Casually investigating solar for our house in south Alberta.
Seems like there are arguments to add some wall batteries and NOT export excess production to the grid.
Put as many panels up as you want, as much batteries as you can w/out running afoul of fire code and need for sprinklers. Pull from batteries at night first, then the grid, via auto transfer switch or whatever.
Versus grid tied where you are capped at having generation capacity being no more than your top 12 consecutive months within the last 24 months.
Also, buying outright instead of some long term payment scheme.
I could be wildly wrong on the above statements. Anyways, anyone running non-exporting roof top solar with battery storage here? Thinking Firefly might be the place to engage for this. The EPCube battery system on a cursory look seems good. Avoiding Tesla batteries for obvious reasons.
EDITS: Typos and expanding upon original post a little bit. Adding hashtags.
@scuttlebutt i understand the rationale behind the gridtie rate limit, but it is ridiculously low. i mean, sure, you don't want people going "i'm running a utility provider in my backyard" but, also, don't punish people who have a sunny yard.
@ghorwood A supposed, and probably real in some cases, concern is the grid can't handle import if a substantial number of people in an area were exporting more than was being used in total.
@ghorwood Sort of like the bogeyman concern of if everyone had an EV and was charging at the same time, the grid couldn't handle it. Except the cars can schedule and throttle their charging etc, not being a dead-short across the power lines as it were.
@ghorwood Haven't looked too closely at our electricity bills in a while, but I'm pretty sure with solar and house battery we'd still be paying the utility a good chunk of what we do now, for all the infrastructure charges. Which is fine, being we wouldn't be going off-grid, just mostly produce-and-consume-locally with grid for backfill beyond what the house system would provide.
@scuttlebutt i feel like a lot of problems could be solved in general with an upgraded grid. i mean: we know electrification is coming: what’s the plan? panic in ten years? hell, even california isn’t getting it done and they have grid failures that cause fatal fires.
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