For many households and businesses, the investment into a solar PV system has revolved around beating the crippling impact of load shedding on productivity, generating an income and for many, the inherent safety and security aspects that come with having no power.Other important factors are also coming into sharp focus – collapsing infrastructure, untenable service delivery failures, and the rocketing costs of electricity which will only get worse as more properties defect from the grid.
One Energy provides the following guidance on how to scale your solar PV system to get the very best returns:Proper monitoring and analysis of your electricity usage will reveal when your peak electricity demand happens and how much you use, on various circuits. From here, you can design a system a system that generates as much as possible of what you would normally use from the grid.
If your PV solar array produces more energy than you need, certain municipalities now allow feeding back into the grid, and the utility pays you for this excess power generated by your solar panels, essentially offsetting what you use from the grid, against what you feed-back in. If you have enough battery capacity and your system is programmed correctly, when your property starts to draw from the grid when the sun goes down, the battery will step in and supply the energy saved in your batteries from earlier, instead of you drawing from the grid.There is a perception that Lithium-ion Phosphate batteries installed as a key component of a hybrid PV system are expensive. This is simply not true if one calculates the average cost per kW over the life of the battery.
Cheaper off-grid inverters will also switch completely to grid power if the load exceeds the solar supply, and cannot only pull the portion of excess demand from the grid, while using your solar power first. This can dramatically reduce the savings from solar.
* Your system will be fully paid off in five years and you will own it, and for the rest of the 15-20+ years of your system lifespan, you will be generating your electricity for free, with less than a 10% reliance on grid electricity.