Since the introduction of a fee for feeding solar power into the grid in the Netherlands in August 2024, operators and homeowners have been looking for a way to consume the generated solar electricity on site. With one project, the Austrian supplier of solar electric heating systems My PV is showing how this can be achieved in single-family homes.
By installing the continuously variable AC Elwa 2 electric heating rod, a Dutch owner of a single-family home was able to increase his own consumption of solar power. This enabled him to significantly reduce the grid feed-in and the associated costs. The owner of the 50-year-old single-family home in the Dutch town of Lekkerkerk operates a solar system with an output of 15 kilowatts on his roof. So far, this has covered a large part of his electricity consumption. In addition, he generated a considerable energy surplus with the system, which was actually too large for a single-family home. Since August 2024, this has been accompanied by high feed-in fees.
Plenty of solar power fed in so far
As only two people live in the household, far more electricity was generated than the house actually needed. On sunny days, a large share of the energy remained unused and was fed into the grid, despite the installed electricity storage system with a volume of 10.2 kilowatt-hours. Accordingly, the homeowner focussed on efficiently increasing his self-consumption of solar power through photovoltaic heat.
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Continuously adjustable electric heating element
To do this, however, he had to use a device with continuously variable control. This is the only way he can optimally utilise every surplus kilowatt-hour of available solar power for hot water and space heating. This is now done by the My PV heating rod, which has stepless control and tracking via the My PV cloud.
Self-consumption increased by half
The result shows: By using the solar power with the heating rod, the homeowner was able to increase his self-consumption share from 54 to 85 per cent on two comparable days with almost the same solar power generation of 23 kilowatt-hours. This reduced the amount of electricity fed into the grid from 10.5 to 3.6 kilowatt-hours.
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Feeding less electricity into the grid
Based on this improvement in self-consumption in the first few months of system operation, he can achieve savings of over 450 euros in feed-in fees, extrapolated to a full year. This is because with a surplus of 48 per cent of the solar power generated, the homeowner would feed 7,525 kilowatt-hours into the grid each year. This would result in a charge of 787 euros. Due to the higher self-consumption with photovoltaic heat, he would probably only feed in 3,213 kilowatt-hours per year. The planners at My PV calculated that this would only incur fees totalling 330 euros. (su)
