3 ms·

It'd be interesting to see what the payback would be like with a small-scale battery system. Obviously it'd be a lot longer and more suited to places with commo

• Syonyk 5y ago
  "Never. By a long shot." At least in terms of financial outcomes. If it improves reliability, it's common enough, but a solar + battery system does well to come in at 4-5x grid rates, even in expensive areas. My office system (off-grid solar + battery) has now dropped below $1/kWh delivered... but not by much. And the batteries are more than halfway through their expected service life (10 years, flooded lead acid). I do it because it's interesting to learn and experiment with, and because trenching power out here would suck, but I don't pretend it's cheap. On the other hand, it is more reliable than the power grid...
• turtlebits 5y ago
  Adding battery storage is prohibitively expensive- not worth it unless you're preparing for an emergency or need to go off grid.
• jandrese 5y ago
  Batteries are getting cheaper every day (well, not so much lately), but if your grid is reasonably stable and your power company does net metering they just don't buy you very much. If you live in an area where the power is regularly going out (or are off grid entirely) then they give you a whole home UPS which is nice, but it doesn't save you money. The only other major use case is when your local power company is run by unrepentant assholes and they screw you over on excess production so it makes sense to try to save that excess production instead of feeding it back to the grid. But this is a penalty reduction instead of an actual savings.