Recently I’ve had a new Solar Panel system installed at my house and I’m trying to figure out the best way to utilise the energy generated. Ideally I’d like to have an off-grid battery system as my motives for installing it are more about building resiliency in the face of supply disruptions. However, at the moment the economics for the batteries is just not there so I’m looking at options for how to use my surplus solar energy in the interim.
To explain in a bit more detail, below is a chart of the energy produced by my panel system on a fairly typical sunny day in the Australian Autumn. As you can see, with 18.81 Kilowatt Hours generated it’s pretty decent, but the majority of the energy generated is between the hours of about 10am to 3pm.
Now if you have a look at our actual energy usage on the same day you can see that in the middle of the day when it’s warm and the wife and kids are out and about, our usage during this time is low. It’s in the evening where we are now pulling energy back off the grid.
This wouldn’t irk me so much except that we are getting paid 8 cents per kWH for solar energy fed into the grid and we’re paying 27 cents per kWH for the same energy we pull back down from the grid later that day. It’s a hell of a spread which I reckon is bordering on outright rort, so surely there is a good way for me to use that daytime surplus energy. It effectively has a much lower cost basis of 8 cents per kWH….which in US dollars is 5.4 cents per kWH.
I had given up on mining crypto years ago because with ASICs going the way they have been and the electricity price in Australia getting silly, this country has been pretty much totally uneconomical for crypto miners and we have practically ZERO crypto mining industry here as a result. However I’ve been wondering if I might be able to get something viable at this cheaper electricity cost since the bar for solar fed back into the grid is pretty low.
After digging around a bit, it seems like one of the most profitable coins to mine at the moment is DOGE – a coin I am not a huge fan of, but I understand that you can do Merge Mining with Scrypt to mine both DOGE and LTC at the same time. Seems like it could be a funky idea. Of course my ROI on an investment in an Antminer L7 is likely to be a lot longer if I am only running it for maybe 4 hours a day but with a 3.425 kW power consumption it looks about the right size to soak up my surplus energy and give me a better return.
Anyone out there still mining crypto at home? Anyone using solar energy surplus to power it? Anyone got a better idea for how to use my surplus energy? If so, throw a comment below. I'm open to all ideas and nothing is off the table!
