My name is Mirek. I have a farm in Africa, on Klein Karoo. The farm is 100% supplied with solar energy. It is a small off-grid installation, just 6 panels at the moment. Actually we are not connected to the city resources so to say. We have our own water, own electricity - 100% ecological. We build the place appr 10 years ago. As we plan to extend the place (now we have three small units / houses there but it is all together > 3000 ha) and I want to stick to this 100% ECO principle, it is highly interesting for me, what is the most efficient (cost efficient) solutions to supply the place with electric power? I want to keep the place as green as possible and I strongly believe this is doable, to keep it off-grid as it is by now. One of the reasons for off-grid is long distances on the farm (10 km x 3 km).
On the other hand, I live permanently in Poland, at the moment in southern Poland. I plan to follow similar principle there, however this might be an on-grid installation, properly balanced. We do have electricity there, so I would rather produce as much as I need and compensate the usage of energy with the production, but there will be either no or very little batteries.
Could you please recommend me which way to go so to say? What main principles shall I follow?
There’s a lot of information here about battery systems, including best value etc. Please have a read through and let us know if you have particular questions.
Thanks for the answer and the link. Hybrid systems look very interesting for my polish site. South African installation I will rather keep as off-grid.
Which panels are nowadays most efficient from cost perspective in your opinion? I am not asking for brand but for the technology. I have enough space so I can instal more of them if this makes sense financially.
Actually I see that “Trina solar is one of the worlds largest solar panel manufacturers and are investing heavily in new generation of low-cost, high efficiency panels” Might be that this is what will fit my expectation of high efficiency.