Export electricity... where does it go?

Mikeyboy01443

As the title says - when i export my electricity from solar, where does it go? I see all the time it written as 'exporting back to grid', but what does this actually mean?
Does it go back to the local substation, do they have big batteries to store it? Or am i literally powering my neighbours houses? 
I wont pretend to know a great deal about electricity flow and how it works so if there is a dummy explanation that would be great as I'd love to understand what actually happens 🙂

QrizB

Mikeyboy01443 said:

Does it go back to the local substation, do they have big batteries to store it? Or am i literally powering my neighbours houses?

To your neighbour's houses.

Reed_Richards

My neighbour has an electric car which sits outside his house; I see it plugged-in..  I was wondering idly if I could offer him a good deal on charging it from my solar panels.  As @QrizB says, I will charge his car involuntarily from power exported, but he will have to pay the going rate for his electricity.  If I could sell him my solar solar power for half the going rate it would be win-win.  The tricky part would be making sure the power he draws was my spare solar power and not power from the grid.   

Mikeyboy01443

lol.. i was in the garden today and my wife was asking were we sending much electricity out, as the weather is so nice at the moment... and i said yes we are sending a lot out, we are probably powering the street (i was joking) but turns out i was probably right then??

Spies

Electricity typically goes to the nearest demand, so the first few neighbours on your street, unlikely there's enough to power the whole street. 

Ectophile

If you have a typical single phase install, then you could potentially be powering a third of the houses in the street.  The other two thirds will be on the other two phases of a three-phase transformer.

If there aren't any other houses that want your power, then it will back-feed through the transformer into the local grid.

At that point, it gets lost in the system, really.  The grid has many transformers, all getting a bit warm, and thousands of miles of wires.  The amount you can generate is so tiny that it's only offsetting a little bit of the grid losses.

Alnat1

6 out of 14 on our street with solar, between us I'm sure we're powering all the other 8 houses 

Mikeyboy01443

Thanks for the replies, it's interesting really id never thought about it! When I'm exporting it's usually 3 or 4kw, so that would be enough to power a few houses that are just ticking along, no ovens or kettles etc on... 
And yet they are still paying full whack to their provider for using my electricity... 🙄

70sbudgie

They are also paying to use the cables that takes your excess electricity from your house to theirs (as well as all the equipment to get the rest of their electricity and all the protection systems required to keep it safe). 

If you wanted to sell your excess generation to your neighbour with the EV at a cheaper rate, the way to do it would be to install a smart EV charger that monitors your export and controls the charge rate accordingly (an example is the Zappi ). Bear in mind when setting your export price, the cost of installing the charger and the rate you would otherwise earn for exporting.

You might earn / save more for both of you by using a refer a friend service from your supplier.

Coastalwatch

70sbudgie said:

They are also paying to use the cables that takes your excess electricity from your house to theirs (as well as all the equipment to get the rest of their electricity and all the protection systems required to keep it safe). 

If you wanted to sell your excess generation to your neighbour with the EV at a cheaper rate, the way to do it would be to install a smart EV charger that monitors your export and controls the charge rate accordingly (an example is the Zappi ). Bear in mind when setting your export price, the cost of installing the charger and the rate you would otherwise earn for exporting.

You might earn / save more for both of you by using a refer a friend service from your supplier.

Alternatively you could use the CoCharger App as I do with my neighbour. As a host you set the cost per hour and minimum charge time. Your chargee requests to charge and you can accept or deny as you see fit. The App handles all the finance with money popping into my account a few days later. It's worked well for us this last six months or so.

Solarchaser

Just to throw in the potential issue of an ev charging with excess solar, is that unless you have an excess of over 1.2kw, then the EV will not charge, so if you typically export 1100w/ hour, this won't be able to go into your EV even with a Zappi.

You can balance this with constant low output if you have home batteries dealing with the peaks and troughs, but without batteries the low output could see you buying electricity from the grid.