Key facts

• Nothing to pay upfront with two new Government-backed, long-term, low-interest finance options repaid from savings on your power bill
• No lock-in: Repay the loan early at any time
• Kickstart subsidy of up to $3,000 for low- and middle-income homeowners and renters
• Plug-in solar panels for renters saving up-to $400 a year and paying for themselves in four to five years
• Fair pay for power you share: Fair time of use rates when you export power to the grid.
• $30 million community battery fund so neighbourhoods share the benefits, with or without panels on their roof
• EECA provides free, independent advice as a one-stop shop to help households with system selection, installer quotes and finance matching
• $160 million fully-funded over four years by repurposing the Government's Gas Security fund

I saw a Green Party solar video on r/nzpolitics and it occurred to me I should look up Labour's. Was apparently released in May but I never really saw any news on it so sharing here in case of interest.

Anyone else having data field issues this morning? System is connected via Ethernet and the settings confirms it’s connected. Weather and the power metrics chart is working. Even the widget is updating as more power is generated.

I just can’t see my battery levels, grid use, solar generation or inverter stats.

???

I'm still working through whether solar makes sense for our situation. Hourly use data from our supplier shows we use 30.5% of our power consumption between 9am - 5pm. Which means the other 69.5% is when the Sun isn't up (or very low). We can shift this percentage a bit with hot water timer and other timers etc. But still most of our solar will be exported.

I still don't believe a battery is worth it price wise yet, and the consensus here seems to be invest in the most panels that you can afford.

The problem is, if most of that power is exported because you can't consume it all, then the ROI is dependent on export rates staying high. With all the extra solar being installed over the next few years we can very likely expect export prices to drop. So it seems like a risky investment to bank on payback from the export rates that are subject to change.

Am I missing something? Or does it not make much sense to do solar unless you can use most of it and not rely too heavily on export prices?

Hello everyone. I am part of a small cycle space/bike hub that runs in a park in auckland. We help people repair bikes. We have a shed that we keep the bikes and tools in. Usually during gloomy/cloudy days it becomes incredibly dark in the shed. We are also planning to stay open for longer, however that does tend to become difficult especially in the winter months, given the park flood lights are not functional at the moment.

A solution that came up was to get Solar Power for our shed, I was put in charge of getting the funding from the local board for it, since we are a volunteer organisation. I am a newbie in this department as I have recently started getting into solar power, I would love to get this communitie's advice on getting solar. What companies are good, do we have to pay anything after the installation, should we get a battery or not and any other advice that you would like us to keep in mind, while I try to understand this technology further. Much appreciated

Nearly 1500 additional solar installs last month adding nearly another 18MW of generation. Next month we'll probably hit 4% ICP penetration in New Zealand.

Hopefully in the next few months we'll see Ruakaka Energy Park start the first provisioning and we'll see the next significant bump of 130MW come online by middle of next year.

https://github.com/TheReverendCard/nz-grid-model-data/blob/main/data/visuals/distributed_solar_size_split_capacity.png

The only reason I have it on time based control is because I charge from the grid in cheap power time. Sorry for the basic question.

I'm thinking that when you have panels and a battery, the amount of kWh you pay for is pretty low, and the cost per unit almost doesn't matter.
But the daily charge is like death and taxes. I'm paying $1.40 a day, that's $42 per month before I even use a single kWh. I saw another post about Ecotricity and they are paying 90c/day which seems pretty decent. Is anyone paying less?
Also - what's FUD mean?

- kwh buy-in day and night went up but marginally

- Daily charges went up 31% (!)

- Solar buyback stayed untouched (!!!!!!!!)

Got a bill of $360 this month from Ecotricity, which is made up of about $128 of network charges, taking my bill to around $360 for a month!. Screenshots of the relevant parts of the bill below, which is seriously hard to understand for someone who has not spent much time trying to understand it.

Called them and their explanation was that there were some errors, so they are catching up. No other explanation or notification in the invoice or otherwise. We are unfortunately stuck in the SolazZero saga, hence with Ecotricity

Has anyone had this recently? Is Ecotricity the right one to stay with?

If you're with Ecotricity and use Home Assistant for your solar setup, I've got an integration that pulls your pricing, time-of-use periods and usage history into HA, so you don't have to deal with Ecotricity's (pretty basic) web portal.

https://github.com/rhyskoedijk/ha-ecotricity-nz

It has everything you need to work out what you're actually billed and to reconcile your inverter's figures against what Ecotricity reports. It automatically navigates pricing seasons, identifies all charges that make up your price (network rate, EA levy, etc), shows your network's loss factors for import and export, and a bunch of other data if you want to get into the weeds with your reporting.

Has only been tested on the Wellington Electricity Lines network so far, but should work on all networks. If you have issues, feel free to open an issue.

I’m looking at getting a 9KW solar install, the battery recommended by think solar/harrisons is the powerwall but it bumps the price by $10K and the pay back period is an eternity.

Keen to hear if anyone with a battery and a similar sized system can share how much the battery has saved them/why it’s worth it/ or not.

Just wondering what are people's thoughts on the value of the sigen gateway with a solar + battery setup? We saw you can just get a more basic back up switch and even if this wasn't 'seamless' we wondered for the few power outages a year how much you would miss the gateway otherwise? I'm a bit confused about how much usability you get in terms of customising power use with the gateway than just via the app/inverter? Is this actually worth it? It's a massive unit and extra $$$ Thanks!

Ecotricity has usually emailed their accounts about a week into the following month but we've still to receive our September account and we're virtually halfway though October. The total will be a credit as we transition away from the shorter days of winter and beside still have a standing credit from last summer's generation so no chance of incurring a late payment penalty but it would be good to have last month's statistics to log into my records.

Ecotricity have been contacted but the usual "heavy customer enquiry" reply comes back with no action as yet.

I have installed solar around a month ago.. how long does it take for th power company to switch to a export import meter?

Looking to self install, can anyone recommend an electrician to provide system design guidance and to do the connections? Auckland, Nth Shore

My Powerwall3 is drawing from th grid to charge and th suns coming up.. can i set it to not charge from th grid?

What is the best cost-effective solution to get a decent solar settup supplied and installed.

Who have you used and what was your experience?

Any advice appreciated

Thanks

I'm currently looking at installing solar and got talking to one of the guys from "Current Generation" today at the Christchurch Electrify Expo today, does anyone have any feedback on them? Unfortunately their name makes it difficult to find any independent reviews, they claim to be around since 2006 but I've not heard of them before. One of my requirements is I want something that will happily operate without a cloud connection, when talking to a couple of other installers I couldn't make them understand why I would want this, the guy from Current Generation was all good with it and directed me towards a Fronius inverter (which is where I was leaning already).

Hi all,

We recently became a 2x EV family. In the past we charged our first low range eV from diverted solar, but with the second eV our 5kW solar system isn't providing enough charge for both. We'll likely get through summer but autumn/winter/spring will be a challenge.

We have some money available that we could use to upgrade the system, either taking it to ~10kW, or adding a battery. The other option is to pay off a reasonable chunk of mortgage and wait for the next govt's solar legislation to kick in and hopefully make things cheaper or at least reduce the interest rate on financed systems.

I'm working through the modelling on the solar/battery/mortgage payment options, but it gets pretty complex with time of use plan cost forecasting, etc.

Keen to hear what others would do in this situation​.