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Great to see DIY early adopters getting great savings here. I think the bigger trend here is lower cost, commoditization, and it eventually becoming a no-braine
by jillesvangurp 1y ago
Great to see DIY early adopters getting great savings here. I think the bigger trend here is lower cost, commoditization, and it eventually becoming a no-brainer for people that have the opportunity/space to be running their own micro grids for cost reasons. The cost of what you need here is still quite high. But making things easier to plug together helps. And of course component cost is coming down.
For example, you can buy kits on amazon for powering your shed or boat and it's essentially a smaller version of what you would put on your house. No electricians needed. No permits required. Here in Germany you can buy balcony solar kits in the supermarket. They only deliver a few hundred watts of power but it's plug and play. And you can get a nice little subsidy to do that. Some of these kits only cost a couple of hundred euro.
I could see that eventually adding a microgrid to a building is not going to break the bank. Car batteries are much larger than what goes in a house and kwh prices are trending well below 100$/kwh now. Meaning it should not cost tens of thousands to get a couple of tens of kwh to store energy. Inverters shouldn't break the bank either. The going rate for solar panels is around 200$.
Mostly current prices for home setups are much higher than the component cost mainly due to regulations, labor cost, certifications, etc. If you go off grid, you can just DIY and you end up much closer to the component cost. But of course long term both component cost and other cost are coming down. With the exception of labor cost probably. Though the skills needed will become more common and you might be able to do a lot of work yourself.