Power company to pay thousands households to dim their solar panels during summer heat
Enexis, a Dutch grid operator, will invite about 55,000 households with rooftop solar panels to join a program that pays them to temporarily reduce or switch off their systems during peak sunlight hours in order to prevent overload on the electricity grid.
Households that participate will be compensated 25 euro cents per kilowatt-hour of electricity not generated while their systems are dimmed. For example, Enexis said that temporarily limiting ten solar panels for two hours would typically result in a payment of about 1 to 2 euros.
The invitations will be sent in the coming days to households in parts of Groningen, Drenthe, Overijssel, Noord-Brabant, and Limburg, NU.nl reported. Enexis said it selects households based on where their homes connect to the grid, which means neighboring streets in the same municipality may receive different notices.
“We are using this measure because we want to manage peaks on our electricity grid,” said Thijs Derksen, manager of network and capacity management for low- and medium-voltage systems at Enexis. “In the summer, we expect peaks in some areas that we want to limit to prevent overload.”
The program is run through a company called Zonnedimmer, which can—only with the homeowner’s permission—remotely reduce or fully pause solar production by controlling inverters, the devices that convert solar power for home use and grid export. The system works with most major inverter manufacturers.
Enexis cautioned that participation is unlikely to generate large annual earnings because the number of curtailment events will be limited and other grid management measures will also be used.
“This is not an emergency measure we only use at the last minute,” Guus Derksen, product manager for small-scale consumers at Enexis, told NU.nl. “We act based on the expectation that we will need so-called flexible capacity the next day.”
The utility previously tested the approach in a smaller pilot with Zonnedimmer, in which about 5 percent of invited households signed up. It is now expanding the program across a larger area in an effort to secure more flexible capacity from residential solar systems.
The measure responds to growing pressure on the Dutch electricity grid caused by rapid expansion of rooftop solar. On sunny afternoons, local generation can exceed what cables and transformer stations can safely handle.
Grid operators already use similar agreements to limit output from large solar and wind farms, but applying the same approach to households is new at this scale.
The company also encouraged households to use more of their solar power directly during daylight hours, such as by running appliances or charging electric vehicles, though it said this alone will not always solve the issue because many people are away during peak production times.
