We love that so many people are opting to have their own solar systems at home. More solar entering the energy grid is great news for the planet. And with renewables on the rise, fossil fuels can take a back seat.
The value of the solar energy you generate is changing. That’s because the price of energy is based on balancing supply and demand. And with more rooftop solar being generated, there’s less demand for electricity from the grid, and more unused solar entering the grid. This typically means that while the sun is shining prices decrease, contributing to lower Feed-in Tariffs (FiT).
You might think “Hey, I’ll just feed all my solar into the grid while I’m at work” but your neighbour Jerry and his mum down the street are now doing the same thing. And when everybody’s doin’ it, more solar supply means lower export value.
Fig 1. The proportion of solar in the grid has increased exponentially over the last ten years, and hopefully will continue to grow. Source: AEMO
While your FiT may be slowly reducing, the best way to get maximum value from your solar is to use what you’re generating. The money you save on your bills by actually using the solar is generally going to be greater than what you’d make from your FiT.
Let's look at two imaginary energy users with solar installed - Jane and Ben. Both customers have the same FiT, generate the same amount of solar and use the same amount of power over the course of a day.
Ben is an average energy user. He uses a lot during the morning and the evenings but not much during the day. Jane schedules her major appliances to run during the middle of the day. As a result, Jane uses less power in the evening peak.
Fig 2: Shifting more of your usage to daylight hours like Jane doesn’t take a huge effort, but it means you’ll draw less from the grid during peak times (helping to save you money).
While Ben gets more return for exporting his solar than Jane, he uses more power from the grid in the evening. Over the course of year, Jane’s total electricity costs are going to be less than Ben’s.
Fig 3: Based on this scenario, the difference in yearly cost when Jane is maximising her solar usage during the day.
In this example, Ben and Jane both live in the Powercor distribution area and use 10MW of energy per year. They both have a 6KW solar system that generates an average of 3.6 KWh/KW a day (7.9 MWh per year). They pay 0.3291992c Flat Tariff Usage Rate for their electricity, and a daily supply charge of $1.3002. Their solar FiT is 3.3c KWh.
Using these figures with the usage pattern shown above, Ben would pay $2,362 a year for his energy, and Jane would pay $2,066, meaning Jane saves $296 (13%) a year in electricity costs.
Appliances account for a decent percentage of your energy usage. And if you’re only running them at night, you’re likely paying for power from the grid rather than using your solar for free - missing out on a great chunk of savings. Most appliances have a delay setting so you can set them up to run during peak solar-generating times (instead of the evening peak energy-consuming hours).
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