Hi this is Mark from M Solar Power in Cape Town South Africa and i'd like to welcome you to
the first in this video series the title of the video series is my goal is xero my goal is zero
electricity spend with eskim for the year and zero power interruptions as we've been having a lot
of load cheating here in south africa so as part of the process i'm going to take you through the
technology that i have installed the city of cape town's framework of how the feed-in tariff works
and my general experience on a day-to-day basis with different types of weather and different
types of power usage in our home i have a 10 kilowatt three-phase hybrid installed from solex
power with 25.2 kilowatt hours of lithium-ion storage and typically without solar power my
electricity spend would be around three and a half four thousand rain a month my goal really is
to generate sufficient excess power in the summer months to offset the power imports that my home
will need in cape town solar winter which is typically between the 15th of june and the 15th of
september so that being said let's dive straight into it and just have a look at my home today
i'm filming this on the 1st of february around midday and this graph is showing my power usage
for the day so if i have a look at it you can see if i put my cursor here this is at 5 past 12
in the morning in the am and this is just after 12 here now in the middle of the day
so the graph may look a little bit confusing but if i just uh take away the actual
different items and if i just show you that we are have been having a cloudy weather here
in cape town for yesterday and today and here you can see it around six o'clock in the morning i
started generating solar power and you can see the sun came out a little bit earlier and dipped off
as the clouds increased and now we're experiencing full sunshine around the middle of the day
i've got 12 kilowatts of glass on glass biofacial solar panel on a ground mount installed
in my garden as if a thatched roof i can't install any panels on my roof and
this then is just the solar production for today but what's uh what helps here is we can actually
see the load power in my home the load is shown in purple the purple being my power usage you can see
my heat pump turning on this morning to heat up my morning water for my shower because yesterday
was overcast and this in essence is going to show the grid power usage and the whole goal of xero is
for your home to stay above the line above the north line mean meaning uh my power generation
and so this being stored solar power from yesterday in battery with my home phasing
below the line at 1 30 in the morning you can see the red line going down below meaning grid power
and as the solar power kicked in for the day you can see my home phasing above the line with
solar generation now running greater than what my actual home's consumption is and that excess
solar power is being stored in my battery for this evening cycle typically during the summer months
we don't normally go below the line overnight and you can see yesterday being a party overcast day
shown by the spikiness of my solar output graph and if we have a look at a typical cape town day
just give it a second to refresh typically
during the summer months we have a smoother parabolic curve
as shown on this curve here you can see it was partly cloudy in the morning with
basically and my home's low power being totally uh from battery power overnight with
no grid power being drawn overnight but here you can see shown in grid and red on a sunny day we're
feeding in power in other words red is normally below the line and here you can see i'm basically
feeding in excess power into the grid and that basically is easy to see if we take away the pv
power you can see no grid power the slight little bit of grid power just maintaining my connection
to the grid and the feed in of my excess power during the day and the idea here really is that
i've oversized my solar system so i'm producing a lot more power than i actually need now and as
i mentioned the purpose of this power is to supplement my power usage in the middle of
the solar winter for cape town so what you can see here on the right if i just zoom into the screen
is a picture of my power usage today so so far today i have
generated 46 percent of my power needs and imported 53 of my power was
at hoppus one this morning my batteries ran out and i needed to import power from the grid so
that being said let's just have a look at how my home did for the month of january
and so the one was a day view this is now a monthly view so you can see duringJanuary
we imported 77 kilowatt hours or six percent or six and a half percent of my home's energy needs
and a self-consumed 48 of our generation 1 100 kilowatt hours and we exported 1 178 kilowatt
hours onto the grid for the month of january so what i plan to do in this series is just to go
through this type of detail in a much greater depth on a day-to-day basis bring out the news
and of how this is actually working for me and basically run this video series up till
december the 31st and see if i managed to achieve my goal my goal being zero power
import from the grid over a year and zero power interruptions so uh thanks for tuning in and
i look forward to sharing all of my experiences with you as the year progresses.
you