Max power limited by utility

[iamrich]

We have 5 acres but not much available at this point. We looked into a 2-axis tracker but they are really ugly. We just finished building
a barn and we oriented it with the intention on putting solar on the roof. There's 1950 sq ft of roof that's south-facing so there should
be plenty of space. The primary issue at this point is that Idaho Power limits the system to 25kw.

Another option might be to build a PV array on the barn not connected to the grid, but this would require batteries. If you could set it up so that the array on the roof + batteries take care of all the barns needs, you basically eliminate that from the equation. Then you just have to power the house with the grid tie array. You could even hook power into the barn charge controller so the batteries would get charged even in the event of a lot of non sunny days. This is what I will likely do to my garage (which is completely off grid) once I build my house. I will have grid power to the house, but I will feed a simple 20a circuit out to the garage to power my batteries if needed. Then I will build as big an array as I can fit on the roof to feed the house and grid.

 

[Supervstech]

44,000 kWh/year / 365 days/year = 120 kWh/day

20 kW of PV at optimum orientation could be a little bit short depending on orientation and location.
His orientation may be less than optimum. 25 kW would come closer.

If time of use rates peak late in the day when PV production is low, extra production in the morning could cover that.

He isn’t limited to 25KW of solar, he is limited to 25KW of inverter... so a heavily overpaneled array of microinverters will output 25KW all day long...
Far more than 120KWh a day...

 

[Hedges]

If excess PV can be installed, then ideal system would be an inverter that provides "25kW export", similar to the zero-export feature but with a different target value. That would let the excess PV power house loads while exporting 25kW.
Do you know what inverter would be good for that?