Best electricity supplier with PV/batteries?

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gchiu

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#247926 3-Mar-2019 09:38

Although I generated more power than I used, and the credit for that power was more than the charge for the power, I was still charged $19 for last week's power period which strikes being a little wrong.

I see that there are some innovations in this area eg. P2Power will buy back at 16c/kWh for the first 50kWh per fortnight, but they're Auckland based. TrustPower will allow you to sell 50kWh a month at any rate to another TrustPower customer. If you generate more than 50kWh for export a month, you need to find another TrustPower buddy to sell to.

ElectricKiwi is another interesting vendor. Although they don't currently buy back solar, they do offer a free hour of power. They, on some plans, charge 29c/kWh. I currently am exporting only 9kWh a day for which I get 9c/kWh so if I were to join them I'd lose 81c. But in the free hour I could top up my 14.4 kWh battery bank eg. 10kWh so I'd gain $2/day. I could also dump 3kWh into my hot water cylinder so that would make it close to $3/day.

Anything else out there?

tdgeek

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#2190165 3-Mar-2019 10:48

Can you elaborate what the $19 bill is from?

Can you add 10lW to the battery and 3kW to the HW in one hour

Aredwood

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#2190178 3-Mar-2019 10:59

Flick Electric.

My understanding is that they will buy back solar power at whatever the current wholesale rate is at the time of export.

Edit.

Guessing that the $19 cost was to pay for lines fees. Which is understandable, as the fixed costs of operating the National Grid and local lines networks dont disappear. Just because you are exporting power instead of importing it. And the costs of meeting peak demand definitely dont disappear either.

gchiu

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#2190210 3-Mar-2019 12:21

$19 cost was metering 30c/day, line $1.27/day, EA .84c/day, and network line charges of 8.35c/kWh (power use split into this and energy supply cost of 9c/kWh)

As for how much can I grab for the batteries and the HWC, I don't really know. It's 63A fuse on the pole for each phase, and I can charge at 27A on each phase. I don't know how to calculate that out but I can set times on both inverters, and on the HWC to use power at that time.

I was with Flick, but had to move to energyclubnz as Flick didn't have an agreement with Wellington Electricity to allow me to swap from a single phase to three phase.

akmodi

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#2201605 19-Mar-2019 13:46

Hi, if the batteries and the inverter allow you to use the full 27A, then per phase you can use 27x240 = 6480w, basically 6.5 KW.

Three phase = almost 20kw.

Hope that helps

gchiu

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#2201627 19-Mar-2019 13:52

So that's pretty good. With the two phases enabled I could grab 13 kW over that free hour. I wouldn't need that much to top up the 14.4 kWh batteries so I would have some left over to heat the water up as well.

Jase2985

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#2202397 20-Mar-2019 13:33

do you have 2 phase power at your house, isnt it pretty rare?

and then if you do are your batteries connected to both phases?

i would say you have a single phase setup there

gchiu

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#2202399 20-Mar-2019 13:36

I have 3 phase power but only two phases are enabled, one for the front house and one for the rear house. Each house has a hybrid invertor connected to the same battery bank.