Our Solar Power So Far

(Our energy consumption from the power company)

In mid-July, after months of pursuit, we got a solar photovoltaic system. Battery storage was back ordered, unavailable. It arrived in September.

We have an east-west roof. We got a different model of solar panels from what low bidders would have installed. Our panels perform a little better with the poor angles of incidence of sunlight on our roof. But without south-facing panels, we knew we would get hardly anything from the system for half the year, October through March.

Now that we have gotten through all of March and April, I thought you might want to see how we’re doing.

The chart at the beginning of this post shows our total energy usage from the energy company for the past two years and this year so far. This past winter our energy usage was high even though we kept the thermostat at 17 Celsius (lower than before) and hardly ever heated rooms other than than the living room and kitchen-dining room. Winter is why we’re trying to get permission to install a microwind turbine. Winter has dull sunlight and more wind.

Our heating, hot water and cooking use natural gas, so we won’t get to zero. Whenever we update the kitchen, we will switch at least the oven and maybe also the cooktop to electric to rely more on energy we produce at home.

You can’t see that we are also feeding noticeable electricity into the grid now, but you can guess from the gap between our usage this spring compared with previous years. If the energy company ever gets around to processing our application (submitted last September) for the Smart Export Guarantee program, our power exports will start to show up on their website. SEG is a feed-in tariff that would pay us a fraction of the market rate for electricity we supply to the grid. When our batteries are full or when the panels are providing so much that the batteries can’t absorb the surplus fast enough, electricity we aren’t using goes to the grid.

I confess that I am addicted to peeking at the monitoring app for our solar system at least once or twice a day to see how it’s doing.

Our primary reason for installing this system wasn’t to end up financially ahead from it. With crazy increases in energy prices across the UK, it certainly looks like the system will reach financial break-even much sooner than the original calculation of 18 years. But that wasn’t our motivation for getting the system.

It’s our buffer against power outages in the local grid. Swings in the weather that are bigger than before impose swings in power demand that are bigger than before. Conventional electricity distribution grids don’t cope with that very well. Modern smart grids do. Most of the electricity distribution grid here is conventional.

Having a solar power system also happens to reduce our demand on the power network. That aligns with our desire to be more kind to the planet.

As the sunlight gets stronger, we look at the monitor tracking our solar system’s performance. Do we solemnly nod and mutter that it is satisfactory?

No, nothing that dignified. We squee with delight.