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Comment by sdk77 | Hacker News Reader

Sure. Of course. Not being allowed to disconnect them would be ridiculous. But do you want to keep an eye on the market every day, and run to the breaker to turn on an off your inverter? No. So you need a solution for that. Then a battery is much more interesting.

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Completely agree. I mainly mention it to dispel any notions that solar panels can expose you to financial risk due to negative energy prices. This is trivial to address. Negative prices should only be a concern for plants that can not be quickly or easily shut down, like thermal plants (coal/gas/nuclear).

This seems like a problem that should be relatively easy to solve with technology.

This is in fact what my home installation already does.

You could implement something pretty easily with a relay or contactor and an ESP32 and a way to monitor the spot price, or just buy a system with that feature already built in.

Note: doing this manually every day (breaking the circuit) can increase the risk of damaging your installation.

How can the use of a switch damage your installation?

inrush current, mechanical wear, thermal stress on some components (mosfets, transformers, etc)...

Could you just use Home Assistant to do this?

True hacker would use web scraping to get the rates and a bash script to turn the switch on and off based on rates

That's the entire point of Home Assistant, I'm currently writing an integration for my electric company. I'd argue the college junior programmer would try to do it from scratch instead of leveraging the solution that gets you 90 percent of the way there out of the box.

You means something like HEMS. A controller to connect everything in house ?

with a scrolling LED display for streaming updates.

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