You may at one time or another heard of the new 'Smart Grid'. The utilities solution to allow us to not overtax their systems. It's touted as a must have for electric cars, but for those of us who produce their own energy the smart grid can be utilized in a very different way.

Lately, the majority of people that I talk to are installing grid-tie systems because they can send their extra electricity back into the grid. If you generate enough you could probably just live by the cheques that come in from the electric company.

I think we should go a bit further and develop a smart grid-tie system. The utility companies have changed to demand based pricing so you may not be getting top dollar for the extra energy that you produce.

Of course, with this new type of system you are going to need batteries to store energy.

Here's how it works. The electric company tells you when the peak demand times are. They change from summer to winter. Your smart grid-tie system is programmed to store all the energy that is produced during the day and pump it back into the grid during these peak demand times.

Even better is if you use most of your electricity off-peak and you pump most of it in on-peak you're actually going to lower your electric bill even more.

The bad news is that you'd need to expand your current system to include a battery bank; however, it doesn't need to be a big one. It should pay for itself rather quickly seeing as you'd be credited at least 25% more for the electricity that you use.

Do you know of anyone that has done this? I'd love to hear about how the little guy is making the electric companies rules work against them.

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