Earning $200 from the grid in a day
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Today we earned over $200 for supplying electricity to the grid! We’re in Emerald, Victoria.
We chose Amber Electric as our energy retailer, since they pass on the wholesale electricity price, which can change every few minutes. You have to be a bit of an energy nerd (like me), but you can make money from supplying power to the grid during peak demand, and even get paid to use power during high supply.
Knowing the price is high makes you acutely aware of consumption, preferring to instead be paid to export. Boil water for a cup of tea, or get paid 20c? Okay, not quite that extreme. 😉
A cold morning and evening (high energy demand), combined with not enough cheap renewables in the grid, means it’s powered mostly by fossil fuel (gas and coal). The wholesale electricity price spikes, which pays a small fortune to anyone who can supply some power, including power companies, and householders who have a battery 🔋💰.
If you’re an energy nerd and want to try Amber’s wholesale electricity pricing, you can use our referral code to get a $30 discount:
https://mates.amber.com.au/3QQ8L3XC
But it also meant that they would actually charge us to export our excess solar to the grid when our battery and car were fully charged. That’s bad!
To avoid it costing us to export, we want the ability to curtail our solar. We have raised this with our installer, Lightning Energy, but they have not yet given us a solution. This issue would make me reluctant to recommend Enphase inverters.