers.
I can curtail my exports to zero, but I thought there is a more "Ozbargain friendly" way to reduce my export while making some profit.
Amber will curtail solar if battery is full and FIT negative, if using SS.
If you go to Amber you need to understand how it works. It is not rocket science.
Amber will curtail solar if battery is full and FIT negative, if using SS.
If your inverter and/or battery supports it, so as I said Don't sign up to Amber unless you can reduce your exports to zero.
If you go to Amber you need to understand how it works. It is not rocket science.
I fully know how it works, so thanks for the neg. Not every battery and not every inverter works with Amber. Hence my statement as the OP didn't list the battery they got.
Not much else you can waste it on other than a bitcoin mining rig, you could get a battery to store it up during the day and sell it back during peak time potentially.
is bitcoin worth it though? I have excess solar and multiple pcs here i used for llms and stuff
Not with normal consumer GPU, no, hasn't been the case for at least 5+ be years. You need a dedicated mining rig(s) now for it to be worth it.
Buy a battery to store excess generation during the day and use that energy to run a/c etc overnight
Did that and have filled the battery up already haha
What size solar system is it?
8 kW. Our usage is about 20 kWh a day, generating over 35 kWh now.
Make sure in the Amber app, set your smart shift settings to earnings optimiser. That way your battery will discharge in the evening peak and make you $$$
VPP, much better FIT at 7pm-7am ;)
Turn your panels off?? I know mine have isolation switches near the inverter that can be used to shut it down.
Depending on your battery system, you can for example on a Tesla system switch it to off grid mode.
https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/powerwall/mobile-app/go…
Can you chuck a tarp over the panels when you're not using them / not charging up your battery?
I set one air-conditioner to cool and the other to heat. Where the high pressure zone meets the low pressure zone in the kitchen I get a storm.
Does it create an aurora borealis?
Only when I’m cooking steamed hams or my patented Jimbo burgers.
Air condition the garden shed? Hot water heater for the bird baths? Heated or cooled driveway? Large outdoor fans to generate a lovely southerly breeze? Bat signal?
my fit is 7c
I won't say what my FiT is. You might have a fit. I was one of the early adopters.
.44c until 2028, easy money
Yeah that whole thing has backfired, incentivising people to pump power into the grid when it is already over supplied at that time.
It's such a missed opportunity in the market, we generate so much excess power and could instead be running temporary recycling factories. Glass, aluminium, ammonia production, even plastic back to pyrolysis oil (instead of redcycles plastic furniture, at higher temperatures you can turn it into about 80% pyrolysis oil, which sells for $1k a tonne)
A lot of these things are low on human capital, have low input costs (companies pay people to take their plastics) and high on energy consumption. Added benefit is that by soaking up excess solar they become incredibly green - we buy lots of ammonia from Indonesia where the input is natural gas and it's created using cheap coal power.
The problem is that low human capital solutions require high automated asset costs. It's easier to just use human labour in low income countries instead.
Anyway, tl;dr, OP you should start using your excess power to create pyrolysis oil. Or go oldschool, use it to start drying grains or something
It's a waste of capital to build something only to then run it for a few hours a day while the sun is shining. The returns wouldn't stack up, a lot of industry runs around the clock to get the best return on assets.
It's a waste of capital to build something only to then run it for a few hours a day while the sun is shining.
E.g. solar panels?
It depends on what it is. A processing plant is going to be located close to population centers on highly valuable land, has very expensive equipment and needs staff to run it. Operating for just a few a hours a day is not viable. It would need to run often at times when it would be using non-renewables.
Solar panels are a bit different. They don't need people to operate and can be located on cheap land well away from population centers.
@JIMB0: Yes, that's a good point. I'd say the capital deployed for the plant and equipment (the panels themselves and peripheral equipment) may still be ineffectivey allocated, even if operating expenses are low and even if there is no opportunity cost for the land (e.g. put them on top of OP's roof). The capital spent on that is still only earning money / saving money for part of the day.
Of course factoring in land cost, even in your example, it depends on the viable alternative uses for the "highly valuable land". Many businesses and warehouses in suburban and urban industrial areas operate only during dayshift. I don't see what the difference is really. A facility such as freefall101 suggested could even install battery capacity to extract cheap power from the grid in the middle of the day to lower its operating costs at other times of the day or to even extend operating hours.
Looping back to the OP's case, it's even worse because they're costing him money for part of the day. In his case he's over-capitalised on generation capacity, and under-capitalised on storage & usage capacity. Heck, the only reason they're costing him at certain times of the day is because the entire grid has over-capitalised on solar generation capacity and under-capitalised on storage or usage capacity. GordonD makes a good comment on that point from the perspective of inefficient allocation of government subsidies.
So the question then becomes is it better to install things that can make use of excess capacity (e.g. freefall101's suggestion) or is it better to shift the excess capacity to get used at other times of the day (e.g. at night via batteries or other storage), or a bit of both.
Solution looking for a problem?
Desalination plant + electrolysis of water to store hydrogen to generate energy at night and cloudy periods is the ultimate goal.
Buy a powerful motor and have it pull a huge stone slab up in the air when the sun is bright. Then lower the stone slab and put the motor in reverse to generate electricity to use for your AC at night. You might need council permits for the structure.
Our if you have a spare $12b, build a pump to push water up to the top of a nearby hill during the day and let it flow back down again at night
See Snowy River Hydro for how not to do this. :-)
Cut the wire go completely off grid.
I don't understand the economics of solar.
How can there be too much of something and its still be being subsidised?
If there is more solar generated power than can be used when it can be generated, so it is now negatively priced, how can there be a subsidy to install more and bigger domestic solar? That subsidy should now be going somewhere else, like to subsidise energy storage.
Sure, it all made sense early on, but you shouldn't get cheap solar now unless it includes a battery.
If I was the government I'd be building a factory to produce sodium based home batteries. Cheap. Long life. Too big and heavy to use in cars, but we don't have a car manufacturing industry. Write off the factory cost, and supply them at cost of manufacture, rather than subsidising imported much more expensive lithium batteries.
But then if I was the government trying to solving the housing problem, rather than spending taxes pushing up the price of houses by helping more people buy them I'd be building prefab home factories to help people buy them by building them faster and bringing down the price.
Moving away from Amber, because while there were some random spikes early on that generated some income (usually less than 20 minutes of high FiT), the opposite is now guaranteed, every day. Each morning at 8am an SMS "the grid is green", justifying them to charge you -1c rising to -6 and upwards for feeding anything into the grid.
If you're getting solar + batteries, strongly suggest some method of isolating from the grid so don't have to worry about being charged.
I would have to set my export limit to 0, so I am not charged for excess solar export.
Bitcoin mining
Get a bigger house with ducted air and pool, office WFH.
Buy an EV
Walk outside and switch your inverter off?
Perhaps join an energy retailer such as Amber where they sometimes pay you to use excess power in the grid (such as during a bright sunny day where everyone's solar is maxed out). Then just grab a bunch of space heaters for free off facebook marketplace and blast away. Those kmart heaters can do like 2KW each…. two per powerpoint…. maybe 6 powerpoints around the house…. that's a good 24kWh load if your breakers can handle it. 3 hours a day between 11am-1pm, say 4c paid per kWh used= $2.88 a day in credit!!!
If your feed-in tariff is truly negative (hard to believe) - ask your installer to turn off feed-in.
I was disgusted at a low (not negative) feed-in rate, and enquired if feed-in could be turned off, and they said no probs.
Power company doesn't deserve to get your power for a low rate, and it's morally reprehensible for them to expect to get away with charging coming and going.
I'm surprised that the people that build these suburbs don't just make all buyers pay for solar, they build a giant battery and then build the poles and wires to create a giant battery power plant for a suburb. With a failsafe to the grid if they do run out of power. But you'd hope the battery might be big enough to last a month or so of overcast weather.
Putting in electric heated flooring for this reason. Mind you, you need to take up your floor to do it. At least then in winter should I start getting charged to feed in I can just sink the heat into the slab and then have it release slowly over hours and hours into the night
Scorching summers gonna be fun
I'm about to move into a house with panels but no battery and thinking about getting one installed to avoid negative FIT + power at night.
I was looking at AussieSolarBatteries and seems cheap compared to other companies around. Does anyone have any experience with them? Is the fox battery just a complete piece of crap?
Grow lights?
If you've got a plan with a negative tarrif you need to set your battery up to ensure you don't export when it is negative. Some have nodered support so you can do this using an api but that might be a bit much (I can't be bothered with it either). A simpler one would be setting an export limit for the times of day it is usually negative for the whole spring to mid autumn period on your inverter.
If all this sounds a bit much, join a VPP program and they will do it automatically.
run an extension lead to your neighbours?