Mark Osborne's posts

Posted by Mark Osborne on Apr 28, 2015 09:36 am

#1 -  Renewable Energy > Technical Discussion: Other > Re: Been reading and thinking but can't seem to find an answer
Very interesting... and feeds right into the topic of conversation Amy !
 

Posted by Mark Osborne on Apr 27, 2015 12:53 pm

#2 -  Renewable Energy > Technical Discussion: Other > Re: Been reading and thinking but can't seem to find an answer
Yup, yup and yup.  I completely understand what you are saying and my research to date supports accordingly.

I've got a unique situation in that, I work from home and use the majority of the KWh's (20) during day light hours, and only 5 at night. I'd have no problem sticking up an 8000 watt PV array (or more), even aiming some west to gather what's needed later in the day if I could figure a way to be "grid zero" during the bulk of the day and pay the lousy 15 cents per KWh for the 5 I use at night.  Even IF I had do buy a couple Kwh's  here and there during the day .... no biggie.  In other words, produce the bulk of what we need - reducing the monthly bill by 75%.

Or local utility says we can only produce what we consume, on average, for the day and uses the past year's energy consumption as the basis for sizing the system, and even at that, I'll still be paying the customer fee of $6, nuclear decommissioning fees, and whatever else they decide to stick on here and there so I'll never completely devoid of an electric bill.

My line of thinking goes like this :  I'd rather stick up a few thousand watts more in PV (getting cheaper by the day) and say the hell with net metering.  I know, I'd miss all the fun of the electrical inspector, the local utility's yearly reviews, all the bureaucratic red tape that goes along with it, but somehow I think I could survive

But that's just my anarchist way of thinking... 

 

Posted by Mark Osborne on Apr 27, 2015 11:06 am

#3 -  Renewable Energy > Technical Discussion: Other > Re: Been reading and thinking but can't seem to find an answer
Amy,  I discovered the answer through further research and couldn't find a way to completely delete my question.

Basically what I wanted to know is : Is there a (pure) grid tie inverter that can be configured to "not sell" to the grid ?  And to date, I don't believe they exist.

I have ran across several examples of people configuring inverters to "not sell", but in every case they were inverters that require battery banks. The new Radian jumps right out as an example with it's "grid zero" feature.

But in the case of a pure grid tie inverter, I can't find an example. People have suggested using timers and dumping extra current into hot water tanks and various other creative ways to prevent pushing electrons to the grid, but I've yet to find an inverter that can do it on it's own.

And considering how an inverter works IE: reads the line voltage and adjusts it's internal voltage to something higher- by design it's always going to attempt to "push" against the incoming voltage.

It would take some sort of monitoring device at the point of grid-tie, and then an internal voltage adjustment- accordingly -to accomplish what I'm suggesting. 

And, not to sound cynical, but why would any inverter manufacturer even offer such a critter ? !  they'd be cutting their own throats - meaning, you suddenly wouldn't need batteries, a charge controller and an hybrid inverter to accomplish "grid zero"... or so it seems to me.

I'll be most interested in your thoughts on the subject ....  ;-)

Mark
 

Posted by Mark Osborne on Apr 24, 2015 10:06 pm

#4 -  Renewable Energy > Technical Discussion: Other > Re: Been reading and thinking but can't seem to find an answer
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Posted by Mark Osborne on Apr 24, 2015 10:03 pm

#5 -  Renewable Energy > Technical Discussion: Other > Been reading and thinking but can't seem to find an answer
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