What Is Solar Export Limiting and How to Find Your Lost Energy

Home » What Is Solar Export Limiting and How to Find Your Lost Energy

Export Limiting: what it means for you

What is export limitation?

Export limiting is determined by your local electricity distributor and involves using additional hardware to limit the amount of power your solar PV inverter can export back to the grid at any given time. To be completely clear, export limitation only limits the amount of energy you can send back to the grid, not what you can consume at any given time. It really sounds a whole lot worse than it actually is and here’s why…

This limit is not a daily limit or even an hourly limit, but as it states, at any given time. Export limiting only effects the amount of power you’re not self-consuming at any given time. Considering the base load for your standard household is 2kW, it would be rare that you would be ever looking to send back any more than 3kW to the grid after self-consumption.

Why?

If it really doesn’t make an impact why do we have these limits you may well ask? The uptake of solar in the last five years has grown exponentially with more than a quarter of Australian homes making the switch to solar, because of this, the electricity distributor must be able to manage the load coming and going out of the network at all times.

Export limiting isn’t all bad

Export limitation can in some instances be very useful. Today’s inverters now have an excellent feature that allows you to dial back your grid exports to a pre-set limit, allowing you to have a larger, grid connected solar array and still match the grid export limits. That means you can enjoy a larger solar array and reduce your reliance on the grid all while meeting your export limits.

Export limiting dynamically adjusts PV power supply back to the grid, ensuring there is more energy available for self-consumption when loads are high, now that’s clever.

Will this affect my ROI?

Don’t worry, based on the average home base load, export limitation will have little effect on your ROI. Remember, the more energy you self-consume the more you stand to save.

Related Tags: Sunpower Solar Panels