KATHMANDU, May 7: Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) has unveiled a plan to buy excess solar energy from household consumers.
According to the power utility, households having photovoltaic solar system of 500 W or above can sell up to 90 percent of NEA electricity that they consume annually. Consumers can sell their excess solar energy to NEA and consume energy from NEA grid whenever they need through net metering.
“The new initiative has been taken to minimize the gap between demand and supply in the coming dry months that begins from November,” Kulman Ghising, the managing director of NEA, said in a press conference on Sunday.
Tapping into the sun
NEA will connect a separate bi-directional meter for recording energy it buys from consumers as well as energy it supplies to them.
Consumers can sell solar energy through NEA’s different grids ranging from 230 volt to 11,000 volt.
NEA is drafting a separate guideline for management of solar energy purchase from consumers and for billing after gross sale and purchase by the household users.
The new arrangement can make solar energy system financially viable, as households, which have already installed such system, need not install batteries which account for about half of the cost of the system.
An experiment of similar system conducted by the Centre for Energy Studies at the Pulchowk-based Institute of Engineering has yielded positive outcomes.
The new initiative can also provide the much needed impetus to suppliers of solar energy system who have seen their sales plummet with the improvement in energy supply.
