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Forum Index : Solar : Solar Panel Real World Power Output
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| George65 Guru  Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308 |
I have read the regs on this, it is not allowed If there is a 5kw Limit like in most of suburban Sydney. You are also not allowed to put say, a 6KW inverter on a single phase system ( no limit on 3 phase) with only 5 KW of panels. The regs I believe are worded to the effect of " Capable of not more than 5kw." and it is the INVERTER That is regulated not the capacity of panels. It does vary between different energy providers however so you would have to look it up. I did see a site not too long ago that had all the different suppliers listed and their "Policy" on solar connections but I can't find it to link it for you now. Really depends how conforming you want to be. The reasons for limiting single phase connections to 5 KW are clearly revenue related Poppycock and have nothing at all to do with safety or security of the grid. You can put up to 30 KW ( I think it is) on each phase with a 3 phase system ( certainly not limited to anything like near 5 KW) so why you can only have 5KW on a single phase system when you would be guaranteed to use more of it in house than you would per phase on a 3 phase system only makes the rule more nonsensical to me. You would have to make a personal judgement as to whether your inverter was legal/ moral or not and do what you thought right. If you want to be 100% by the book and you are on a single phase system where it is limited to a 5K inverter, it is effeminately not Kosher. |
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| M Del Senior Member  Joined: 09/04/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 155 |
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| Warpspeed Guru Joined: 09/08/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 4406 |
If you can safely draw 5Kw+ from the grid without excessive voltage drop, or overloading the wiring, you should be able to feed 5Kw+ back in without excessive voltage rise, or any other purely technical reasons. Agree with George, its all based on revenue and Corporate policy to prevent people like us from breaking even or horror of horrors, coming out in front! I think we are going to have to face the reality that the Government are going to keep changing the rules to maintain an ever rising revenue for the energy utilities, even in the face of decreasing demand. As soon as someone comes up with some way to reduce the reliance on their system, it will be outlawed sooner or later. Cheers, Tony. |
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Madness Guru Joined: 08/10/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2498 |
A guy that worked for Energex who is our local electricity people was telling me they are having problems with too much solar power coming out of some areas. It is widely reported that the Sunshine Coast has the highest uptake of solar compared to anywhere else in Australia. So what they were doing is installing a large Tesla battery system to take up the extra power during the day and feed it back to the people at night. I have heard of some being refused to be allowed to install solar due to the number already on that transformer. I am not saying this right or wrong etc just passing on what I have heard, I really couldn't give a rat's arse about the grid myself. There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. |
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| Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 814 |
Another reason they are pushing for the smart meters rollout as well Madness If you look at any of the newer solar installs, the inverter has its own input to the meter, and the smartmeter can control the inverters grid connection, so that if they do get to the situation where the solar inputs are too much, they can throttle back by disconnecting the inverter from the grid George65- I have never worked for or am associated in any way with any electrical supply company, what I am is someone who did their apprenticeship as an electric fitter, and although I dont work in the electrical industry any more, when I did I was never more than an electrician- I cant even legally work on my own house anymore! What contact I do have is a friend (one of my fellow apprentices actually) who I still am in regular contact with who does work in the industry (he's one of the guys who works on street lines and such). In relation to your comments about the meter reader- you do realise that meter readers often dont work for the electricity company at all, I almost went for a part time job off Seek as a meter reader, but comments by others about that company persuaded me otherwise (they hire meter readers, pamphlet deliverers, shopping center cleaners and a variety of other occupations, usually aimed at retirees or part time workers) And the comment made earlier about with prices rising that nobody is being undercharged, the companies involved do have the right (and in fact the legal obligation) to ensure that their meters are accurate, I dont agree about the rates they charge per unit cost (in fact I agree that the price of electricity has risen outrageously!), but the metering must be accurate and the old fashioned meters simply arent anymore. Interestingly not everyone does get a price increase (as already shown in this thread) and I am sure they wouldnt want to go back to the less accurate spinning meters and get the older incorrect (but higher) readings again- you never know, you may be one of the ones that gets a decrease in their power consumption and end up saving money! M Del- Not that unusual, it simply depends on your loads unity factor- an ideal (resistive) load is 1 (which really only applies to old fashioned incandescant light bulbs, resistive heaters, and electrical heating elements (although the last two can often have a element of inductance, which can pull them away) With modern electronics having almost exclusively switchmode power supplies (which can vary down as low as 0.3!) the `assumptions' that the spinning meters used to calculate the amount of electricity used simply dont hold true any more. It all depends entirely on the actual devices you have in your home, some raise the power factor, others lower it, the combination is what is presented to the meter which records your (apparent) usage using its own inbuilt assumptions of the loads lead/lag characteristics, where the smartmeters actually measure the true consumption and record that instead |
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yahoo2 Guru Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166 |
I was one of the few people that lobbied hard to get the limit as high as possible, it is fair to say I didn't get a lot of support at the time. None of us imagined someone would want to spend $80K and put 10kw of panels in, how times have changed. Their argument was based around the SWER transformers ability to shed heat, it turns out there are a lot less transformers per 100 connections than I was aware of. However we did get net metering through which I regarded as a win. I should remind you all that the 5 kw limit for the inverter only applied to systems installed under the feed in tariff legislation. You can install a larger transformer at your own cost and negotiate a higher limit in most areas. I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not... |
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| Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 814 |
80K for 10Kw of panels, yeah I remember those days too, my first offgrid place had 1.5kw of panels, and they cost me more than I paid for my 3 year old car! now you can look at 10kw of panels and spend under $2000 how times have changed |
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| George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308 |
I think you will find the majority of peoples bills went UP when smart meters were introduced in Victoria. Without doubt some went down and that's the ones they will make a song and dance about but the peoples bills that went up will be kept very hush hush. Lets face it, If the power companies thought that most peoples bills would go down and they would loose revenue, they wouldn't be so damn keen to install the things would they? They would claim they were accurate, that the loads balanced and even that any inaccuracies were in favour of the customer. The power companies would have not just decided to install these things without loads of research, studies profit/ loss/ investment studies and everything else and they certainly would not be implementing them unless they showed they were going to make good profit out of the very expensive exercise. Precisely! Just like they have done with water rates here and power in the US. The LAST thing they want you to do is save energy although that may change shortly when they can't keep up with demand having blown all the power stations up. They will probably do a we want it each way thing like they did when the grid was collapsing before and solar gave them so low cost breathing room. Soon as the revenue went down, Oh no, can't have that! When the lights start going out, lets see what spin doctoring is rolled out then and how the current regulations change. They go on and on with BS about the environment and clean energy yet they deter a person making their own clean power as much as they can. Why should I have to buy power at .30C a kw when all I get back for what I make is 6C a kw they then sell to my neighbour for 30C KW and maybe more if they are silly enough to pay more for " Green power". If they were serious about the environment they would give you a 1:1 FIT because they would save tons of Co2 and whatever by being able to turn down the power plant during the day and save on the distribution losses by having the power generated and sourced locally. Instead, they try to give us malarkey about generation cost and wear and tear on the power poles and wires etc. The house I just moved from I had known for 33 years. In that time only one pole was replaced in the street a few years back when a car hit it and they rejoined the wires. I expect they could be there easily 50 years so what was the cost of distribution in my street? $1 a day? In any case, every house is paying near or over $1 a day supply charge. WTF is that for? Would that not be to cover the cost of equipment? If paying .6c for what I generate and then hitting me for 30C ( or over 54c with certain TOU rates) isn't a double dipping ripoff, I don't know what is. Like most of Sydney is limited to 5KW output now, whatever new thing may come along they will limit or control for the sole and direct purpose of protecting their Multi Million dollar yearly revenues. I may be sympathetic if they were asking for price hikes all the time while posting losses but when they keep pushing higher prices and higher profits for something that they do have you over a barrel for, I say Fu.... Blow them. It's like this fantasy people have about alternate fuels. Anyone that thinks an industry with the power and influence the oil industry has is going to allow a new contender to come along which erodes it's profits or requires them to spend tens of Billions in infrastructure for a new fuel UNLESS they can make more out of it that what they can with oil is naive to the way Big business works. Gubbermint did that there too. Save the planet with Biofuels!! If you add 1L of home brewed Biodiesel to a tank full of dino diesel, you are liable to pay tax ( again) on the whole amount of blended fuel. Yep, that's the environmental spirit all right! Guess how much Tax I gave them in 15 years for making my own fuel.... I can only see the problem as being one of too little revenue to the power company or an unwillingness to spend on infrastructure they deemed not to give adequate return. What could be the electrical/ physical problem? Lets say that all the homes in a local area are putting out 3 Kw having a 5 Kw system with no one home ( probably less homes than occupied these days). Lest say there are 600 homes in said area and 2/3 have solar. First off you have the draw of those homes and say 50% of them have someone at home and are using just 3 Kw. How far away from that residential area is something like a factory or industrial area, public building, swimming centre, a pub or club, railway, shopping centre, sewerage pumping station, water pumping,gas pumping, hospital, school and so on that consume HUGE amounts of electricity. How far from that area of homes with a high uptake of solar does that power have to go? Some here would have an idea of the amount of power places like that consume and those that don't could probably never over estimate or come to grips with how much it is. I helped a mate at a swimming centre a few years back that was having trouble because their incoming power was limited to 300A per phase. They upgraded to 1200A per phase and after an upgrade to the centre had to install their own sub station to get more. Wonder how many houses it would take to supply that place alone. Imagine what goes into even a small shopping centre with the AC alone. And like warp said, if they can supply it they can be supplied. what current are those lines carrying in the early evening when everyone is sucking juice? Too much power? Get real! ( Power companies not individuals here!) Again, the draw the people connected to that transformer would demand would outstrip the amount of feedback they could pump back to it. An amount of houses in any area will have solar. Most will be 5 KW or under and I'd gaurantee the average of all homes would be under 3 Kw potential. Turn on 2 fan heaters in a home and you are at 4KW. An AC, loads more. Stove/oven.... check your fuse box and see the 20A breakers they are on. EACH. Virtually every house will be pulling far more than 3 or 5 Kw in peak periods so to say the transformer is overloaded to me is more rubbish fed to the sheeple as an excuse to protect revenue and nothing more. And playing devils advocate, if the transformer is too small, WTF not put in a bigger one? They are buying the power at .6c kwh and selling it at 30, what's the problem? You are a wise and lucky man. No, I didn't but that is interesting from my perspective. I wonder how diligent they are about looking for things and reporting them like my backwards spinning meters? I always imagined they were company people that would be well trained to look for things like this. Given what you say, I can will imagine they are little more motivated than the people dropping things in letter boxes and just want to get the job done and go home. Be just my luck to get the stickler though! :0( That's a big feature the manufacturers of the meters if you look at their literature sell to the power companies. The ability to remote disconnect in the case of non bill payment. Obviously has other upsides for the power companies as well. In my rare situation where I am getting a 1:1 return for what I generate, that is not possible. Again, I highly doubt saving money is the experience of most people when they have a smart meter forced upon them. |
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| Warpspeed Guru Joined: 09/08/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 4406 |
I am in Melbourne, and my supplier is United Energy. The usage histogram their website provides, also gives a curve for the average daily usage in my suburb. Last week that curve was unusually flat at 15.4 Kwh per day per household. That seems to be pretty typical. That is the AVERAGE. As I only used 1.8Kwh daily for that week, and many other households would be using less than the average, while some households must be using vast amounts of power for the average to be that high. The advantage of smart meters for the power utility is mainly the completely automatic logging and billing feature, as well as being able to instantly connect and disconnect individual users from a central computer keyboard, all with far less staff. Also, being able to very easily do some instant selective shedding of non essential loads and step by step load recovery after a major regional blackout. Its possible to shut down a whole suburb, but keep things like traffic lights, hospitals, the Internet, and phone system powered up. There is far more to this than just an evil plot to replace the old meters with newer ones that read higher. Cheers, Tony. |
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| yahoo2 Guru Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166 |
smornings re-news South Australia's stunning transition I might have done a little fist pump while nobody was looking.  I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not... |
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| Madness Guru Joined: 08/10/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 2498 |
I have thought about writing a letter to the SA premier to congratulate them of there foresight. Might be time for someone to start a new thread on power company conspiracy theories, this thread is getting way off topic. There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't. |
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| George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308 |
Yet 2 basic facts remain..... SA has the Highest power prices in the country by a long shot and the most unreliable supply. All this Co2 and globull warming saving has been admitted by the gubbermints head greewashed chief of propaganda, Finkel, that removing ALL of Australia carbon emissions, would make not one bit of difference to the world air quality. Yet somehow people still carry on like some miracle of save the world proportion has been achieved. |
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| George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308 |
Sounds right. My Neighbor went away caravaning on the weekend. Their now empty house for 3 weeks will probably use less than 2Kw per day till their return. My brother in law round the corner whom runs his business from home and has a lot of amenities on the property uses about 50Kwh+ per day. I'm using about 20-30 Kwh a day but probably taking about 5 Kwh a day from the grid atm. As I sit here it's 9 am and I'm making about 2.6 Kw of my own power. I don't think the thing is so much average with regard to regulating solar installs and size, it's peak consumption because as said, if it can come out it can go in. As they can see what the consumption is on average and peak for a given area, they could also work out how much generation they could allow from people putting PV in. And of course add that to the consumption of other things like Shopping centres, offices etc that use power but have no feed in that would be on the same part of the network and fed from the same sub stations. I agree with you there! These are good point you bring up. Question I ask is why would they want to take out a whole suburb or shut down your aircon as the end proposal to control appliances from the power companies end ultimately is? The main reason I can think of is to cover their backsides when they stuff up and there isn't enough power available. They can isolate areas now when they have to for reasons like bushfires or repair work, they just have to do it manually. Given the infrequency of the need to do this, hardly seems a big deal. But you are right, there is more to the evil plot than just revenue raising alone. More I think about it, the more I am motivated to get my power independence into place so when they come knocking to put in their smartarse meters I can tell them to go jump and if they want to disconnect me, fine. Not like there are not a good number of people here off grid and I doubt you could convince them to go back on it. If they do disconnect me for refusing a smart meter, I don't think I'll be the one to loose out. |
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| Warpspeed Guru Joined: 09/08/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 4406 |
[quote]Question I ask is why would they want to take out a whole suburb or shut down your aircon as the end proposal to control appliances from the power companies end ultimately is? The main reason I can think of is to cover their backsides when they stuff up and there isn't enough power available. [/quote] Could be a major power feeder down, or a transformer explosion, or some clown with a digger cut one of the major underground cables. Something thats going to take some time to fix. They can probably divert some power around the problem, but not max full rated load. So they need to shed some load. In the old days they just throw the big switch and black out a whole region for half a day. Now they can selectively shed load, but only as much as needed. They can even short cycle the blacked out areas on and off for short intervals to at least give refrigeration and people stuck in lifts a chance. Cheers, Tony. |
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| isochronic Guru Joined: 21/01/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 689 |
in other words, high-profit aircon suburbs will be kept going while low-budget fridges are chopped. Another classic market failure, courtesy of so-called Darwinian economics and the idiots that worship it. |
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| M Del Senior Member Joined: 09/04/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 155 |
Agree, when I got my first bill after change over I pushed to get the old meter to new meter difference checked as the old meter seemed to be 10% higher. Their claim was I had changed my habits because I could tell what my use is now, 2kwh of the decrease was the off peak water heater, for the benefit of the customer my ass. Mark |
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| George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308 |
Bingo! And there we have a real reason. Everywhere these meters have been rolled out has been a disaster so Australia being Australia will rush headlong into it to prove the known problems once again. |
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| George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308 |
On a topical Note.... My 6.6 Kw of mismatched panels/ arrays netted me 25Kwh on the dot today. Better again than I expected but still not at full capacity. 4.6KW of panels is lying flat on the grass, got to get them up on the shed roof asap. They are also on a 2Kw inverter which is maxed out from 9am till pretty well into the very late afternoon if the weather stays clear. Not sure how much I'm loosing there but I'd expect it to be at least 2 Kwh. Yesterday was raining then patchy cloud all day. Both inverters went out and I thought maybe I had succumbed to the warned of cloud edge effect. Turned out one of my temporary connections on the DC side had come out, probably from the nearby lump of stick falling on it in the wind. Re connected more securely, all was well. Made high 1800W from 2.5KW of panels which is maxing that half broken inverter out as well. The other array had me a bit stumped why it kept showing ground faults and I thought it was on something on the AC side. Would only allow me to connect one array before tripping out. Tracked the fault down to more dodgy wiring in the DC side, the cables from the 2 arrays was not sitting in the acorn connector right and had burnt the wire. Redid all that and off it went pushing 2kw even with some decent cloud shading. I did try the 5KW inverter but didn't get far with that. It would come up to about 2.3 Kw and trip out also. I'm using an extension lead on the mains atm and I had trouble before with the 2Kw inverters and know it's because of the high resistance in the crappy 1mm wire. Nearly bought a proper HD lead today but they are not cheap and I thought I'll have no use for it later and won't make the money back. Still only 1.5mm conductors. Could buy a 100M roll of 2.5 mm Builders cable for $94 and a plug for each end for about another 8 bux and have something that was proper heavy Duty and low in resistance. In a few weeks at worst I should have everything on the roof and wired properly. I have been following the posts of a guy on another forum in canada. He gets nearly 25% more out of his array than its rating in the cold with the snow all around no doubt reflecting a lot more light. Double bonus there with cool panels and about as much light as I imagine you'd ever get hitting the panels. He has them on a tracker also which would help get the max out of them. Still quite an amount over their spec and they are 7 yo panels. |
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Tinker Guru Joined: 07/11/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1904 |
Hmmmmm, the quote "do it once and do it properly" comes to mind while reading your comments. Shoddy workmanship never pays off, even while just experimenting with new equipment. Do yourself a favor and try the 'proper' way, you'll be surprised it will only take about the same time than haphazard connections. This was something I was told many times during my apprenticeship (electrical fitter - a long time ago) and the message had stuck. Now I'm passing it on, I hope you do not mind  Klaus |
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| George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308 |
Don't mind, know it as well but the thing was, I did not want to spend money on things I knew I would have to re do and couldn't re use either. Started out as a " I'll see if this is going to be worthwhile at all" to a bit of an obsession at how well it works. The test with 1.6 Kw of panels has gone to 6.6. Obviously what was satisfactory as a short term to begin with is not quite up to what it's become but it's not going to be like that much longer. I have spoken to a sparky mate about the permanent installation. Bugger the requirements, we are going to do it to OUR satisfaction. New sub board, well over spec wiring, breakers etc. Already got the 6mm cable when 2.5 would do and we'll go from there. Think we may have trouble pulling the bigger cable through so we'll start at the meter box and do a new trench if we have to. I did some re wiring on my old house. Had an unrelated problem shortly thereafter which tripped a breaker when there was next to no load one night and I was worried it was something I did. Mate come round and had a look and was asking what the hell did I do it like that for? I asked what I did wrong? He said you over did it about 4 times what you needed to. No need to have gone to all that trouble! I said so you mean my house is never going to burn down from what I did? Yep! I did it perfectly as I wanted then! I know there are a lot of people that cut corners on their DIY. I'm one of these people that thinks my sleep is worth paying for so when it comes to what matters, I'm very happy to overdo things so I never have to lie awake worrying! :0) |
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