In Europe it is common to feed your power into the grid and parallel to take your demand from it, whether PV, wind, biomass or gas generators. During your peak demand you “buy” power from the grid, during low demand you “sell” it back. Both sides can compensate each other. This is called “metering”.

Advantages:

• you feed in electricity whenever you generate it; this allows you to work with PV or wind without backups or storage facilities like batteries
• working with gas generators you only buy an engine fitting to your average demand because you feed in your demand on an average 24/7 level.
• as you generate the power where you use it your transmission losses are nearly disappearing and you don’t need to build more power lines

Disadvantage

• you need a constantly working grid. If your end of the grid where you feed in is down your generated power can’t be used.
• If this happens more often, your systems might suffer mechanical damages, especially wind power plants can’t cope with blackouts.

As you feed into the grid independent of your individual actual demand your generator always operates at the best efficiency of about 43%.

The more people participate in such a grid the more homogeneous supply and demand move.

A gridparallel system can be easily applied within a “mothergrid” you have control of yourself.