For a year I paid the real price for solar and I hated it – and loved it.
It turns out that the retailers that on sell the power from the network to your house don’t pay a set price for it. Every 10 minutes or so, the wholesale price for a megawatt, or wattever, is determined by how much it costs to generate it at the time .. On a cloudy, windless winter afternoon, when everyone gets home from work, turns on the heater and the lights, puts on a load of laundry and chucks something in the oven, wholesale power gets pretty expensive.
The app would also let me know when I was literally paying the power company to take away my excess solar power. After all that money we spent putting the bloody things in, there they were, adding to our power bill. Thanks, app. Got a home battery? Lucky you, you can store up all that lovely solar power during the day, instead of paying for it to be taken away, then either use it yourself at night or sell it back to the grid for a nice juicy return during the morning and evening spikes. Nah, we can’t afford a battery.