Today was our first solar anniversary – one whole year since our solar panels and battery were commissioned.
Since then checking the data logger figures and charts on the mobile app has become my obsession, and I have been looking forward to getting a full year’s worth of numbers to tally up.
To recap, our house is in Dundee, Scotland, at approx. 56° 27′ 43″ (so that’s pretty far north), and the roof of our house faces due east-west. We’ve put the equal number of panels on each side to maximise the hours of generation to compensate for not having any panels facing south. At this latitude, we are blessed with very long hours of daylight in summer (and Dundee is said to be the sunniest city in Scotland) but very little generation in winter as days are short and the sun is too low.
The headline figures for 2023 (16/01/2023-15/01/2024) are:
- Total solar generation: 3840.5 kWh
- Total exported to grid: 1959.1 kWh
- Total import from grid: 1395.5 kWh
| 16/Jan/2023-15/Jan/2024 | Solar | Load consumption | Exported to grid |
Imported from grid |
From battery |
| 3840.5 | 3034.6 | 1959.1 | 1395.5 | 879.7 |
In summer, the battery was full most of the time, and since our battery is not that big and we don’t have any thermal storage (such as hot water cylinder), we ended up exporting most of what we generated. The UK no longer has a feed-in tariff scheme, so what we receive for export is determined by the energy company we are with, which in our case is Octopus, which has a relatively generous export tariff.
If you compare the bar charts from June and December (click image to expand), you can see the difference in the solar output (green bars). You can barely make out the export bars (blue) in the December chart.
The fact that we generated more power than we needed was intentional; we opted to get as many panels as we could fit on our roof so we can maximise generation in expectation of full electrification, with a heat pump for space and water heating. Hopefully we can start this final step soon so that we can go off gas completely.