Net metering concept in Power Electronics - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Understanding Net Metering Concept

📖 Scenario: You have a solar panel installed at your home. Sometimes it produces more electricity than you use, and sometimes you use more than it produces. Net metering helps you keep track of this balance.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple record of electricity usage and production to understand how net metering works by tracking energy consumed, energy produced, and calculating the net energy.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called energy_data with keys 'consumed' and 'produced' and their values as lists of daily kWh readings.

Create a variable called days to represent the number of days of data.

Calculate a list called net_energy that contains the daily net energy by subtracting consumed from produced for each day.

Add a final step to calculate the total net energy over all days and store it in a variable called total_net_energy.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Net metering helps homeowners with solar panels track how much electricity they use versus how much they send back to the grid, which affects their electricity bills.

💼 Career

Understanding net metering is important for roles in renewable energy, electrical engineering, and energy management to optimize energy usage and savings.

1

Create the energy data dictionary

Create a dictionary called energy_data with two keys: 'consumed' and 'produced'. Set 'consumed' to the list [30, 28, 35, 40, 32] and 'produced' to the list [25, 30, 40, 38, 35].

Power Electronics

# Create the energy_data dictionary with consumed and produced lists
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with keys 'consumed' and 'produced' and assign the exact lists given.

2

Set the number of days

Create a variable called days and set it to the number of days of data, which is 5.

Power Electronics

energy_data = {'consumed': [30, 28, 35, 40, 32], 'produced': [25, 30, 40, 38, 35]}
# Create the variable days and set it to 5
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Count the number of days from the lists and assign it to the variable days.

3

Calculate daily net energy

Create a list called net_energy that contains the daily net energy for each day by subtracting the consumed energy from the produced energy using a for loop with variable i iterating from 0 to days - 1.

Power Electronics

energy_data = {'consumed': [30, 28, 35, 40, 32], 'produced': [25, 30, 40, 38, 35]}
days = 5
# Calculate net_energy list using a for loop
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a for loop from 0 to days-1 and subtract consumed from produced for each day, then add to net_energy list.

4

Calculate total net energy

Create a variable called total_net_energy and set it to the sum of all values in the net_energy list.

Power Electronics

energy_data = {'consumed': [30, 28, 35, 40, 32], 'produced': [25, 30, 40, 38, 35]}
days = 5
net_energy = []
for i in range(days):
    net_energy.append(energy_data['produced'][i] - energy_data['consumed'][i])
# Calculate total_net_energy as sum of net_energy
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the sum() function to add all daily net energy values into total_net_energy.