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‘If 1.5m Germans have them there must be something in it’: how balcony solar is taking off
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2024
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These units do not push electricity into the grid unless their fail-saves are bypassed deliberately or fail catastrophically.
Anyway, no, it's not that important. You already have a battery at home- your entire home. If you're overproducing electricity then you can convert it to another medium such as hot or cold air depending on the time of year and save on AC. You can run preload your washer and make it run when production is at peak automatically. Be creative. Most people will not be overproducing electricity with one of these kits.
Additionally, local energy independence is not about being off-grid, it's about being able to charge and use a radio or the internet in an emergency where the grid is out. A solar panel on the balcony provides that, it makes you independent of the grid even if you're still using the grid to run your washing machine and the oven in a non-emergency scenario. A battery will only be a boon to you if you expect the grid to go out for days at a time regularly or if your kit is large enough to actually overproduce at any point, which again, most don't; they supplement.
I don't understand what you mean by this. The time people want to minimize their grid usage is during the hours of 16-19 which is peak usage and when electricity is most expensive. These panels will still provide a decent supplement in that time during the summer half of the year.
In summary, I just don't think a battery is going to add much unless you're expecting to overproduce regularly which a balcony panel isn't gonna do.
edit: I should mention that the larger kits do come with battery options, because those could be expected to overproduce, and thus would be useful.
What are you talking about? Of course, energy that isn't used in the household is pushed back to the grid.
Do you know how these kits work? The whole point is that they're plug-and-play. If the feed back into the grid, they are not plug and play and will require coordination with your power company lest you accidentally kill someone because you're backfeeding into a line they turned off so they could work on it.
The kits have built-in measures to avoid backfeeding, or they would be illegal. Where I live, they've been deemed so unsafe, failsafe or not, that you're just not allowed to use them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid-tie_inverter
https://www.inverter.com/what-is-a-grid-tie-inverter
These kits absolutely can push power into the grid, usually with payment for the generation. Just because they may not be allowed where you live doesn't mean they don't exist.
If you happen to have an old Ferraris meter without a ratchet it can even run backwards when you produce more than you consume. And, of course the 800 Watt EU limit is a worst case limit. If you feed in on a dedicated (no other consumers or generators) line with its own fuse and sufficient wire crossection you can feed in up to about 2 kW. Be aware that the fuse will not trigger if you have a near-short while you generate peak or near peak which can cause overheating and is a fire hazard. While none of the above is legal and you will lose house insurance in case some electric-related fire event occurs it is safe technically.