Gone are the days of South facing 4kWp solar PV systems. These were Feed in Tariff accumulators, which happened to help you reduce bills a little bit. System design has changed as a result of changes to the Feed in Tariff rates and bandings, but mostly down to the change in how use and we pay for electricity. These changes are powered by ever improving technology.
With ever increasing electricity prices, paired with the roll-out of smart metering, a much more technology driven approach could well reduce a household energy cost. Much more dynamic electricity cost structures are starting to appear where night rate electricity is cheap, day is more expensive and increasingly peak rate very high cost electricity. This may sound like a bad thing… but here’s how to take advantage!
The reason behind these tariffs is to discourage use of electricity at peak times, when electricity is expensive and dirty to generate – much more fossil fuel generation is in the fuel mix. When demand is low, the grid tends to be much cleaner. By implementing these tariffs, much greater use can be made of the cheap, clean electricity in place of the dirty expensive stuff.
Most households use more electricity during the day, for obvious reasons. To insulate yourself from the higher day rates a solar PV system can be installed, offsetting import with clean locally produced electricity.
For the very expensive peak rates, battery storage can be included to ensure that little or none is imported from the grid during these times. These can be charged for free from excess solar and/or from cheaper grid electricity.
And then it’s possible to also make more use of the benefits of cheap night time electricity using more technology. Either charging batteries such as the Tesla Powerwall for daytime use, or going even further and charging an Electric Vehicle. An EV would then be very cheap to run, and is using the cleanest electricity possible – cleaner low-demand times from the grid, paired with using any excess solar PV which you saved in your battery.
We are seeing our enquiries turn into these kinds of complete solutions at the moment, and we expect this to be a continuing trend. We would love to speak with you further about it, or adding to your existing set up (EV already, or solar already…) to find out if we can keep you right on how to use all this technology to be as green (and low cost) as possible! Just get in touch…
