There's been about 2500 complaints about this last year in my region of this small country. And the company in charge of the grid refuse to give any compensations.
I’m shaking my head over here. 2 years.. They could have gotten together with the public to lobby for their ability to sell power to other places, or built some type of power-intensive value producer (desalination? hydrogen?).. They could be far richer than if they just sell power to residences.
However, this is ripe for disrupting like Uber did by skirting laws in many areas. Could it possibly be legal to 'provide' power and create a residential subdivision with a microgrid and the price is part of the sale of the house?
If that happens energy companies will at that point be lobbying to force endusers to stay on grid to continue subsidizing maintenance.
We aren't at that tipping point yet but with large tax breaks coming for EV ownership, an EV vehicle also makes a great way to dump "excess" solar power. Enough so that gas stations will start disappearing over the next few decades as well. Again, IMHO.
If batteries get cheap enough it might make sense for an entrepreneur to sell or lease solar+battery+charger to people who want to sublet part of their property, crowd sourcing EV charging.
I mention it here because it’s important to watch out for these types of laws and vote as neccessary
I think we're there now. You can get "server-rack" LiFePO4 batteries for about $1500 for a 5kWh battery. You can probably get solar, inverters, and 30kWh of batteries for about $25,000 and this should last maybe a few days for most homes. Mini-splits instead of central HVACs reduce power consumption a good bit, and have better energy efficiencies.
I mean unless your on nuclear or something that takes entire days to throttle up or down in which case congratulations you are now on a 100% green grid
Could you create a separate grid in your home? Off-grid or maybe hybrid, having no connection to your domestic power connections nor the supply. You'll be able to reuse nearly all of the existing solar equipment and will just need to invest a bit more to re-architect some of the electrical system in your home.
It may be a little awkward to use, since you'll be sometimes unplugging appliances from one supply to another. But if you were willing to invest in energy storage too, there'd be more consistency from your solar and less need to unplug appliances.
North American products pictured, European versions probably available, but perhaps from a different vendor.
1: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/smart-home-panel 2: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/delta-pro-portable-power-sta...
Since the article is in German, I will give a short summary here:
The solar panels of the person concerned are not completely off the grid, but the connection was already deactivated for more than 90 days this year. However, he is entitled to compensation for the electricity not taken, which so far amounts to 35,000 Euros.
The article predicts that the problem will worsen rather than diminish in the near future, as grid expansion cannot keep pace with new installations, affecting wind more than solar. However, there is disagreement about whether this is a general problem or only a regional one and how long it might last. According to the article, a total of 6.1 terawatt hours of electricity was lost in Germany in 2020 (the latest available figure) due to downward adjustments.
I don't think it makes sense to count all of that as "lost", at least in the sense of framing it as mismanagement.
If you want solar to supply a large part of a country's electricity, you have to overprovision to cover cloudy days, which automatically means that only a very sunny day, you'll produce more electricity than you can use, since large-scale storage is not yet feasible.
Something similar I could observe myself on a local scale in the region my parents live (also in the state of Bavaria, about 100 km away from the person who is mentioned in the Spiegel article). There, the limiting factor for the size of new solar parks was the capacity of the grid nodes in the vicinity. This is of course only anecdotal.
[1] They first wanted to build "cheap" overhead power lines. After protests from the population along the planned routes, they changed their minds and decided in favour of underground cables and had to start planing again. Unfortunately, it took more than two years for them to change their minds. (And of course, it was not them that were responsible for the delay, but the evil protesters, generally long procedures and nonsensical appeal options.)
The whole Suedlink process has been a triumph of pseudo-environmental Nimbyism over the actual environment and now threatens the whole energy stability of Germany in the coming energy-crunch winter.
Better than the stories of exploding substations being a Belgian plague that I heard from electric grid engineer few years ago
That's not stupid at all, it's unavoidable if you want to still have enough energy when you don't have peak production. Given how cheap solar is getting, it may even be more economical. And you always have the option to add storage later, when it becomes more economical (which it isn't yet).
It sounds like it's grid-tie only - so it just shuts down when the local grid is over-voltage. Ideally you'd want something that could run in an isolated mode, if only to supply power to something useful like an electric water heater.
Isolated DC-coupled solar is mostly done by DIY folks with inverters like Sol-Ark that can do AC or DC-coupling and can work when the grid is shutdown. Your solar constantly charges your batteries and powers your house as a microgrid. Any excess power COULD be sold back to the grid, but to avoid the added hassle of interconnection agreements, most just store it into a larger battery bank for rainy days. The goal here is to fully zero out your monthly power bill AND be self-sustaining.
The grid is expensive to maintain and it isn't there to deliver solar power the other way, there is no reason why it would compensate you. Next when Solar is generating the wholesale price is usually low, so really you shouldn't get paid much anyway.
The final problem with Solar in Northern countries is that in cold Winter nights you want to get power from the grid and use the infrastructure which most of the year now doesn't make any money. So either you should pay very high electricity prices in those periods ie several Euro/kwH (which isn't politically acceptable) or realistically solar should be restricted in the first place.
Lol if you're going to downvote me, tell me why residential solar deserves to get paid as much as it is.
Has some useful info.
Yes this is what is needed. The problem with Northern Europe is that the VOS would be so tiny people wouldn't bother.
Why would they be going to all the bother of buying it if it had no value?
Belgium has a lot of Nuclear so not such a big problem. Its still burning gas though so more solar would help. Again farms are easier rather than residential houses who expect to get paid 10c/kwH on a sunny day in May.
Surprisingly, because I would expect them to act exactly how you said :)