Winter in Corfu - power cut!

One of the small problems of living on a Greek island is the slightly unreliable power supply. To be fair it enormously improved over years gone by, but it’s February and it’s been off for three hours so far…

[@Nick_G.]

I thing a solar panel or two wouldn't be a bad investment

[@newlifemarine1476]

14x 400w panels and a Fronius 6kw three phase inverter would be ideal, but unfortunately the budget doesn’t stretch to it currently. It’s a silly situation as the Greek government are keen to increase self reliance, but make net metering unaffordable.
One day, it’s in the pipeline eventually!

[@Nick_G.]

@@newlifemarine1476 Even though I’m Greek, I have no idea what exactly you need to do to get solar panels in Greece I’m pretty sure they have to be approved by the ministry environment and energy or some thing like that. And even then I’ve heard that you cannot use your power that your generating you have to sell the power to the electricity company or something along those lines. So if that’s true you cannot be self-reliant. And I’m not sure how much the Mitsotakis government wants to help the residents of this country everything he legislates is in the interest of the power companies, private schools and clinics and the shipowners everything else are communicative tactics so he can be elected again in a few months

[@newlifemarine1476]

@@Nick_G. the problem is the net metering - we had a German company come and look at the villa with ideas for solar, and the big thing is the net metering system. Unfortunately, Deddie limit the power (massively) that private individuals can put back into the grid, so on peak days over the summer most of our generated power would be wasted. On top of that, we would have to pay Deddie €45 per month to administer our own solar power!!
In Germany (for example) you can feed all the excess power back into the grid, then draw it back out again on cloudy days for free. We live in a very sunny climate, and all that energy isn’t harvested because of government policy!

[@Nick_G.]

@@newlifemarine1476 that’s absurd. I don’t know what they were thinking they were legislating that. I mean Deddie is the electricity distribution network operator and it’s a government company. Why would you have to pay them to administer your own solar panels?

[@intelmacs]

@@newlifemarine1476 The reason why they have to limit exports in the summer is due to keeping the voltage within tolerance. The network was never designed for power to flow both ways and therefore when everyone is exporting the voltage goes through the roof.