I take the OP to be asking for some guidance. like many things mustachian, read read read!
Certainly, though I'd suggest more in the way of datasheets, inverter manuals, mounting guides, and of course the relevant NEC if you're doing the work yourself. There's a lot of stuff written out there (I'm working on one in addition to my blog posts), but the problem is that some of it is quite wrong. And until you know the field well, it's hard to tell which is good advice, which is bad advice, and which is good advice from 1985, but not useful advice now. On the other hand, I'll say that YouTube is about 90% correct... just that telling which the nonsense 10% is comes to the same problem, you can't tell until you know the field well. There are a ton of very dodgy installs, people laughing about connectors smoking, and generally terrible advice on YouTube. There's a lot of overlap between solar and lithium DIY Powerwall stuff, and again, most of the advice is "90% sane, 10% dangerous." If you ever see anyone soldering to 18650s, you can assume they're suspect...
Also be wary of some on-line forums on solar power, there is a kind of orthodoxy in some circles and new ideas are shunned, learn what you can and move on.
I've learned more from the cranky old guys living with solar than just about anyone else... and their advice, while perhaps "shunning new ideas," tends to be based heavily around what works, what's repairable, and what has been proven by time. There exists an IRC server with a dozen or so people in a quiet room, and the signal to noise ratio, when the room is on topic, is through the roof. You don't find the latest and greatest promised tech, but you do find people who are living with off grid power systems for decades, who know what works and know what doesn't. Some of that is useful for grid tie, some of it less so - again, my weird system layout is based on "virtual tracking" and looks more like an off grid system than a normal grid tie system, on purpose. Also, in many cases, the equipment preference is based around knowing the history of the inverter industry (which is fairly small). "Oh, that's so-and-so's new company, they're improving the control on thus-and-such design..." vs "I've never heard of them, they're Kickfunding their... uh, might pass on that one."
This way I don't need a bi-directional meter and in fact the power company cannot see that I run 70% of my stuff on solar, they only see my using 200KWh in summer instead of 1200KWh.
Depending on how that's done, it may or may not be compliant with your local codes and power company requirements (and the two will, often enough, have absolutely nothing to do with each other). At least in my area, a "no-export" system, in almost all cases, is still going to require the power company to be aware of the system. If there's any way that it can possibly backfeed the grid, they need to know about it. One could, theoretically, use a UL listed passthrough inverter (I'm mostly familiar with the Aims stuff) and not be technically capable of backfeeding, and be fine without power company approval, but that doesn't mean that they won't come knocking if you have a good sized solar field they don't know about - and, yes, they do check for stuff like that. I had some interesting conversations with the various inspectors doing my system, and "rogue grid tie systems" are a thing. Depending on how it's done, it may just be an issue of getting the proper paperwork filed, or they may take your meter and leave until you fix the problems (if you had, say, a non-UL-listed inverter without any sort of disconnects).
The marco trend of solar is a reduction in grid-tie incentives that may even turn into cost adders. In my area they are starting to levy "grid service fees" on grid tie solar installs to the tune of $4/month/KWp.
Polo!
Calculating the costs and benefits of distributed energy resources (DERs) is a wide open problem, and there are plenty of studies from various groups that tend to find reasonably different results, though one can often enough look at who funded it and guess the results ahead of time.
It's quite the hard problem, because home solar is an uncontrolled DER - there's no way for the power company to really control it, they just have to deal with what it does. There's some work on virtual power plants that combine home solar, home batteries, and larger resources (as well as industrial demand management) into a coherent device, but they're still mostly research papers and pilot deployments, not anything that's actually widespread. There's also the problem that "What works for that one weird guy" doesn't really work out for areas with higher deployment. California is working through this, and other areas are going to have to as well. If everyone were on the kWh for kWh program I'm on, there would be nothing left to fund grid operation, and mid-day peak production would rather exceed consumption. At solar noon the past two months, I'm typically pushing 8-10kW to the grid while consuming about 1kW internally - it's pretty badly biased towards export, except when it's not (clouds, or laundry + EV charging + someone taking a shower). That sort of thing is why grid segments often have a 10-15% solar penetration max - they just don't have anything to do with the surplus. Even if you add batteries to the substations, there's a limit to how much energy can be routed around. I've had 100kWh generation days when the house used 20kWh over a 24h period - though I admit the system design predated Covid. I was planning an extra 10-15kWh daily from PHEV charging and use that simply doesn't happen reliably anymore.
This obviously errases some of the fiscal incentive.
Indeed. However, if you do your own install for $1.25/W or so, it still makes an awful lot more sense than the $4/W installers. We'll see how Tesla does, they've been consistently turning in $2/W, but also won't touch anything complicated. And I'm not sure they'll even bother Idaho, given our... plans review process. The guy apparently is known to pick fights with professional engineers over things like battery banks. :/
The power companies have discovered they can install solar farms and produce at 2cents/KWh and still charge you the same as when they were running huge multi-GW thermal plants.
Yes? And? That's about the same cost of the power from the thermal plants. A typical kWh of energy during non-constrained times is $0.02-$0.04/kWh - the rest of the cost of your power, delivered, is related to transmission and distribution grid costs and maintenance. You can get a pretty good estimate of your local power company's per-kWh costs by looking at a demand rate schedule for large industrial customers. They pay separate for the energy (per kWh) and for the power (per peak kW drawn over a period of time), and that per kWh cost is a good starting point to use when pondering power company rates. Solar is cheaper, but it's also of limited dispatchability (you can curtail them, but not ask for more if they're running at the max power point). They've got some interesting potential with regards to spinning reserves, especially if you hang some batteries on the high voltage DC side, but there's no pricing model for that in a lot of areas, so it's not yet done.
My take was, and still is, that off-grid with a lithium battery in a "grid fall back" layout is the right choice for me. With power outage resilience, massive monthly savings/short payback time and much less upfront costs it's the right mix of benefits for my needs. good luck learning, and in your project!
It may be the optimum for you at the moment, but it's also no real way to keep a power grid operational long term if more than a handful of people do it.
It seems some kind of rotation of your panels towards the horizon could make that slightly more stable. I think my uncle with a cabin up in a northern US state put a panel tiler on his property a long time ago. Something about passive and the fluid in the system moves the panel rather than any motor. Are there times during the morning or evening where the solar is not covering electricity use and you would cover if you had tilted panels?
My panels catch the sun as soon as it comes over our hill (which is a bit past sunrise), and hold it until it sets over the mountains on the other horizon. Other than using somewhat fewer panels, there's nothing a tracker would gain me in terms of power output. I would, on the flip side, lose production compared to my As on some of the days that are hazy or cloudy, where the light is coming from a variety of directions instead of directly from the sun. On days like that, panel area is king and I've got more of it than I would with a tracker.
As for solar "a long time ago," yes. Most of them had trackers, and there were a range of systems along the lines of what you describe (fluid thermal expansion sort of stuff). When panels were $10-$15/W (in 1980s dollars), you could spend a ton of money optimizing the panel daily production and come out far, far ahead. That's not as true anymore with the cost of panels, though industrial solar facilities still tend to have single axis trackers (the axle runs north-south and twists the panels to follow the sun across the sky - it does improve morning/evening production, with fewer panels than I use, but those tracker companies won't talk to homeowners). The balance of system costs used to be "Panels dominate, everything else is a rounding error," and that's no longer true. On my system, only about $8000 of the $25,000 build cost was panels. Optimizing that at the expense of the rest of the system doesn't make nearly as much sense now.
However, there's also no good reason to go overboard. The production loss from off-angle sun is a cosine error. If the sun is 10 degrees off panel normal, you still get 98.5% of the illumination. At this point, trying to really hyper-optimize panel production is more of an interesting hobby than a useful activity, at least in terms of dollars. It's certainly useful in terms of materials spent on panels, but... optimizing materials required is the sort of thing one could simulate and write a PhD thesis on.
