My solar PV thread

[oil pan 4]

How about some production numbers. I will list themin units of megawatt hours.
Year of plandemic.
Part of june, about 20 days, 1.36
July, 1.73
August, 1.63
September, 1.36
October, 1.14
November, 0.84
December, 0.83.
Year of fauci virus:
January, 0.76
February, 1
March, 1.44
April, 1.54
May, 1.56
1/2 of June, 1

[redpoint5]

Nice that you can get half of production in the winter. I get 1/5th during the winter.

I get 0.2 mWh in Jan, and 1 mWh in July.

[oil pan 4]

Well I got a letter saying the coop is going to up charge me $60 a month for having solar, because they can. This was always going to be money losing endeavor now it's losing another $60 per month.
I never would have installed solar if I had known this was going to happen.
Buyers remorse at or near 100%.
I say screw it, do not buy your own solar unless your electricity provider is desperate for you to.
Yep Michael Moore was right the new generation green energy is pretty much a scam.

[freebeard]

I don't understand some of the details, but this sounded right when Jack Rikard (RIP) published it in 2018.

evtv.me/2018/10/solar-mqtt-selfish-solar-on-a-global-scale-bob-battery-on-board/

To deal with the utility grid is very simple – simply cut the cord and go off-grid. But this has some problems of its own.

Everyone knows that the solar energy available varies with the season. But few realize how MUCH it varies. We can produce 3.5x MORE electricity here in Missouri in June than we can in December from the same installed hardware.

And smaller weather events also pose a variable. Four days of rain cuts our power to the bone. Four days of sun and we have more than we can store or use.

And so for the present, we advocate maintaining a link to the grid. But we advocate you remain under the utility grid radar by simply maintaining a basic 200A 240vac link to the grid and paying the monthly minimum connection fee. Do NOT seek a “net metering” agreement or do anything to alert them that you are anything but a very low usage residential or commercial customer.

As it is QUITE common to have empty houses or apartments or dark warehouses for months or years, they really don’t have much in the way of tools to DETECT that you don’t use much electricity – as long as you pay that $11.24 connection fee every month. And you quite likely need to have a grid connection just for local code compliance.

And so you should have one. And use it as little as possible as a backup to augment your power system.

So we’ve inverted the usual scenario. Instead of a battery back up system for grid power, we envision a grid backed up battery system.

And we advocate abandoning the kumbayah vision of everybody sharing and loving each other. Do NOT seek net metering or compensation from the grid operator.

We call this SELFISH SOLAR. And of course the end mission remains the same – total independence from the grid ultimately. And we further see it as based on repurposed EV batteries for solar energy storage.

Maybe hard to fly under the radar if you're already on it?

[oil pan 4]

My problem is I have a really good idea what it would take to go off grid.
I could potentially make a 10kw with ??kwh of battery capacity and just power the little stuff off solar.

[redpoint5]

I'd go off grid. Whatever supplemental amount in the winter you'd need, a generator could provide and it would probably be cheaper than $60/mo.

[thingstodo]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

Well I got a letter saying the coop is going to up charge me $60 a month for having solar, because they can. This was always going to be money losing endeavor now it's losing another $60 per month.
I never would have installed solar if I had known this was going to happen.
Buyers remorse at or near 100%.
I say screw it, do not buy your own solar unless your electricity provider is desperate for you to.
Yep Michael Moore was right the new generation green energy is pretty much a scam.

BOO!

I had hopes that a coop would be less draconian than a utility company would be. But I guess small people with low self-esteem like to inflict petty inconveniences and penalties on others ... because they can .. no matter what size the organization is.

Are you able to take the solar offline (no grid tie) and just turn it off when your batteries are full and you have no further loads?

I have a very small system (3 solar panels) and while I am experimenting it is definitely NOT grid tied. Too much paperwork.

[thingstodo]

Originally Posted by freebeard

I don't understand some of the details, but this sounded right when Jack Rikard (RIP) published it in 2018.

evtv.me/2018/10/solar-mqtt-selfish-solar-on-a-global-scale-bob-battery-on-board/


Maybe hard to fly under the radar if you're already on it?

Jack's idea (he is missed!) at the time was to run everything off-grid and if you happen to need some additional power during a month or two, you use your grid connection to charge up your batteries.

So he kept the grid connection as a 'backup generator' sort of solution.

Later, after he got enough solar to go off-grid during the winter ... he did not have enough loads to use all of his available solar in the summer. He already had the separate disconnect required by his utility, so he connected a grid-tie inverter to push electricity back to the grid.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by thingstodo

BOO!
I had hopes that a coop would be less draconian than a utility company would be. But I guess small people with low self-esteem like to inflict petty inconveniences and penalties on others ... because they can .. no matter what size the organization is.

Are you able to take the solar offline (no grid tie) and just turn it off when your batteries are full and you have no further loads?

I have a very small system (3 solar panels) and while I am experimenting it is definitely NOT grid tied. Too much paperwork.

A coop is a smaller entity, so the negative externalities of any individual solar installation has a greater proportion of impact than a large utility with more customers. With a large utility, costs can be distributed across a larger number of consumers to hide the impact.

Back in the day of mechanical meters, it was possible to do grid-tied guerilla solar. In other words, the utility didn't know and had no way of knowing because the meter simply ran backwards. As long as net consumption was slightly higher than solar production, the net would simply appear to the utility as extremely low electricity consumption.

[thingstodo]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

A coop is a smaller entity, so the negative externalities of any individual solar installation has a greater proportion of impact than a large utility with more customers. With a large utility, costs can be distributed across a larger number of consumers to hide the impact.

Back in the day of mechanical meters, it was possible to do grid-tied guerilla solar. In other words, the utility didn't know and had no way of knowing because the meter simply ran backwards. As long as net consumption was slightly higher than solar production, the net would simply appear to the utility as extremely low electricity consumption.

I have seen equipment advertised that uses your house wiring to distribute AC from your solar, but measures the incoming power at your panel to ensure that you don't export to the grid. I think that this is gorilla (sp?) as well.

So you are only reducing your load on the grid, not sending back to the grid (technically). Even when you are exporting to the grid ... you are really exporting to your nieghbors on the same distribution segment (13800V transformer) ... unless you have a very large array I guess.

As for costs, besides the meter ... what costs? The grid does voltage and frequency regulation, has the peaker plants, etc. I must e naive - what does the coop do?