Wow, what a wild weather ride in Victoria yesterday.

We’re still in NSW, but the Weather app summarised the weather at home in Emerald as “Fire Weather” 😮. The heat was followed by a heavy storm that knocked down many trees and power lines.

In the middle of the day, wholesale electricity prices peaked at a hundred times the norm at nearly $20 per kWh (normally under 20c per kWh). I checked our home remotely using the Tesla app. It was exporting power from our battery (and solar) to help keep the grid supply going, whilst paying us about $100 per hour for the supply!

Our battery has continued to supply power to our home during the blackout. We messaged some of our neighbours an invitation to come over and plug in any needed devices (such as phones or a portable fridge). A few of them also checked on our house for us. Great neighbours and community ☺️.

We might need to also offer them showers because those with on demand gas hot water often need electricity to light them.

All the petrol stations in the area are also closed. We hope to be able to charge from our solar panels when we get home, if the grid is still off line.

Some technical details:

Before we left home last week, I turned off two strings of the solar array. Because we are on a wholesale market electricity plan, the price can even go negative, where you pay to export during times of high production and low consumption in the grid, such as a sunny lunch time on a weekend. If I had left all the solar panel strings on, we probably would have been paid $200 for the hour of peak export, but it would have been slowly eroded by paying for export at low demand times.

Ideally, we should be able to just turn off the solar production remotely, either via an app or automatically. I am looking to Enphase Energy to provide a solution for this.

Unfortunately, the exporting was short lived, with the grid dying an hour or so later. No grid meant we could no longer export.

During the day, our solar panels power our house, charge up our battery and export any excess. During a blackout, it is supposed to continue to supply the house and battery. But, it’s not working. There’s currently no solar production. The charge in the battery is slowly draining, currently down to about 60%. We have put in an urgent service request to the installer, Lightning Energy, to hopefully remedy this soon, before we lose all power. AusNet estimates “multiple days” without power. Belong has also informed us that broadband is off line, so we can no longer monitor our house remotely. The Tesla Powerwall battery gateway is supposed to have a wireless cellular backup connection, so I don’t know why that’s not connecting.