@Lizzie
In this state our governement did not want to be faced with the expenditure of replacing our aging power generation system so they hit on the idea of making people generate their own electricity and offered huge incentives with massive rebates on the hardware and a 44c per Kw feed-in tarrif for any surplus power the consumer feeds back to the grid. This was on the proviso we got in before Sept 30th 2011 and this price is guaranteed until Dec 2026. So we got on board along with about a third of the state.
So where the issue comes in Lizzie, as a government, if you are going buy power at 44c per Kw...what can you sell it at?? We were always going to be in trouble and, although all the poles and wires still exist and have to be maintained, not as much power flows along them, and much of it the other way, back to the government.We have the most expensive power in the world at a cost of....42c pr Kw!.
Some of us could see this coming and decided to insulate ourselves from this cost burden.
I use both Lizzie, solar and wind. If I could have my time over again I would put the wind turbine in first because solar has a limited amount of time each day when it will actually produce electricity....as long as there is more than 8 KPH of wind, the turbine will produce. It still produces at midnight, so our window of generation can be up to 24 hours a day instead of the 4 or 5 of solar.
The turbine looks a bit like a large roof ventilator, has three arms and this will give you an idea of the size of it!
And this is what it looks like running....it is totally silent in operation.
https://imgur.com/a/twXlcnb
The smaller turbine you can see in this shot was my first attempt but it wasn't powerfull enough and now simply aides the larger Pravac unit.
Here is the solar inverter.......
This shot was taken not long after the sun came up but the array is still chugging along at getting close to 1.5Kws..
From 10.30am until about 2.30 pm the system will produce about 3Kws per hour. Combined on an average day I have a total power generation capacity of around 32Kws of which around 21 is fed into a 1150amp/ hr battery storage.
At this point most people glaze over and say "kilowatts....amp hours, what the hell does that mean".
The easiest way I can explain it is,....imaging a watering can, the sort you water the garden pots with. The body of that can...the amount of water you can stuff into it, that is your amp hrs! That is the amount of energy you can store..ok!
The nozzle that governs the rate at which that store of water can come out of the can...that is the Kilowatt hrs. In other words the rate at which your supply of electrcity is being used.
Now although that explains the principal, it still doesn't mean much until you understand there is a relationship between Kilowatts and amperes! There is 4.22225 Amp hrs of stored energy required to get you 1 Kilowatt of useable energy.
Now as the average home in the US and Australia and probably much of Europe uses about 19 Kws of power per day that means the average house uses 80 amp/hrs of produced or stored power per day. When sizing a battery array just decide how many days you want from your stored capacity.....80 x 7 days = 560 amp/hrs of battery storage. Does any of that make sense?
My property (having outrageously power hungry Airbnb guests) uses around 33 Kilowatts of electricity per day....139 amp/hrs, so I need just under 1,000 amp/hrs of battery storage to keep us self sufficient for a week! There are times when our demand tops 45 Kilowatts and at those times we have to drag some energy from the grid but for most of the year we are in credit. We earn more than we consume!
Sorry, long winded but I hope this is of some value.
Cheers......Rob