The barrier is batteries and the cost of them. I briefly looked into this. To run my house's essentials: heat, water, fridge, and 1-2 outlets for electronics I

The barrier is batteries and the cost of them. I briefly looked into this. To run my house's essentials: heat, water, fridge, and 1-2 outlets for electronics I currently use a 5KW generator when the power goes out. I have a transfer switch that shows me my peak current: roughly 2.5-3 KW when the well and fridge are running. A deep cycle marine batter that you can readily buy from Amazon costs $100 or so and gives you 12 Volt 35AH. That's 420 Watt hours. Thus to run just the bare essentials in my house for 1 hour, I'd need 7 of these (assuming perfect DC to AC conversion). To run for 24 hours, I'd need 168 of them. So I am investing $16,800 in just batteries. But don't forget, that there will be periods of cloudy days, so you want enough capacity to get through those. I haven't seen the sun here in CT for about a week now... Oh, and in the summer, I do like my AC which itself pulls 5kW and has a relatively high starting current. I'd have to quadruple the capacity to run it. My basement is simply not large enough to contain all these batteries + inverter system. Doing all this to save under $200/month on the electric bill will never pay for itself. A low cost space saving battery with high energy density would be pretty game changing here.