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Pull the Plug regularly brings the latest news in the field of green energy and sustainable energy.
Owners of a photovoltaic installation often contact us to ask how they can best use their surplus produced power . Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to this.
Excess power generation is currently not reimbursed and is therefore actually a gift to your electricity supplier. (And tell yourself, they don’t give gifts either! 😉)
You can quickly think of the easiest ways to use this surplus:
- An electric boiler for domestic hot water
- Place electric fires and save on the consumption of the boiler
- Placing air conditioning
- A heat pump to support the central heating boiler
- …
But is that smart and, above all, what does the future hold?
First of all, we want to point out that electric heating is an ecologically irresponsible choice.
Solar panels produce the vast majority of annual production in the summer months. Production does not mean much in winter.
Conversely, this is when you start heating with, for example, a heat pump or electric fires. In addition, the largest consumption is in the winter.
Red: heat pump consumption
Yellow: solar production
How will the “smart meter” handle this?
As the graph clearly shows, the power that your heat pump uses in the winter will still come from a gas or nuclear power plant, and all your excess solar power will be injected into the grid in the summer.
With a view to rolling out the smart meters (starting in 2019), this combination is a very dangerous choice! The smart meter measures exactly how much power you have injected into the grid and how much you take it off again. In the long term, market forces will evolve in such a way that you will have to sell your excess electricity at a very low price (€ 0.05 per kWh) and buy it again in the evening at the full pot (€ 0.3 per kWh). This means the end of the reversing counter as we know it.
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Pull The Plug offers the solution!
Our team of passionate experts has some smart solutions ready for this that you can expand as you wish (and budget). For example, our system will continuously measure whether power is injected or taken from the grid. With injection (and therefore surplus solar energy) we can automatically switch on consumers. An electric boiler, the washing machine, a dishwasher, the charging station for an electric car, you name it! This avoids injection of valuable solar power at a low selling price.
As a second step, we can store potentially injected power in a home battery. As soon as the sun goes down, the house will continue to run on 100% green energy from its own cultivation via this battery! In this way we avoid the purchase of expensive (30 cents per kWh!) gray electricity.
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Also convinced?
Take the step and #PullThePlug!
Take contact and request a free and no-obligation energy audit at your home by our PTP team.
See you soon!