Comment by edent
Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my excess solar back to the grid.
Where in the world are you? In the UK I get paid to sell my excess solar back to the grid.
> That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.
Australia has the highest density of residential rooftop solar in the world, making up about 11% of the grid supply. Feed-in tariffs are standard there.
Also in Australia, and yeah feedin tariffs are a thing, but during midday "off peak" times when solar has excess energy, they're down around 1-2% of the retail cost of electricity and that's been going down for years.
Anecdotally, amongst my social circle, people are buying house batteries because the feedin tariffs are so low it's worthwhile spending $10k or so to store your daytime solar for use in evenings/night - because it costs 40 or 60c per kWHr to buy electricity off the grid in the evening, and they only give you a cent or two to if you feed it on during midday solar peaks. It's way better value to charge your house battery (and you car if you can) than to sell solar generated electricity back to the grid.
That's usually the case if there's only a few people with solar or if your local infrastructure is overbuilt, since grids typically aren't designed to handle residential power generation.
If there's too much solar in your area (which will be the eventual end result everywhere) you get net billing, where you don’t get charged for the energy you use, but they won't pay you a dime for anything over what you use or will even disconnect you if you overproduce so the local substation doesn't explode because it wasn't specced for any of this shit.
The end result is that you don't get paid for any of your daily overproduction and still get billed at night, the worst of both worlds. It incentives people to buy batteries and store the peaks, with grid power being mostly optional.