Nice! I am getting ready to invest in some older panels from Santan Solar to use for an offgrid setup. Getting 24 panels (only $480 for the lot) to use for various things around the farm. First thing will be building a solar wall in front of this old non-working garage door to the manufacturing side of the building. Going to set up a couple of lipo 100ah batteries in parallel with a PSW inverter. Will be using it to charge all my tool batteries and to run computers mining Monero. The rest of the panel I will use for the greenhouse and other little projects that require power.
It's a whole thing getting it approved to be grid tied and the cooperative we get our power from is all weird about it. Can't use the used panels for instance...
The idea was too offset my power usage from computers, miners, and 3D printers anyway, so I'll just go full offgrid with my stuff.
Most power companies have pretty strict rules and registration required. Part of it for safety I suppose so their guys don't get hit with unexpected power streams during outages and break/fix. I suppose other is them just trying to keep control. Buy a few new panels for hookup and approvals, and likely easy to add the older panels to it later if desired to bump the production up. The Solar company we bought ours through did all the Power company and HOA approvals for us, so almost transparent from my side, and very glad they did it instead of me.
Luckily I don't have to ask permission from anyone to do off-grid setups. I am on a good bit of private property. The business admin for the power coop basically told me how to get around everything. I lived on 12V for 4 years while living in a van and had time to figure out and plan this now that my roots are set, lol. I will use all the power so I am not even concerned, lol.
Edit: yeah, they say it's for 'efficiency' for the grid, but no, it's all about control. Plus I wouldn't get back much of anything as far as credits, so I might as well just use it all and mine some clean, free, crypto, lol.