I have been wondering one thing:
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I have been wondering one thing:
when residential #solarPanel installations produce energy that is used in the same house and not sold to the grid, is it counted in the stats about the renewable energy production of a country / grid-area-whatever? Or does it get missed because the grid never sees it? Or does it depend on the local regulations?
does anybody know?
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@valhalla good question. I had assumed that either it was an estimate based on the capacity installed and local weather conditions, or the home systems are reporting in.
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G gustavinobevilacqua@mastodon.cisti.org shared this topic
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@valhalla I would think that unless it has been registered with some sort of power utility, then it won’t be counted as renewable energy generated. However, it would be indirectly counted as greater energy efficiency as the overall consumption of grid electricity per capita or per GDP would go down.
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@valhalla of course now in Australia, they’re rolling out smart meters, so I presume the reporting method might become more prevalent.
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@chris yeah, I was thinking of the various “this year solar production has reached X% of total energy produced in country Y” headlines, and those tend to report that the total energy produced/used has also increased.
Or maybe it's just that residential energy use and production doesn't make that much of an impact, compared to industrial.
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@valhalla in Italy solar panels must be connected to the home's grid meter. In fact, if there is a grid outage, unless you have a fully fledged UPS, your house will be powered off as well. So the produced energy is counted as well as the auto-consumed one, but I don't know how the overall figures are calculated.
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@scollovati that's a safety feature (to avoid sending back energy to the grid when it's supposed not to be live, and prevent accidents to the people working on it), and it doesn't necessarily mean that the meter will actually *see* the energy that gets self-consumed.
Devices that allow self-consume even when there is a grid outages do exist and are legal in Italy, but they are an additional expense that very few people add to their systems.
(Besides, you don't really *have* to connect the panels to the grid, you are perfectly allowed to be fully off-grid, but then of course you don't get the advantage of being able to get energy from the grid when there isn't enough sun)
