But the beauty of solar is that it makes you independent from the grid. China makes the whole system. Cheap, but good quality solar panels. Cheap inverters - these are actually pretty good for the price. And finally cheap LFP batteries.
When amount of solar capacity exceeded half of entire grid, my country has established few silly rules to stop the growth.
For example let's say your house's grid connection is 24kW 3phase. If you want to connect your solar to the grid and feed in power you are limited to 24kW peak solar panels, and.... 24kWh of battery.
This is beyond stupid, but there is more... If your inverter is 10kW or more you have to give the grid operator full control over your system. They then decide when you are sending power to the grid, when you use your battery and when you use the grid. Of course they will make you push to the grid when prices are the lowest and you'll consume from the grid when they are highest.
So many people do what I did. Build off grid systems with ability to swap between the grid and the system.
Such systems do not have to be registered anywhere and I bet they are responsible for huge amount of power use.
For example before I installed solar I wouldn't even think about installing a heat pump for both air con and heating. But having extra power allows me to do it economically.
[–] bluGill 2 days ago
[–] Roark66 2 days ago
>No we don't. Battery systems can stabilize the grid. You need inverters that are designed for this, but it isn't hard to make an inverter that will set then grid frequency and force it correct.
I know in theory we don't, but in practice there is no such real grid anywhere in the world that would run on large percentage of solar. So it seems we do.
I'm talking about real grid as something that powers at least thousands of households. Not a compound with a dozen buildings.
Take Canary Islands for example. They are an ideal environment to setup a 90% solar and battery grid. They have a great climate and size well suited to this. But they still run thermal plants.
Why? Because no one has successfully showed a largish scale frequency regulation/stabilisation with inverters.
See a writeup about the Texas outage a year or two ago to understand how fragile grids with too large percentage of semiconductor sources are compared with rotating masses.
[–] mphillips 1 day ago
This is a regular event outside of the winter months, and has been for some years now. South Australia has a mixture of solar, wind, and gas generation, with some large batteries as storage.
No we don't. Battery systems can stabilize the grid. You need inverters that are designed for this, but it isn't hard to make an inverter that will set then grid frequency and force it correct. You want most inverters to follow the source, but something needs to set it.
Most rotating steel isn't setting grid frequency either, an induction motor follows the frequency of the grid, and generates power if it is rotating faster than the grid frequency. (this is much more complex, but close enough for a quick comment).