Installing solar panels on your home or business is common in many European countries. But they really come into their own during energy crises.
“If you’ve got a solar roof on your home and you’ve got a battery then, depending on how much energy you can generate, you are substantially insulated from importing electricity,” explains Matthew Clayton, CEO of UK-based Thrive Renewables.
Dynamic tariffs are becoming more common in Europe. This is where the price of electricity varies throughout the day and night, with costs going up during peak periods, like dinner time, when households are using more.
This means that if you store up solar power during daylight hours, when the sun is at its strongest, then you can use that energy, rather than drawing it from the electricity grid, during the most expensive periods. “Your relationship with the grid is totally changed,” says Clayton.
The grid-tied inverters need to have a grid voltage and frequency to be in a certain defined range orelse they switch off (this behaviour can be changed via firmware for some inverters). In theory you could use a pure sinus UPS for that, but in practice it is not designed to receive power on the outlet side and will overload/burn out.
There are specific battery/diesel backed solar grid-tied inverter solutions which can smoothly separate and reconnect from the grid during outages while providing power to the consumers. These are far more expensive than simple grid-tied solar inverters.