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Comment by yourpalkeith | Hacker News Reader

Please don’t increase your energy consumption just because you are generating an excess. As a world, we need to lower our energy use (as I’m sure you are well aware). I’d urge you to consider those extra watts as a much needed contribution to the cause.

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That makes no sense. If the energy is here, what's the benefit of not using it?

It makes a bit of sense. If you use all energy, you a) generate heat b) increase your energy consumption habits. The alternative is of course to reflect the sunlight. Not that this one case would make a difference, but still makes sense as a mindset.

Assuming the panels are connected to the grid, then the power will be consumed by neighbors - not wasted.

EDIT: I see it was right there in the first line of the post that the plan is to unplug from the grid. I would reconsider this decision. If you stay connected, you can share your excess capacity - if not then you use it or lose it. Why put yourself in that position?

I personally support municipalities making it illegal to go completely off the grid.

It's an RV, so good luck.

Well that certainly changes a lot. Probably would have been helpful in your question to specify.

Out of curiosity why?

Creating and maintaining a electric grid requires scale, it's one of the main reasons municipalities grant exclusive monopolies to power companies, because competition doesn't really work in the space. At certain low thresholds the system can absorb people going "off the grid", but too many and it becomes economically unstable. Forcing a rise in rates and a cascade effect. By requiring people to remain attached to the grid and sell off their unused power the benefit to all is clear.

Instead of consuming the extra energy, OP could also provide it to another customer through the grid, by selling it back to the utility company. This would reduce the total amount of energy that needs to be generated from non-renewable sources. If OP increases their own consumption instead, those non-renewable kWh are still being generated and causing environmental impact somewhere.

This is being mounted on an RV, which is explicitly off-grid, and would only be intermittently connected at best. In my municipality they only do power buy-back from larger generators.

Also most of it isn't going through an inverter, I'm using direct DC-DC, which is much more power efficient for what I'm doing. So that means more cost for inverters, which I'd consider paying even if at the scale I'm working at it would take years for the equipment to pay for itself, but...

You can't simply tie an inverter into the grid and sell back to the power company, as that could mean that during repairs lines they thought had no power were energized by some residential customer. You need special hardware that the power company can shut down remotely, and that's only available for larger customers.

Also I'm not sure if the price I'd be getting for that power would actually offset the monthly connection fee, making connecting to the grid and selling back extra power very likely cost more than just wasting the power, which is unfortunate.

So unfortunately grid-buyback that isn't really an option for me.

Which is why I'm looking at other options. I like the wood pellet one, in an ideal world I'd be able to do some kind of carbon capture or something, but I'm not seeing any good power-to-gas tech right now.

Thanks for the reply - makes perfect sense in your case.

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