Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Electric Cars

No, that's the downside of the way the existing legislation and technology works. If your solar array is connected to the grid, it must shut down if there's no power on the grid. It's to protect engineers who might be working to fix any problem.

It is possible to get a setup that does provide power when the grid is non-operational, but they are a lot more expensive than a normal installation.

RobMog88 on here.

Thank you Hamwich. In that case, I can't see any point to them.

I think Neil said it before, it goes from A to B perfectly acceptable. It's purely economics for me doing 35k plus miles a year in it. If I wasn't lucky enough to have my other two cars I wouldn't of got one. Hope Tarka gets sorted sooner than later.

The point to having batteries is that without a FiT contract in place you don't earn any money from solar power you export to the grid. So instead you stick it in the battery to maximise your own use of it.

So for example yesterday we were able to make use of 97% of all the power we generated, spreading that use out right through the 24 hours rather than just when the sun was shining. Yesterday we used 12.4KWh of power of which only 1.1KWh came from the grid.

The point to having any solar system is as a hedge against future price increases. My supplier is Ecotricity, who are notoriously expensive, you only go to them if you consider your ethical position to be more important than the amount you pay for electricity. When we had our system installed in late 2020 w were paying 20p/KWh and the payback period was getting on for 20 years.

Now we are paying 40p a unit and the payback period has halved.

I (having spent the last 14 years of my career working in the electricity supply industry) give absolutely no credence to the idea that energy prices will ever drop back. We have spent the last 35 years since privatisation paying artificially low prices because the strategic investment bit that CEGB did so well has been stripped out in favour of imported gas. Now the chickens are coming home to roost. I fully expect we'll be paying £1/KWh within 3 years, probably less.

The best time to install any micro-generation capability is 5 years ago, with Tomoorow being the best alternative.

I got the FiT when it was at its best and the price of solar panels was coming down (slightly!). So I got the best of both worlds. It has paid for itself already (Nearly £14,000) so I have about 13 years of tax-free income from the Govt!

Bob, likewise, 4 days before the end of the old high tarif at the end of November 2011.
I have a 3kWh battery, which isn't large enough.
I get perverse pleasure looking at graphs like this...



The two peaks in the early hours were charging the Tesla, we pay 7.5p/kWh from 11:30 until 05:30, the big gap from 9am until 7pm is when we get free power from the PV panels.
We joined Octopus on 31 March, so I've not had a bill yet.

Except you can earn money that you post to the grid… of course it’s a different rate vs what you consume, and you need a smart meter…
eg https://octopus.energy/blog/outgoing/ is currently 7.5p per kWh

The latest Tesla battery has a gateway to allow your battery to be used when the grid goes down. But yes it’s pretty expensive, so I decided to rely on the trustworthy long-term energy storage planning by our dynamic officialdom, and not specify a battery in my current solar project ;

My understanding is that it only applies to existing installations and that new installations aren't eligible for the feed in tariff