Balcony solar without storage is actually pretty dumb when we already have integrated battery/inverter/solar mppt units available for a few hundred dollars.
All we need to do is have something like this hub inbetween to ensure grid isolation when an outage occurs.
For crticial loads you would just plug those directly into the all in one battery unit. Almost all of them these day also have a <20ms UPS pass through function as well. When the grid goes down it can isolate the battery from backfeeding the house but the solar will still function and the critical loads will still function.
With a solution like Pila is developing you could even use your homes wiring to transfer power (~1kW) around multiple small battery units (attached to independent circuits) each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.
Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). This is California.
California has spent decades convincing people to convert to solar panels and EVs and now that many have switched, they doubled electricity prices and told us not to charge when it’s too hot. Now they want solar panel owners to pay a surcharge for “connecting to the grid”, upwards of $100/month or more than my actual solar bill. It’s all a scam.
It's not a scam. Connecting to the grid has enormous value, and keeping the grid up has real costs. A model where your generation pays you retail prices doesn't make sense.
California's current net metering system, which is more reflective of the true benefits and costs of solar to the power system, has been incentivizing people to add storage to keep their solar rather than get paid big money to feed back midday low-value solar, which is a big win.
> Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid.
That's kind of ... required?
Otherwise you have a bunch of people who are off the grid until the sun doesn't shine for a week and they run their batteries down and then they all try to connect simultaneously and collapse your grid.
Most places I know of don't care if you never connect to the grid--you get your exemption and get on with life.
However, once you are connected to the grid even once, the grid operator has to size things for the worst case when everybody is connected to the grid and drawing power and work things out for stability when everybody disconnects and they have to back off generation. At that point, the grid operator is well within their rights to demand that you comply with cooperative regulations like making a request to connect/disconnect from the grid itself.
It is illegal to discontinue your relationship with your local electrical utility. As in, completely disconnect from the grid, cut the wires and never look back.
As the previous poster said, charging for the “privilege” of connecting to the enormously-valuable grid would be a little bit defensible if having a connection were not legally required in most places.
It is illegal for the utility to disconnect you for nonpayment. There is nothing requiring you to connect to the utility.
In CA, the requirement is that the building either be connected to the electric grid or demonstrate that it has a code-compliant alternative power system capable of meeting all of the buildings expected power needs. The issue is that most residential solar installations aren't capable of meeting all needs except possibly in the summer.
The problem is that there are two different costs associated with running an electrical grid. The first one is a variable usage cost tied to generation and is what everybody thinks about. The problem is that there is also a second constant capital cost to simply maintain your connection to the grid.
In the past, the variable usage generation cost was much greater than the capital cost of maintenance. Solar generation (and decades of energy efficiency programs) breaks that.
The solution is to split electrical bills explicitly into the two parts (variable and constant). The problem with that is that a bunch of people installed solar with the expectation of an amortization schedule of much, much lower electricity bills since most of the cost was bundled into the usage cost which solar would reduce. If you change that billing, the amortization of that solar system goes right out the window.
The secondary problem is that this is politically dangerous because the people you are upsetting are homeowners who have some money and vote fairly reliably.
Furthermore, it is not illegal to COMPLETELY disconnect from the grid. As long as you follow the building codes, you can have the utility come out and completely disconnect the wires and you're good to go. You will likely have to demonstrate some local electrical system within the bounds of your local building codes. However, it is not uncommon for houses in the less populated areas of California to not be connected to the grid at all.
What is NOT legal is leaving those wires connected to the grid and toggling your connection on and off. If you are on or even possibly on the grid, you are expected to cooperate, and you have to help pay for the grid.
Since all we’re doing is opinions, and all opinions are equal.
It’s a scam.
All that money we’re coughing up for rooftop solar and batteries at home would be better spent investing in grid scale electricity generation, of any technology.
That way the best ideas generate more profit than the lesser ideas, and market discovery can solve problems.
Maybe governments could incentivise renters and home owners alike by discounting tax liabilities on new power generation investments. Or share holders could be offered discount rates. I’m open to ideas.
Rather than government picking winners, which seems to have a terrible track record.
Therefore, I posit my opinion is more valuable than yours.
> All that money we’re coughing up for rooftop solar and batteries at home would be better spent investing in grid scale electricity generation, of any technology.
In my city we literally can't buy any more grid scale solar. We rely on the county for transmission, we're buying all we can, and we're maxed. So you either get solar installed or you're paying some of the highest rates for electricity in the country.
I'm installing the max balcony solar the law allows the day it's legal. It's the biggest no-brainer every, it'll pay itself off in ~2 years in my case because it's knocking out the most expensive part of my power bill.
Electricity prices keep increasing, daily supply charge keeps increasing (this ones supposed to pay for the transmission network), while the solar feed-in tariff keeps decreasing.
With the added stupidity that, obviously the sun works during the day and so do you.
Now tax payers are forced to subsidies residential batteries as well as rooftop solar, which results in a wealth transfer from everyone else to home owners, and isn’t a policy that helps low income earners and / or renters.
It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.
The issue in oz, is that energy investment by power companies is locked in with decades long contracts - raising power prices for everyone. But investment by individuals is subject to bait and switch.
Most people bought in with the expectation of a 12-15yr break-even, but the dropping feed in prices, and increase in grid costs have meant that break-even will probably never materialise.
Meanwhile, we keep paying excess costs for power companies to produce dirty power, and subsidise mining companies to sell off our gas and coal overseas, without even getting a benefit through taxes or royalties (or barely any).
Makes sense people are kind of pissed off about this (even if their reasoning is batshit-skynews-crazy).
EV, Battery, Solar, Heat pump, Amber. Maybe be give it a tech abbreviation like HBASE? :)
Ok this may squarely be in the upper middle class and up for now but prices will come down and change everything. Almost to the point of off grid being feasible for suburban and rural areas at least.
Then build solar and wind farms and batteries and hydrogen production/consumption for base load.
Why should Australians continue to tolerate a government that gives half our gas exports away, and exports at least as much coal as it uses.
But not build any modern tech coal and gas for cheap reliable base load and load following power? And nuclear too, we export all the uranium we mine, and at least some of that to nuclear armed states. Yet prohibit both on our own soil.
Why must we continue to be told we should, ever increasingly, rely on a) energy technologies that have proven to be more expensive and unreliable, and b) unproven technologies with unproven costs.
Fortunately there are other political options on the table.
Queue the continued downvotes for a reasonable comment that offers an option contrary to the received wisdom.
Today, building new solar, wind, and batteries is cheaper than building new coal or gas plants, let alone the fuel costs. Building new coal and gas would actually be stupid. Running older plants without caring about pollution might be cheaper in the short term, but not by much.
And what do you mean by "new technology"? We've had solar power for over 50 years and wind power for centuries. Australia was a pioneer in grid-scale batteries over a decade ago with Tesla.
Even if you wanted to build gas and coal plants, where would you get the turbines? There's a massive shortage, with deliveries supposedly 5 to 7 years away that is even before the current AI based demand surge. Nuclear will also take decades to build. The only fast, cheap option left is solar, wind, and batteries. Which can be up and running in under 12 months.
The thing you're missing here is timelines. The reason renewables are expensive is because it requires a grid upgrade to make it work, whereas replacing the old coal generators with new ones wouldn't so much. The kicker is though that once that upgrade is done, maintaining it will be very cheap whereas fossil fuels will continue to get more expensive (both sticker price and the cost of dealing with climate change). It's not like installing more fossil fuels halfway through helps either, we can't use coal to eliminate the duck curve without massively overbuilding it for a huge up front cost. We would need to build enough of it to cover when there is no renewables... which would be enough to never use the renewables at all.
There is a lot of evidence in fact that we have _already_ reached the point where just going all in on renewables is cheaper. People like to point to the last 40 years or so to say fossil fuels are cheaper but that was a time when the rate of new power generation wasn't very high and most power stations had already been built. We are at a point now where just about all of our coal power stations need replacing, and actually doing that would be more expensive than the renewables roll-out.
As for nuclear, the average cost to install and run it _in countries with existing industry_ is also higher than renewables. Despite the costs renewables are actually the cheapest method to get power, even if you add in all the extra associated costs.
Of course if you think the CSIRO is full of paid shills then this won't help, but you should probably have a hard think on who is actually spending the most on lobbying money, which you can also look up quite easily.
What it has done is resulted in ridiculously high electricity prices, such that manufacturing anything in this country has become progressively less viable.
The Net Zero story sold to Australians is, and always was always will be, complete bs, as evidenced by three facts:
1) It’s no longer the narrative, because “data centres”
and
2) even when it was the narrative, it was always bs because Australia exports huge amounts of gas, and a metric ship load of coal, so other countries can have affordable electricity. So why don’t we just use it. There’s only one atmosphere.
and
3) Australia could double or triple its emissions and it would have approximately no additional impact on total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
We haven’t reduced our emissions, we’ve merely exported them.
In before you say “shut up Pauline”, yes I did vote One Nation at the last federal election.
And if you’re so sure I’m just drowning in koolaid, how certain are you you aren’t?
Remember the good old days when governments weren’t to be trusted and we criticised them when they laid out idiotic policy?
Australia emits 1-1.5% of greenhouse gases. Tripling that would absolutely impact global concentrations, especially over human time scales.
But agree, Australia exporting fossil fuels should be reflected. If you counted their export of fuels it would be closer to 5% of global emissions.
IMO, getting to zero would knock over a whole integer percent off the global goal, that's notable. And if you stopped exporting oil, we'd be 1/20th of the way to the goal already!
What we’re doing isn’t working, so let’s do more of it.
There’s a cost of living crisis in this country effecting the majority of Australians.
So let’s make energy more scares, more expensive.
I’m with Gad Saad here, in that the one thing that astounds me the most about other people is their inability to change their opinions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Ah, so you are taking the anti capitalist stance. Interesting to see that pop up here.
Australia sells its fossil fuels on the global market rather than prioritizing its local market. So when disruptions (like the various wars around) drive up prices, Australia sells the gas at a higher rate. This, in turn, drives up prices locally.
Combined with aging and failing coal infrastructure, which isn't producing as much or as reliably, you have a marginal rate that can get quite high.
Meanwhile, Australia has retail electricity providers and not a single government owned utility. Those retailers must make a profit, and they've invested heavy capex into smart metering. So they charge customers as much as customers will tolerate.
You might be right, it might be time to nationalize some of that fossil fuel usage, and remove the profit motive from energy retailing. That could drive down costs for end users.
But I don't think solar is really a major input here beyond replacing baseload. Expensive marginal priced peaker plants are one of the key drivers of high energy costs. When the sun sets, those plants have to come online. Better battery storage would smooth that demand significantly, as in parts of Australia solar production is already producing negative energy prices.
Yeah every non-China nation can say "everyone else should do it, we is little, China should do it"
Problem with pollution is it is easy to overpollute but in the other direction realistically zero is the limit. Unless we go wartime funding on recapturing carbon.
>It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.
The internet was funded by the government until it got big enough. Solar panels were, wind turbines were. Many things aren't cost competitive in the beginning. The free market isn't good at funding something for 20 years to get it price competitive.
You can argue about how long the subsidies should go on for. But they demonstrably work.
The new rule here requires you to pay for part of your imports (up to ~60%), even if you export more. I know people who installed batteries in the inverters because of this. It is more expensive overall (hybrid inverter + LFP batteries) but has other benefits (blackouts are not a problem, most months you don't even use the grid). I imagine that once sodium-ion battery production scales and costs decline, this will become the "default" option for a solar installation.
In more well-run locations, power companies are providing incentives to install batteries because they help reduce the load on the grid.
These are plug-in solutions, though. The whole idea is that a permit isn’t required. If approved in your area, you don’t need to work with the power company at all. You just buy one and plug it in.
The plug-in stuff doesn’t play by the same rules as the big installs.
Yes, and non plugin-in batteries don't just need a permit - typically the power company also directly controls the battery, via a web API that the manufacturer provides (at least in Australia, this is a condition for access to the incentives).
Property taxes increase at a rate legally-mandated to be less than inflation. Not just that, you can inherit your parents (or grandparents) property tax rate.
Didn’t have parents who owned property in 1978 (shortly after racial covenants were declared unconstitutional)? Well, why don’t you just go fuck yourself?
Everywhere you look are policies that are ostensibly progressive, but actually quite regressive.
That doesn't really matter when you're buying a house in CA. It's a relatively small percentage of a difference in my overall mortgage. I'd rather have Prop 13 even if that means some people inherit a tax break. Homes that stay in a family have less administrative churn and keep neighborhoods more stable in the long term.
> Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0).
The way I would see this working is that you charge the batteries when electricity is cheap (generally, midnight through early afternoon), and then run the house (not supply the grid) the rest of the time.
LFPs are cheap enough now that a strategy like this would pay back after about 2 years.
If they try to adapt with a “NEM 4.0”, the whole thing will collapse because solar and LFPs are so cheap that everyone will just pay their mandatory $50/month grid connection fee and not buy any electricity from the grid.
Completely agree with you, Govts sacred duty is to protect the super rich and utilities are the biggest monopolized cash cows (Eg: Warren Buffet). However,if people work with their local governments and change the building code to allow plug-in solar and plug-in batteries, that will continuously upgrade every home to become more and more energy independent and with the explosion of products, eventually be grid free. The biggest costs are labor, permits and delays; if its just products that people can plug and play, the adoption will be faster than just rooftop solar (or rooftop + batteries).
Also, most utilities have tiered rates (higher utilization at higher rates), if you can have plug in systems that can bring the total kwh down, it immediately lowers the peak rate.
The only bottleneck is making products that are safe to plug in, and this will happen as building code creates a standard to plug-in.
So… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably.
If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod.
To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument:
* code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;
* individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;
* the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;
* the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?
* the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;
* one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;
* Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;
* building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…
I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!
I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.
> * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;
UL 3700 exists. Local efforts are underway to let anyone use plug-in sola without contractors, permits, utility approval: https://pluginsolarusa.com/
> individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;
The grid connects millions of individual homes. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here?
> the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;
Plug-in solar or batteries do not feed in to the grid. They are for consumption within the home.
> the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?
There is no work involved other than just plugging it in. There is no volunteer home owners labor. Even if there is, it is their own home. When you turn the lights on, do you add that to your spreadsheet of volunteer home owners labor? Or do you consider plugging a cable into an outlet a big task that should require contractors, project managers, managers, directors, forecasts, estimates, daily standups? If thats your view, thats understandable, most enterprises work that way.
> the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;
plug-in battery uses existing built environment. Thats the whole point.
> one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;
> Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;
Rate tiers are a politically convenient way to hide cost-recovery problems, cross-subsidize favored groups, and extract revenue while pretending the underlying cost structure of the grid is volume-driven when large parts of it are not. California homeowners are buying record numbers of home batteries to pair with solar panels. If the rates are entirely unreasonable, homeowners will go offgrid. California homeowners are smart enough to figure out how to freeze property taxes close to zero, I'm sure they will figure out the right laws when electricity rates become unreasonable.
> building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…
Yeah, just leave it to the utilities and regulators, they have nothing but consumers best interest at heart.
> I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!
plug-in batteries are impossible and require home owners volunteer labor, but fusion, it can manifest from thin air!
If being connected to the grid is a "scam", then disconnect. Buy 100 grand worth of batteries (which still may not get you through the winter), and pull the ol' plug.
NEM 3.0 is more fair. The grid is expensive and just as expensive if it is needed to be fully utilized 1% of the time or 100% of the time.
The problem is California forcing new construction to buy overpriced solar from builders that makes little sense compared to commercial solar installations + grid.
When we got our solar system in CA, our electric bill went to zero. We calculated the payback to be 9 years. Eventually, they stopped buying back electricity and changed the way they metered and our bill was as high as ever. We save a bit because we're able to charge our electric car at times of peak PV output.
We left California last year for this and many other reasons. They just don't want anyone to be productive here.
There are several variations on this idea, and the web sites are confusing.
First, there are ones that are just a big UPS. You plug them into the wall, and plug loads into them. They may try to level your power usage. No problem with that. Good for refrigerators. That seems to be what "Pila" is selling. This class of device seems to come with deceptive ads which do not show cords from loads plugged into the box.
Then there are ones that purport to pump power back into their wall outlet.
That has safety issues, starting with its male power plug being an output.
It can't provide power when there's no input power, because it would try to drive the the whole grid during an outage. It's mostly for taking advantage of variable power pricing. This seems to be what "Regen" is selling.
These are apparently available in Germany, but must be installed on their own dedicated circuit, so you don't have a load and a source on the same side of the breaker. Otherwise, you could potentially have an overload without a breaker trip. Regen is trying to get them into the UK, but old UK ring main wiring is a bad match to this. Gotta have a breaker between load and source.
The trouble with these things is that, plugged into the wrong outlet, they create a gap in overload protection that won't show up until something goes wrong.
That’s largely correct but misses the point that the battery+pv system is legally only allowed to feed in 800W [1]. On our circuits you can draw ~3.5kW without tripping the breaker. This brings you to 4.3kW max load, which - as far as I understand - is still what all the circuitry must be rated for anyways.
The downside is that we have three phase power supply anywhere halfway recent. And that only gives you a single phase. In _most_ cases that’s fine, because you get a net-sum of all three phases at the meter, but technically you are only drawing/supplementing one out of three phases. In practice this likely doesn’t matter since different house put theirs on different phases and it all washes out.
[1] the DC side can have up to 2kW of panels. But that’s not visible to the grid
Plugs and sockets have the wrong gender for this. On the battery, you'd have a male plug with live 240v contacts, ready to short against anything, or anyone, that's conductive. This is the same reason why male-to-male extension cords are labeled "suicide cords".
Well, yes generally speaking. But the way this works with these plug in panels is that the micro inverter won't actually start delivering power to the grid in the absence of an energised plug in the first place. So just sitting there, the contacts are completely harmless. Obviously actual physical safety where you literally can't touch the contacts would be better.
They need the grid frequency to generate AC. Those inverters are only allowed to be grid-following (at least for the plug-in part. I think there are systems that provide a -to-load socket that can be a PSU)
I assume plug-in batteries are considerably more workable in the UK on 240V, since they could charge and deploy at double the rate of a plug-in system here. Of course 240V plugs exist in North America, but they're generally only installed for dryers, ranges, and EV chargers, so people don't tend to have one just free.
What percentage of buyers do you imagine are gonna buy a battery big enough to saturate 15A*120V=1800W for long? The average home uses 30 kWh per day = 1250W. Batteries don't need to handle peak load. Approximately nobody has a whole home UPS.
Also 240V power strips are fairly common in my circles because GPU server PSUs tend to be more efficient at 240V. They're marketed as PDUs, not strips. You're not gonna install a new outlet for every server. One dryer outlet in the garage is enough for most people
I'm not clear what point you're making about PDUs.
Re 120V outlets, while batteries don't need to supply the full peak load, they are more effective the more of it they can supply. And a home with a heat pump or baseboard heaters, electric range, EV charger, or dryer for example is going to at times significantly exceed the capacity of the 120/15 outlet. Doesn't mean the battery would be useless, just that it wouldn't be as effective at its primary purpose of load shifting as a 240V system, and therefore less economical.
> What percentage of buyers do you imagine are gonna buy a battery big enough to saturate 15A*120V=1800W for long?
You can get 10kWh of batteries and a 5kW MPPT chargeverter for a little over $2k these days (UL certified). A 30 kWh system with inverter can be had for around $4k. That’s well within the reach of most households.
What makes it easier on 240v systems is that your entire household is on the same “circuit”.
If you’re on a 120v system, there’s a ~50/50 chance that your load is on the wrong side (except for 240v loads where you’ll imbalance things a tad but it should average out).
Unless you’re in an apartment/conso and have 208v instead of 240v… dunno what happens then.
Every US household has at least some big circuits across both lives. You could theoretically put the battery in the laundry room and use the 240v outlet. This is effectively what I did when my power was out during a hurricane. I backfed my entire house through my laundry room. Not to code but nothing was that week. The circuit wasn't rated for enough to handle the HVAC load so I eventually installed a separate 50A inlet on the side of the house.
> Every US household has at least some big circuits across both lives.
Not really. My parents have all natural gas for the furnance, oven, stove, clothes dryer, and water heater; no air conditioner. Everything else is lights and outlets. There are no 240v outlets and no 240v breakers other than the main breaker.
There are multiple circuits on each phase, you would still need to limit current per outlet to 10A (8A sustained). If it's a dedicated circuit then 15A is fine, but usually that means a separate run, and in that case you can just have 20A or 32A.
When you have "three phase 415v", the 415v is the phase-to-phase voltage. Unlike the US 180 degree split phase 220v or 208v p2p, consumer equipment is not wired phase-to-phase unless it is 3-phase.
It's interesting that Europe has 3 phase cooktops, we usually see 32A single phase in Australia, homes rarely need more than 7kW per circuit. Aircons, pool heat pumps and EV chargers are the 3p loads.
Getting a 3 phase PV inverter is worthwhile if you have sun synchronous loads, like pool heater/chillers, across the phases. Then you will want a 3p battery inverter for the same reasons.
I don't see the point in panels without a battery, so I'm looking at a DIY system. RCBO for new circuit = £20, 5.12kWh battery = £700, ~3kW hybrid inverter from eBay ~=£400, Panels ~= £100 each. I'm not the including cost of a registered electrician for a new circuit in my case.
The plug in "balcony panels" are usually limited to 800W here in Europe, so having them without a battery can make sense because you're probably going to use that power on the spot most of the time.
If "everyone" uses plug-in batteries, the peak demand curve will be flattened and the utility companies will likewise flatten the rate. Then there goes the arbitrage; everyone is left with just an expensive piece of emergency equipment for blackouts.
800W peak * 3 is only 2400W which is fine, it's very unlikely to be pumping out that for long. Now if you put in 6 of them you will have problems, but this is the same problem as people plugging in multiple loads, and circuit breakers handle this fine in practice.
Perhaps the bigger risk is a mix of loads and supplies on the same circuit, which could result in large currents on runs without a circuit breaker. Cheap extension cords are are possible problem too.
Arguably the plug in PV should have to talk to a house bus controller, which controls generation and loads. Unfortunately the standardisation process is impossible.
Right. The problem is the kitchen outlets or some other heavily loaded circuit. Running the microwave and kettle and fridge. And powering via these plus the wall. Or putting three of these on an extension cord.
Where do PVs work best? Since you can't put them on the roof, out in the back yard. So you run a long extension cord and plug them into a power board. Or in an apartment, there might be one circuit with an outside outlet, so they all plug into that.
Usually it isn't sunny enough and the load on the circuit isn't large enough, so the wiring will be fine. But sometimes it won't be.
It's amazing that we actually have an IOT use case and the resistance to networking equipment is profound.
Millions of households have plug-in solar. The payoff is something like 1.5-5 years. Of course, this should be tens or hundreds of millions, but this isn’t vaporware
It's already been a thing for a long time. People in the UK are talking about it more because it's about to be legalized(up to 800W) by the end of August.
The power grid has the potential to be insanely dangerous. We largely have eliminated that danger because of tight regulations and codes.
Look up backfeeding, which is a huge concern with this stuff. It is entirely possible for anyone sharing a transformer with you to send power back up the lines to your house in a dangerous way. That’s why you shouldn’t just plug a generator in with a suicide plug when the power’s out.
A grid tied battery without the right protections is electrically identical to a generator with a suicide plug. We want some standards here.
Not really. If it was off grid it wouldn’t be a problem, but connecting to the grid requires that all of the power generating equipment get along and operate safely.
Anything that starts getting into shared territory requires regulations. Similar to how wireless equipment needs to comply with regulations so we can use the frequency spectrum.
I think the move to allow plug in solar is good, but its just a sticking plaster over the issue. And that is rental houses not having solar, or much of anything.
In the 60s many houses only got indoor toilets because the government forced the issue. Maybe we should be doing the same for insulation, energy efficiency and solar panels.
This goes double for social housing. Poor people can't borrow money as cheaply as the government, so we're left giving money to people to pay their electricity bill. Why not put solar power on their rooves instead. This can be counterbalanced if needed by taking money from the benefits, so it pays for itself.
I've been following this for a while: Regen have a beautifully designed product. The idea that people need to be able to access time of use tariffs in a way that yields lower energy costs makes a lot of sense. But this is about energy costs rather than infrastructure, and the actual problem is that products like this are a) a bit scary to have indoors and b) a hack to compensate for deficiencies in the UK energy market.
I'm also a member of the lovely https://kirkhillcoop.org/ - an energy coop. I own around 1kW of potential overall production from a number of pretty big turbines in southern Scotland, for which I paid around £1k. The benefit to me is I pay opex cost for energy according to the performance of that farm. I believe this is projected at around 5p per kWh - we're getting our first payouts this year.
The coop model means I don't need anything in my house. It is also, sadly, not accessible because of companies like Ripple Energy collapsing. They facilitated the coop being started in the first place. No more of them can be founded. Starting these things in the first place was just too hard and too slow.
Whereas batteries.. are an incentive to use domestic headroom to balance the grid at considerably lower costs than if a commercial operator did it. High costs generally mean time of use tariffs give an incentive to people to do what ought to be grid scale investments, but there's the problem: the only way individuals can capture the benefits of grid scale investment is via specially designed shareholdings in those investments.
Nobody is offering that chance now that ripple is gone. Buy shares in companies operating wind turbines, or retail energy suppliers, and your gains are so much worse than with a Ripple co-op like Kirk Hill. They're worse than a battery, too.
I'll be getting a plug in battery when the time comes, but it is truly insane that I have to personally take on that responsibility to feel the benefit, and that there is no easy route to buying at grid scale. Ripple were a very brief oddity I'll derive a small benefit from for a long time, but now they're gone, and all we have instead is the prospect of storing pretty scary substances in our homes instead, on time of use tariffs which also don't let us reap the full benefit from our investment. It sucks. Cooperativism and mutualism would be a nicer alternative.
The standard governing this is UL 1741 in the US or VDE-AR-N 4105 in the EU. both require certified inverters to detect grid loss and immediately cut off.
How many houses in Britain have wiring that is less than 800 W away from starting a fire? How many of those houses have the disposable income to buy a plug in battery?
Yes, more electricity means more risk of fire. But 800W batteries do not seem like a major safety issue
The new sodium batteries are a lot safer than the lithium chemistries. And we already do have type of home batteries they are just called UPS systems. The real game changer will be when 3-5kwh plugin batteries fall below $150-200pkwh as at those prices batteries will make sense even for apartment owners/renters with no solar to use it to demand shift as time of day electricity prices get more common.
The problem isn't the battery catching fire, it's that you no longer have a circuit breaker between your appliances and the generator. Meaning you could, especially if you have several batteries, push load through wires in the wall in excess of what is rated for.
Sure, but now we're talking about some freak situation where you have multiple sources with a combined allowed load of more than 32amps with 3 or more connected devices drawing at their max rating or above, but only when on battery power when you have no grid connection. Like, it could happen but we're entering the "fun to think about" territory.
Why not when grid connected? The problem arises when you are grid connected.
You draw 31 amps from the grid, you draw 6-7 per battery or solar installation behind the circuit breaker. The circuit never trips because the amount crossing the breaker is 31 amps, but the wires could be dealing with 37+. With battery and solar that could be 43+. Some idiot puts two or three of these in their house or puts them on an extension cord, wires are going to get warm.
This is not daisy chained (HN markup hates diagrams) but hanging off wall circuits and power boards. With a situation like this (in 240v) the batteries will sink 2x10A and the PV will supply 16A through point P1. The CB will not trip, nor will appliance fuses.
Since you can just buy 800W modules from Aldi for €300 people will definitely do this by accident. However, it will likely go away because Aldi et Al are also selling their Balkonkraftwerk with batteries included (2000Wh at 1700W) for €1000.
If the comms-over-powerline standards were working then devices could talk to their CB and reserve/advertise capacity. But sadly the power companies have just been fighting to ban home automation and smart grid technology.
I mean sure but right now in the UK you can only add one 800W source without planning permissions.
I'm just not sure what we're trying to say here - can someone create a dangerous situation for themselves by ignoring the rules? Yeah of course.
My example above was for a 32+ amp source(or a collection of sources) which can operate with the grid off, like most battery systems in the UK can - they just have a relay that disconnects the grid when the grid is offline. So it's not illegal, but it's also something that would require a planning permission to have. Can someone just go any buy themselves 10x800W modules, plug them all into one ring and burn their house down? Yes,but that was never a legal setup in the first place.
Traditionally we have been quite prescriptive about what people can do electrically on their side of the meter, in the name of protecting people from themselves. (Even with a grid isolation switch.) Allowing generation that isn't wired in by a licensed electrician is a big change in regulation, so people are jittery and vested interests are using that.
So it isn't no risk and it isn't a huge risk. Some people will do stupid things. I think we could do more to protect people using plug-in generation, and simultaneously improve grid regulation and reduce costs. As engineers I think we are duty bound to achieve these objectives, but accountants run energy companies now and donate to politicians, and politicians run policy. What we have left is technical innovation that creates economic impetus.
So I'm in favour of technology that makes low cost PV+storage safe and available, economically and with just enough regulation.
With the US banning Chinese inverters, it will be interesting to see if that spawns new tech, or if they just licence build/assemble Chinese junk. Prices will be higher initially but competition should be strong. Unfortunately US standards for software/interoperability seem absent. IEEE 2030.5 is not nationally mandated in the US AFAIK, and it is weak on cyber assurance.
IEEE 2030.5 is also designed for grid to consumer and doesn't anticipate having multiple PV devices that need to talk, let alone batteries. The Germans just exempted everything below 960W, so people routinely have several panels plugged in.
Yes payback period batteries as at those prices payback period falls below 5 years with just 4-5c arbitrage so even if you don't have solar like most apartments it is still useful. And the price is low enough that it can be made mandatory for all new home construction without inflating home prices.
While the potential for fires shouldn't be dismissed, for batteries designed to be stationary rather than mobile (such as in an e-bike), you can use a chemistry optimized for stability rather than optimizing for compact weight and size.
Because there are not enough of these large battery banks, which require planning permission to build.
Whereas you can buy a battery that will save you money over a 5 year period and get on with it.
(I'm hoping that enough of the larger ones get built that having one yourself doesn't make economic sense, but I suspect we're ten years out from that)
LiFePO4 batteries generally sit upwards of 3000-8000 cycles to 80 percent original charge.... Depends on what your chemistry is.
As the batteries improve, you'll probably want to upgrade every 8-10 years or add/swap out a 1/4 to 1/2 storage by that time, still able to use effectively even if a little lower top end. Depends on your usage and if you're still on grid.
Lithium irons are often 4000 cycle now. For full cycles.
I forget who but I really want to say I was looking at some cells a year or three ago that were 10k cycle count.
And it's not like the battery is worthless at that point. It just means the battery is down to 80% max capacity. You can down cycle it, find some other consumer to use it, replace it, if you need the capacity. But should keep running for a long time.
What was the breaking point for modern British society where housing unwieldy and potentially hazardous electrical equipment in your living room seems like a completely normal and just thing to do?
Bluetti already has a product for this available in the EU. I have been posting eveywhere that they need to bring it to the US.
https://www.bluettipower.eu/products/balco-transfer-hub
Balcony solar without storage is actually pretty dumb when we already have integrated battery/inverter/solar mppt units available for a few hundred dollars.
All we need to do is have something like this hub inbetween to ensure grid isolation when an outage occurs.
For crticial loads you would just plug those directly into the all in one battery unit. Almost all of them these day also have a <20ms UPS pass through function as well. When the grid goes down it can isolate the battery from backfeeding the house but the solar will still function and the critical loads will still function.
With a solution like Pila is developing you could even use your homes wiring to transfer power (~1kW) around multiple small battery units (attached to independent circuits) each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.
Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). This is California.
California has spent decades convincing people to convert to solar panels and EVs and now that many have switched, they doubled electricity prices and told us not to charge when it’s too hot. Now they want solar panel owners to pay a surcharge for “connecting to the grid”, upwards of $100/month or more than my actual solar bill. It’s all a scam.
It's not a scam. Connecting to the grid has enormous value, and keeping the grid up has real costs. A model where your generation pays you retail prices doesn't make sense.
California's current net metering system, which is more reflective of the true benefits and costs of solar to the power system, has been incentivizing people to add storage to keep their solar rather than get paid big money to feed back midday low-value solar, which is a big win.
> Connecting to the grid has enormous value
Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid.
If disconnection were legal for those who want to be energy self-sufficient, then charging just to connect would be more defensible.
> Yet in most locales it's illegal to disconnect from the grid.
That's kind of ... required?
Otherwise you have a bunch of people who are off the grid until the sun doesn't shine for a week and they run their batteries down and then they all try to connect simultaneously and collapse your grid.
Most places I know of don't care if you never connect to the grid--you get your exemption and get on with life.
However, once you are connected to the grid even once, the grid operator has to size things for the worst case when everybody is connected to the grid and drawing power and work things out for stability when everybody disconnects and they have to back off generation. At that point, the grid operator is well within their rights to demand that you comply with cooperative regulations like making a request to connect/disconnect from the grid itself.
Are you being deliberately obtuse?
It is illegal to discontinue your relationship with your local electrical utility. As in, completely disconnect from the grid, cut the wires and never look back.
As the previous poster said, charging for the “privilege” of connecting to the enormously-valuable grid would be a little bit defensible if having a connection were not legally required in most places.
You have it exactly backwards.
It is illegal for the utility to disconnect you for nonpayment. There is nothing requiring you to connect to the utility.
In CA, the requirement is that the building either be connected to the electric grid or demonstrate that it has a code-compliant alternative power system capable of meeting all of the buildings expected power needs. The issue is that most residential solar installations aren't capable of meeting all needs except possibly in the summer.
The problem is that there are two different costs associated with running an electrical grid. The first one is a variable usage cost tied to generation and is what everybody thinks about. The problem is that there is also a second constant capital cost to simply maintain your connection to the grid.
In the past, the variable usage generation cost was much greater than the capital cost of maintenance. Solar generation (and decades of energy efficiency programs) breaks that.
The solution is to split electrical bills explicitly into the two parts (variable and constant). The problem with that is that a bunch of people installed solar with the expectation of an amortization schedule of much, much lower electricity bills since most of the cost was bundled into the usage cost which solar would reduce. If you change that billing, the amortization of that solar system goes right out the window.
The secondary problem is that this is politically dangerous because the people you are upsetting are homeowners who have some money and vote fairly reliably.
Furthermore, it is not illegal to COMPLETELY disconnect from the grid. As long as you follow the building codes, you can have the utility come out and completely disconnect the wires and you're good to go. You will likely have to demonstrate some local electrical system within the bounds of your local building codes. However, it is not uncommon for houses in the less populated areas of California to not be connected to the grid at all.
What is NOT legal is leaving those wires connected to the grid and toggling your connection on and off. If you are on or even possibly on the grid, you are expected to cooperate, and you have to help pay for the grid.
I have no idea where it would be illegal not to connect to the grid. You can just not pay your electric bill.
You know I can just not use that grid electricity, pay the absolute minimum, and then do everything off grid right?
Not according to this ancestor comment:
> Now they want solar panel owners to pay a surcharge for “connecting to the grid”, upwards of $100/month or more than my actual solar bill
Depending on jurisdiction.
This is not ubiquitous. It is common.
Since all we’re doing is opinions, and all opinions are equal.
It’s a scam.
All that money we’re coughing up for rooftop solar and batteries at home would be better spent investing in grid scale electricity generation, of any technology.
That way the best ideas generate more profit than the lesser ideas, and market discovery can solve problems.
Maybe governments could incentivise renters and home owners alike by discounting tax liabilities on new power generation investments. Or share holders could be offered discount rates. I’m open to ideas.
Rather than government picking winners, which seems to have a terrible track record.
Therefore, I posit my opinion is more valuable than yours.
> All that money we’re coughing up for rooftop solar and batteries at home would be better spent investing in grid scale electricity generation, of any technology.
In my city we literally can't buy any more grid scale solar. We rely on the county for transmission, we're buying all we can, and we're maxed. So you either get solar installed or you're paying some of the highest rates for electricity in the country.
I'm installing the max balcony solar the law allows the day it's legal. It's the biggest no-brainer every, it'll pay itself off in ~2 years in my case because it's knocking out the most expensive part of my power bill.
> in my city we literally can't buy any more grid scale solar.
Ok. That’s not the argument I was making though.
And neither is the rest of your comment a reply to anything I wrote.
Of course in the absence of the full suite of options, people will and should make rational economic decisions based on the options they do have.
And hopefully keep voting the bastards out until better options are on the table.
Similarly here in Australia.
Electricity prices keep increasing, daily supply charge keeps increasing (this ones supposed to pay for the transmission network), while the solar feed-in tariff keeps decreasing.
With the added stupidity that, obviously the sun works during the day and so do you.
Now tax payers are forced to subsidies residential batteries as well as rooftop solar, which results in a wealth transfer from everyone else to home owners, and isn’t a policy that helps low income earners and / or renters.
It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.
Wild.
Didn't Australia just introduce free daytime electricity?
No.
https://www.energy.gov.au/news/new-energy-plan-daily-window-...
Australia has been a great success for solar and battery storage.
Your statement about a wealth transfer is putting no value on climate change or good air quality which benefits all.
The issue in oz, is that energy investment by power companies is locked in with decades long contracts - raising power prices for everyone. But investment by individuals is subject to bait and switch.
Most people bought in with the expectation of a 12-15yr break-even, but the dropping feed in prices, and increase in grid costs have meant that break-even will probably never materialise.
Meanwhile, we keep paying excess costs for power companies to produce dirty power, and subsidise mining companies to sell off our gas and coal overseas, without even getting a benefit through taxes or royalties (or barely any).
Makes sense people are kind of pissed off about this (even if their reasoning is batshit-skynews-crazy).
EV, Battery, Solar, Heat pump, Amber. Maybe be give it a tech abbreviation like HBASE? :)
Ok this may squarely be in the upper middle class and up for now but prices will come down and change everything. Almost to the point of off grid being feasible for suburban and rural areas at least.
Then build solar and wind farms and batteries and hydrogen production/consumption for base load.
Edit: changed to inc. solar
Why?
Why should Australians continue to tolerate a government that gives half our gas exports away, and exports at least as much coal as it uses.
But not build any modern tech coal and gas for cheap reliable base load and load following power? And nuclear too, we export all the uranium we mine, and at least some of that to nuclear armed states. Yet prohibit both on our own soil.
Why must we continue to be told we should, ever increasingly, rely on a) energy technologies that have proven to be more expensive and unreliable, and b) unproven technologies with unproven costs.
Fortunately there are other political options on the table.
Queue the continued downvotes for a reasonable comment that offers an option contrary to the received wisdom.
Today, building new solar, wind, and batteries is cheaper than building new coal or gas plants, let alone the fuel costs. Building new coal and gas would actually be stupid. Running older plants without caring about pollution might be cheaper in the short term, but not by much.
And what do you mean by "new technology"? We've had solar power for over 50 years and wind power for centuries. Australia was a pioneer in grid-scale batteries over a decade ago with Tesla.
Even if you wanted to build gas and coal plants, where would you get the turbines? There's a massive shortage, with deliveries supposedly 5 to 7 years away that is even before the current AI based demand surge. Nuclear will also take decades to build. The only fast, cheap option left is solar, wind, and batteries. Which can be up and running in under 12 months.
The thing you're missing here is timelines. The reason renewables are expensive is because it requires a grid upgrade to make it work, whereas replacing the old coal generators with new ones wouldn't so much. The kicker is though that once that upgrade is done, maintaining it will be very cheap whereas fossil fuels will continue to get more expensive (both sticker price and the cost of dealing with climate change). It's not like installing more fossil fuels halfway through helps either, we can't use coal to eliminate the duck curve without massively overbuilding it for a huge up front cost. We would need to build enough of it to cover when there is no renewables... which would be enough to never use the renewables at all.
There is a lot of evidence in fact that we have _already_ reached the point where just going all in on renewables is cheaper. People like to point to the last 40 years or so to say fossil fuels are cheaper but that was a time when the rate of new power generation wasn't very high and most power stations had already been built. We are at a point now where just about all of our coal power stations need replacing, and actually doing that would be more expensive than the renewables roll-out.
As for nuclear, the average cost to install and run it _in countries with existing industry_ is also higher than renewables. Despite the costs renewables are actually the cheapest method to get power, even if you add in all the extra associated costs.
If you're actually interested in reading up on this then I can suggest going through the GenCost report https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/Ele...
Of course if you think the CSIRO is full of paid shills then this won't help, but you should probably have a hard think on who is actually spending the most on lobbying money, which you can also look up quite easily.
I am up for nuclear actually. And some gas as backup but not base. I just thing that global warming is a threat and every country needs to combat it.
No it hasn’t.
What it has done is resulted in ridiculously high electricity prices, such that manufacturing anything in this country has become progressively less viable.
The Net Zero story sold to Australians is, and always was always will be, complete bs, as evidenced by three facts:
1) It’s no longer the narrative, because “data centres”
and
2) even when it was the narrative, it was always bs because Australia exports huge amounts of gas, and a metric ship load of coal, so other countries can have affordable electricity. So why don’t we just use it. There’s only one atmosphere.
and
3) Australia could double or triple its emissions and it would have approximately no additional impact on total atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.
We haven’t reduced our emissions, we’ve merely exported them.
In before you say “shut up Pauline”, yes I did vote One Nation at the last federal election.
And if you’re so sure I’m just drowning in koolaid, how certain are you you aren’t?
Remember the good old days when governments weren’t to be trusted and we criticised them when they laid out idiotic policy?
Australia emits 1-1.5% of greenhouse gases. Tripling that would absolutely impact global concentrations, especially over human time scales.
But agree, Australia exporting fossil fuels should be reflected. If you counted their export of fuels it would be closer to 5% of global emissions.
IMO, getting to zero would knock over a whole integer percent off the global goal, that's notable. And if you stopped exporting oil, we'd be 1/20th of the way to the goal already!
Your argument seems to boil down to:
What we’re doing isn’t working, so let’s do more of it.
There’s a cost of living crisis in this country effecting the majority of Australians.
So let’s make energy more scares, more expensive.
I’m with Gad Saad here, in that the one thing that astounds me the most about other people is their inability to change their opinions in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Ah, so you are taking the anti capitalist stance. Interesting to see that pop up here.
Australia sells its fossil fuels on the global market rather than prioritizing its local market. So when disruptions (like the various wars around) drive up prices, Australia sells the gas at a higher rate. This, in turn, drives up prices locally.
Combined with aging and failing coal infrastructure, which isn't producing as much or as reliably, you have a marginal rate that can get quite high.
Meanwhile, Australia has retail electricity providers and not a single government owned utility. Those retailers must make a profit, and they've invested heavy capex into smart metering. So they charge customers as much as customers will tolerate.
You might be right, it might be time to nationalize some of that fossil fuel usage, and remove the profit motive from energy retailing. That could drive down costs for end users.
But I don't think solar is really a major input here beyond replacing baseload. Expensive marginal priced peaker plants are one of the key drivers of high energy costs. When the sun sets, those plants have to come online. Better battery storage would smooth that demand significantly, as in parts of Australia solar production is already producing negative energy prices.
Yeah every non-China nation can say "everyone else should do it, we is little, China should do it"
Problem with pollution is it is easy to overpollute but in the other direction realistically zero is the limit. Unless we go wartime funding on recapturing carbon.
On the other hand you could just not export the coal and leave it in the ground?
Unfortunately that will piss off others who want the income. But then those same people won't plan for a time when there's no buyers for coal, so.....
And all the people who rely on that energy?
What about them?
Some of that coal is coking coal, used to make steel.
What of it?
>It’s also government picking winners, which historically has never worked, rather than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.
The internet was funded by the government until it got big enough. Solar panels were, wind turbines were. Many things aren't cost competitive in the beginning. The free market isn't good at funding something for 20 years to get it price competitive.
You can argue about how long the subsidies should go on for. But they demonstrably work.
The new rule here requires you to pay for part of your imports (up to ~60%), even if you export more. I know people who installed batteries in the inverters because of this. It is more expensive overall (hybrid inverter + LFP batteries) but has other benefits (blackouts are not a problem, most months you don't even use the grid). I imagine that once sodium-ion battery production scales and costs decline, this will become the "default" option for a solar installation.
In more well-run locations, power companies are providing incentives to install batteries because they help reduce the load on the grid.
These are plug-in solutions, though. The whole idea is that a permit isn’t required. If approved in your area, you don’t need to work with the power company at all. You just buy one and plug it in.
The plug-in stuff doesn’t play by the same rules as the big installs.
Yes, and non plugin-in batteries don't just need a permit - typically the power company also directly controls the battery, via a web API that the manufacturer provides (at least in Australia, this is a condition for access to the incentives).
For the incentive programs you need to submit to a virtual power program so the power company can coordinate the fleet.
For normal non-subsidized installations here you don’t need to let the power company control it.
The solar situation in CA is truly mind boggling for a state that is ostensibly progressive.
It’s not just solar.
Property taxes increase at a rate legally-mandated to be less than inflation. Not just that, you can inherit your parents (or grandparents) property tax rate.
Didn’t have parents who owned property in 1978 (shortly after racial covenants were declared unconstitutional)? Well, why don’t you just go fuck yourself?
Everywhere you look are policies that are ostensibly progressive, but actually quite regressive.
That doesn't really matter when you're buying a house in CA. It's a relatively small percentage of a difference in my overall mortgage. I'd rather have Prop 13 even if that means some people inherit a tax break. Homes that stay in a family have less administrative churn and keep neighborhoods more stable in the long term.
> Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0).
The way I would see this working is that you charge the batteries when electricity is cheap (generally, midnight through early afternoon), and then run the house (not supply the grid) the rest of the time.
LFPs are cheap enough now that a strategy like this would pay back after about 2 years.
If they try to adapt with a “NEM 4.0”, the whole thing will collapse because solar and LFPs are so cheap that everyone will just pay their mandatory $50/month grid connection fee and not buy any electricity from the grid.
Completely agree with you, Govts sacred duty is to protect the super rich and utilities are the biggest monopolized cash cows (Eg: Warren Buffet). However,if people work with their local governments and change the building code to allow plug-in solar and plug-in batteries, that will continuously upgrade every home to become more and more energy independent and with the explosion of products, eventually be grid free. The biggest costs are labor, permits and delays; if its just products that people can plug and play, the adoption will be faster than just rooftop solar (or rooftop + batteries).
Also, most utilities have tiered rates (higher utilization at higher rates), if you can have plug in systems that can bring the total kwh down, it immediately lowers the peak rate.
The only bottleneck is making products that are safe to plug in, and this will happen as building code creates a standard to plug-in.
So… @lazide replied with a hahaha. It got flagged to death, understandably.
If it were anybody but @lazide I’d have flagged it too, but… I can’t help but grimace and nod.
To hazard a loosely-informed guess at their subtext… and politely ignoring your opening salvo of calorie-free populism… I’m not speaking from a place of certainty, but my impression is that there seem to be elements of “not even wrong” here. Some contra- lines of argument:
* code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;
* individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;
* the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;
* the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?
* the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;
* one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;
* Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;
* building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…
I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!
I love your sense of empowerment; I’d encourage you to bring it to bear at a scale where it matters— much bigger than a home, much smaller than a whole polity… I think there are benefits to decentralization and to independence but I don’t think those are the benefits you’re emphasizing here.
> * code, especially in the huge fundamental aspects, tends to flow from the NEC downward, rather than from municipal experiments in playing with literal fire. Not insurmountable, I guess, but it seems like a pretty big chicken-and-egg kind of obstacle to your proposed course of action;
UL 3700 exists. Local efforts are underway to let anyone use plug-in sola without contractors, permits, utility approval: https://pluginsolarusa.com/
> individual household demand is several orders of magnitude removed from the considerations informing grid design and operations;
The grid connects millions of individual homes. I'm not sure what you are trying to say here?
> the last thing a grid needs is a meaningful amount of random feed-in that it can’t centrally (and near-instantly) manage;
Plug-in solar or batteries do not feed in to the grid. They are for consumption within the home.
> the costs of home-scale labor/permits/whatever are only the biggest ones from the perspective of toting up individual homeowners considering uneconomical projects, not from utility-scale (much less whole-polity-scale) scratchwork… would an army of volunteer homeowners’ labor really still outperform specialist labor installing hundreds-of-homes’ worth of capacity per day at an energy facility somewhere?
There is no work involved other than just plugging it in. There is no volunteer home owners labor. Even if there is, it is their own home. When you turn the lights on, do you add that to your spreadsheet of volunteer home owners labor? Or do you consider plugging a cable into an outlet a big task that should require contractors, project managers, managers, directors, forecasts, estimates, daily standups? If thats your view, thats understandable, most enterprises work that way.
> the thing holding back the “explosion of products,” consumerist-salvation overtones aside, seems more likely to be {physics vs the existing built environment} than permits—that, plus the lack of a mass market;
plug-in battery uses existing built environment. Thats the whole point.
> one barrier to “plug and play” is that said plugs are safe only because of an interlocking set of assumptions upstream of said plugs—which definitely do not contemplate feeding back in whole-home current from a random convenience outlet on your front porch;
I don't know what you are trying to say here. It sounds like corporate speak: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QmAbQMukB4
> Rate tiers are an economic device to influence consumption patterns under the status quo. As the Californians are learning, there’s a hard floor on the price of “having a grid” vs “not having a grid”; as consumption patterns shift, rate schemes can and must shift too;
Rate tiers are a politically convenient way to hide cost-recovery problems, cross-subsidize favored groups, and extract revenue while pretending the underlying cost structure of the grid is volume-driven when large parts of it are not. California homeowners are buying record numbers of home batteries to pair with solar panels. If the rates are entirely unreasonable, homeowners will go offgrid. California homeowners are smart enough to figure out how to freeze property taxes close to zero, I'm sure they will figure out the right laws when electricity rates become unreasonable.
> building codes care about safety, grids and ISOs and energy providers care about capacity and stability. Players on grids can realize enormous economies of scale with respect to pretty much any generation or storage technology. The bottleneck you describe is…
Yeah, just leave it to the utilities and regulators, they have nothing but consumers best interest at heart.
> I dunno, man… the only bottleneck to energy too cheap to meter is fusion, obviously all we have to do is just go crack fusion and we’ll have a fusion pot on every stove!
plug-in batteries are impossible and require home owners volunteer labor, but fusion, it can manifest from thin air!
If being connected to the grid is a "scam", then disconnect. Buy 100 grand worth of batteries (which still may not get you through the winter), and pull the ol' plug.
NEM 3.0 is more fair. The grid is expensive and just as expensive if it is needed to be fully utilized 1% of the time or 100% of the time.
The problem is California forcing new construction to buy overpriced solar from builders that makes little sense compared to commercial solar installations + grid.
These are problems not inherent to solar, but to places that are underdeveloped and under-regulated.
Plenty of places in modern and developing countries don’t have these issues.
When we got our solar system in CA, our electric bill went to zero. We calculated the payback to be 9 years. Eventually, they stopped buying back electricity and changed the way they metered and our bill was as high as ever. We save a bit because we're able to charge our electric car at times of peak PV output.
We left California last year for this and many other reasons. They just don't want anyone to be productive here.
Literally one of the most productive states of the entire world btw
It's not even close too.
Dishonest post. When you bought your system you were grandfathered into either NEM 1 or NEM 2. Please provide proof that your arrangement changed.
NEM 2.0 doesn't pay as much anymore but that could just be increased grid electricity costs.
There are several variations on this idea, and the web sites are confusing.
First, there are ones that are just a big UPS. You plug them into the wall, and plug loads into them. They may try to level your power usage. No problem with that. Good for refrigerators. That seems to be what "Pila" is selling. This class of device seems to come with deceptive ads which do not show cords from loads plugged into the box.
Then there are ones that purport to pump power back into their wall outlet. That has safety issues, starting with its male power plug being an output. It can't provide power when there's no input power, because it would try to drive the the whole grid during an outage. It's mostly for taking advantage of variable power pricing. This seems to be what "Regen" is selling.
These are apparently available in Germany, but must be installed on their own dedicated circuit, so you don't have a load and a source on the same side of the breaker. Otherwise, you could potentially have an overload without a breaker trip. Regen is trying to get them into the UK, but old UK ring main wiring is a bad match to this. Gotta have a breaker between load and source.
The trouble with these things is that, plugged into the wrong outlet, they create a gap in overload protection that won't show up until something goes wrong.
That’s largely correct but misses the point that the battery+pv system is legally only allowed to feed in 800W [1]. On our circuits you can draw ~3.5kW without tripping the breaker. This brings you to 4.3kW max load, which - as far as I understand - is still what all the circuitry must be rated for anyways.
The downside is that we have three phase power supply anywhere halfway recent. And that only gives you a single phase. In _most_ cases that’s fine, because you get a net-sum of all three phases at the meter, but technically you are only drawing/supplementing one out of three phases. In practice this likely doesn’t matter since different house put theirs on different phases and it all washes out.
[1] the DC side can have up to 2kW of panels. But that’s not visible to the grid
Plugs and sockets have the wrong gender for this. On the battery, you'd have a male plug with live 240v contacts, ready to short against anything, or anyone, that's conductive. This is the same reason why male-to-male extension cords are labeled "suicide cords".
Well, yes generally speaking. But the way this works with these plug in panels is that the micro inverter won't actually start delivering power to the grid in the absence of an energised plug in the first place. So just sitting there, the contacts are completely harmless. Obviously actual physical safety where you literally can't touch the contacts would be better.
How do you detect that it's plugged in? Just detecting voltage would mean that you'd unplug it and it would stay energized, right?
They need the grid frequency to generate AC. Those inverters are only allowed to be grid-following (at least for the plug-in part. I think there are systems that provide a -to-load socket that can be a PSU)
We've had these for years? My brother has two solar panels on his balcony and plugged into a normal socket.
I assume plug-in batteries are considerably more workable in the UK on 240V, since they could charge and deploy at double the rate of a plug-in system here. Of course 240V plugs exist in North America, but they're generally only installed for dryers, ranges, and EV chargers, so people don't tend to have one just free.
What percentage of buyers do you imagine are gonna buy a battery big enough to saturate 15A*120V=1800W for long? The average home uses 30 kWh per day = 1250W. Batteries don't need to handle peak load. Approximately nobody has a whole home UPS.
Also 240V power strips are fairly common in my circles because GPU server PSUs tend to be more efficient at 240V. They're marketed as PDUs, not strips. You're not gonna install a new outlet for every server. One dryer outlet in the garage is enough for most people
I'm not clear what point you're making about PDUs.
Re 120V outlets, while batteries don't need to supply the full peak load, they are more effective the more of it they can supply. And a home with a heat pump or baseboard heaters, electric range, EV charger, or dryer for example is going to at times significantly exceed the capacity of the 120/15 outlet. Doesn't mean the battery would be useless, just that it wouldn't be as effective at its primary purpose of load shifting as a 240V system, and therefore less economical.
> What percentage of buyers do you imagine are gonna buy a battery big enough to saturate 15A*120V=1800W for long?
You can get 10kWh of batteries and a 5kW MPPT chargeverter for a little over $2k these days (UL certified). A 30 kWh system with inverter can be had for around $4k. That’s well within the reach of most households.
What makes it easier on 240v systems is that your entire household is on the same “circuit”.
If you’re on a 120v system, there’s a ~50/50 chance that your load is on the wrong side (except for 240v loads where you’ll imbalance things a tad but it should average out).
Unless you’re in an apartment/conso and have 208v instead of 240v… dunno what happens then.
Every US household has at least some big circuits across both lives. You could theoretically put the battery in the laundry room and use the 240v outlet. This is effectively what I did when my power was out during a hurricane. I backfed my entire house through my laundry room. Not to code but nothing was that week. The circuit wasn't rated for enough to handle the HVAC load so I eventually installed a separate 50A inlet on the side of the house.
> Every US household has at least some big circuits across both lives.
Not really. My parents have all natural gas for the furnance, oven, stove, clothes dryer, and water heater; no air conditioner. Everything else is lights and outlets. There are no 240v outlets and no 240v breakers other than the main breaker.
This is true for the British system, except for the largest houses (6+ bedrooms) where you'll have a three phase 415V supply.
Elsewhere in Europe it varies. Even small properties in Denmark and I think Germany have a three phase supply, my oven and stove use it directly.
There are multiple circuits on each phase, you would still need to limit current per outlet to 10A (8A sustained). If it's a dedicated circuit then 15A is fine, but usually that means a separate run, and in that case you can just have 20A or 32A.
When you have "three phase 415v", the 415v is the phase-to-phase voltage. Unlike the US 180 degree split phase 220v or 208v p2p, consumer equipment is not wired phase-to-phase unless it is 3-phase.
It's interesting that Europe has 3 phase cooktops, we usually see 32A single phase in Australia, homes rarely need more than 7kW per circuit. Aircons, pool heat pumps and EV chargers are the 3p loads.
Getting a 3 phase PV inverter is worthwhile if you have sun synchronous loads, like pool heater/chillers, across the phases. Then you will want a 3p battery inverter for the same reasons.
It would be very unlikely that your 240v system would all be on the same circuit, unless you have an antique UK ring main.
I don't see the point in panels without a battery, so I'm looking at a DIY system. RCBO for new circuit = £20, 5.12kWh battery = £700, ~3kW hybrid inverter from eBay ~=£400, Panels ~= £100 each. I'm not the including cost of a registered electrician for a new circuit in my case.
The plug in "balcony panels" are usually limited to 800W here in Europe, so having them without a battery can make sense because you're probably going to use that power on the spot most of the time.
If "everyone" uses plug-in batteries, the peak demand curve will be flattened and the utility companies will likewise flatten the rate. Then there goes the arbitrage; everyone is left with just an expensive piece of emergency equipment for blackouts.
UK-based reader here. Homeowner, with no solar or battery, but interested in getting some decent, independent advice, how would I go about it?
We are a two EV household, with oil central heating. Don’t mind paying for solid unbiased advice.
Can give free advice, contact in profile
What happens when a consumer buys three and sticks them on the same 20 amp circuit?
Cause people will definitely do that. Going to be some warm walls.
800W peak * 3 is only 2400W which is fine, it's very unlikely to be pumping out that for long. Now if you put in 6 of them you will have problems, but this is the same problem as people plugging in multiple loads, and circuit breakers handle this fine in practice.
Perhaps the bigger risk is a mix of loads and supplies on the same circuit, which could result in large currents on runs without a circuit breaker. Cheap extension cords are are possible problem too.
Arguably the plug in PV should have to talk to a house bus controller, which controls generation and loads. Unfortunately the standardisation process is impossible.
Right. The problem is the kitchen outlets or some other heavily loaded circuit. Running the microwave and kettle and fridge. And powering via these plus the wall. Or putting three of these on an extension cord.
Where do PVs work best? Since you can't put them on the roof, out in the back yard. So you run a long extension cord and plug them into a power board. Or in an apartment, there might be one circuit with an outside outlet, so they all plug into that.
Usually it isn't sunny enough and the load on the circuit isn't large enough, so the wiring will be fine. But sometimes it won't be.
It's amazing that we actually have an IOT use case and the resistance to networking equipment is profound.
As someone with a poor background in electrical engineering, this is really cool. It’s amazing that you guys can make something like this work.
I thought plug-in solar was coming 10+ years ago.
Millions of households have plug-in solar. The payoff is something like 1.5-5 years. Of course, this should be tens or hundreds of millions, but this isn’t vaporware
It's already been a thing for a long time. People in the UK are talking about it more because it's about to be legalized(up to 800W) by the end of August.
Wild that we have to ask permission to be able to make this stuff.
The power grid has the potential to be insanely dangerous. We largely have eliminated that danger because of tight regulations and codes.
Look up backfeeding, which is a huge concern with this stuff. It is entirely possible for anyone sharing a transformer with you to send power back up the lines to your house in a dangerous way. That’s why you shouldn’t just plug a generator in with a suicide plug when the power’s out.
A grid tied battery without the right protections is electrically identical to a generator with a suicide plug. We want some standards here.
Thanks for clarifying this, clearly I did not read enough into the details.
Not really. If it was off grid it wouldn’t be a problem, but connecting to the grid requires that all of the power generating equipment get along and operate safely.
Anything that starts getting into shared territory requires regulations. Similar to how wireless equipment needs to comply with regulations so we can use the frequency spectrum.
I think the move to allow plug in solar is good, but its just a sticking plaster over the issue. And that is rental houses not having solar, or much of anything.
In the 60s many houses only got indoor toilets because the government forced the issue. Maybe we should be doing the same for insulation, energy efficiency and solar panels.
This goes double for social housing. Poor people can't borrow money as cheaply as the government, so we're left giving money to people to pay their electricity bill. Why not put solar power on their rooves instead. This can be counterbalanced if needed by taking money from the benefits, so it pays for itself.
I've been following this for a while: Regen have a beautifully designed product. The idea that people need to be able to access time of use tariffs in a way that yields lower energy costs makes a lot of sense. But this is about energy costs rather than infrastructure, and the actual problem is that products like this are a) a bit scary to have indoors and b) a hack to compensate for deficiencies in the UK energy market.
I'm also a member of the lovely https://kirkhillcoop.org/ - an energy coop. I own around 1kW of potential overall production from a number of pretty big turbines in southern Scotland, for which I paid around £1k. The benefit to me is I pay opex cost for energy according to the performance of that farm. I believe this is projected at around 5p per kWh - we're getting our first payouts this year.
The coop model means I don't need anything in my house. It is also, sadly, not accessible because of companies like Ripple Energy collapsing. They facilitated the coop being started in the first place. No more of them can be founded. Starting these things in the first place was just too hard and too slow.
Whereas batteries.. are an incentive to use domestic headroom to balance the grid at considerably lower costs than if a commercial operator did it. High costs generally mean time of use tariffs give an incentive to people to do what ought to be grid scale investments, but there's the problem: the only way individuals can capture the benefits of grid scale investment is via specially designed shareholdings in those investments.
Nobody is offering that chance now that ripple is gone. Buy shares in companies operating wind turbines, or retail energy suppliers, and your gains are so much worse than with a Ripple co-op like Kirk Hill. They're worse than a battery, too.
I'll be getting a plug in battery when the time comes, but it is truly insane that I have to personally take on that responsibility to feel the benefit, and that there is no easy route to buying at grid scale. Ripple were a very brief oddity I'll derive a small benefit from for a long time, but now they're gone, and all we have instead is the prospect of storing pretty scary substances in our homes instead, on time of use tariffs which also don't let us reap the full benefit from our investment. It sucks. Cooperativism and mutualism would be a nicer alternative.
If one is not modifying the house wiring how does this prevent backflow into the grid? Does it shutdown completely on power loss from the mains?
The standard governing this is UL 1741 in the US or VDE-AR-N 4105 in the EU. both require certified inverters to detect grid loss and immediately cut off.
yeah, it’s called anti-islanding. UL 3700 is the thing to look at if you want to read more about some of the safety precautions
This will lead to some new and exciting ways of starting a housefire.
How many houses in Britain have wiring that is less than 800 W away from starting a fire? How many of those houses have the disposable income to buy a plug in battery?
Yes, more electricity means more risk of fire. But 800W batteries do not seem like a major safety issue
The new sodium batteries are a lot safer than the lithium chemistries. And we already do have type of home batteries they are just called UPS systems. The real game changer will be when 3-5kwh plugin batteries fall below $150-200pkwh as at those prices batteries will make sense even for apartment owners/renters with no solar to use it to demand shift as time of day electricity prices get more common.
The problem isn't the battery catching fire, it's that you no longer have a circuit breaker between your appliances and the generator. Meaning you could, especially if you have several batteries, push load through wires in the wall in excess of what is rated for.
it is the same as the balcony solar though so what is the difference the batteries would be doing the same exact thing?
Yes. We have circuit breakers for a reason, and rooftop solar is not risk free.
Maybe you don't know this, but in the UK every single appliance has its own individual fuse right inside the plug.
You can have multiple loads and sources that are in-spec but the wiring between them is overloaded.
Sure, but now we're talking about some freak situation where you have multiple sources with a combined allowed load of more than 32amps with 3 or more connected devices drawing at their max rating or above, but only when on battery power when you have no grid connection. Like, it could happen but we're entering the "fun to think about" territory.
Why not when grid connected? The problem arises when you are grid connected.
You draw 31 amps from the grid, you draw 6-7 per battery or solar installation behind the circuit breaker. The circuit never trips because the amount crossing the breaker is 31 amps, but the wires could be dealing with 37+. With battery and solar that could be 43+. Some idiot puts two or three of these in their house or puts them on an extension cord, wires are going to get warm.
If you have no grid connection then everything will go offline, unless you do something illegal.
The situation can occur if loads and sources are on the same circuit, e.g.:
Grid
Meter This is not daisy chained (HN markup hates diagrams) but hanging off wall circuits and power boards. With a situation like this (in 240v) the batteries will sink 2x10A and the PV will supply 16A through point P1. The CB will not trip, nor will appliance fuses.Since you can just buy 800W modules from Aldi for €300 people will definitely do this by accident. However, it will likely go away because Aldi et Al are also selling their Balkonkraftwerk with batteries included (2000Wh at 1700W) for €1000.
If the comms-over-powerline standards were working then devices could talk to their CB and reserve/advertise capacity. But sadly the power companies have just been fighting to ban home automation and smart grid technology.
I mean sure but right now in the UK you can only add one 800W source without planning permissions.
I'm just not sure what we're trying to say here - can someone create a dangerous situation for themselves by ignoring the rules? Yeah of course.
My example above was for a 32+ amp source(or a collection of sources) which can operate with the grid off, like most battery systems in the UK can - they just have a relay that disconnects the grid when the grid is offline. So it's not illegal, but it's also something that would require a planning permission to have. Can someone just go any buy themselves 10x800W modules, plug them all into one ring and burn their house down? Yes,but that was never a legal setup in the first place.
Traditionally we have been quite prescriptive about what people can do electrically on their side of the meter, in the name of protecting people from themselves. (Even with a grid isolation switch.) Allowing generation that isn't wired in by a licensed electrician is a big change in regulation, so people are jittery and vested interests are using that.
So it isn't no risk and it isn't a huge risk. Some people will do stupid things. I think we could do more to protect people using plug-in generation, and simultaneously improve grid regulation and reduce costs. As engineers I think we are duty bound to achieve these objectives, but accountants run energy companies now and donate to politicians, and politicians run policy. What we have left is technical innovation that creates economic impetus.
So I'm in favour of technology that makes low cost PV+storage safe and available, economically and with just enough regulation.
With the US banning Chinese inverters, it will be interesting to see if that spawns new tech, or if they just licence build/assemble Chinese junk. Prices will be higher initially but competition should be strong. Unfortunately US standards for software/interoperability seem absent. IEEE 2030.5 is not nationally mandated in the US AFAIK, and it is weak on cyber assurance.
IEEE 2030.5 is also designed for grid to consumer and doesn't anticipate having multiple PV devices that need to talk, let alone batteries. The Germans just exempted everything below 960W, so people routinely have several panels plugged in.
Why that number in particular? Are you thinking of payback period of something else?
Yes payback period batteries as at those prices payback period falls below 5 years with just 4-5c arbitrage so even if you don't have solar like most apartments it is still useful. And the price is low enough that it can be made mandatory for all new home construction without inflating home prices.
While the potential for fires shouldn't be dismissed, for batteries designed to be stationary rather than mobile (such as in an e-bike), you can use a chemistry optimized for stability rather than optimizing for compact weight and size.
It's not the batteries that are the concern. It's skipping the fuse box.
UK has ring mains, so appliances have fused plugs to protect the mains wires from being overloaded.
Why? Just make it possible to buy "shares" in a larger battery bank, if you must.
Home batteries make total sense for off-grid systems or as a backup power source. But plug-in batteries are not designed to do either.
Because there are not enough of these large battery banks, which require planning permission to build.
Whereas you can buy a battery that will save you money over a 5 year period and get on with it.
(I'm hoping that enough of the larger ones get built that having one yourself doesn't make economic sense, but I suspect we're ten years out from that)
I can’t help feel without ampacity and voltage upgrades to most domestic home circuits this is like a fart in the wind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49141066
"the battery pays back from around 2.5 years onwards"
So around 1000 charge/discharge cycles?
That is roughly the ability of a battery. By the time you break even, it's time to spend again.
LiFePO4 batteries generally sit upwards of 3000-8000 cycles to 80 percent original charge.... Depends on what your chemistry is.
As the batteries improve, you'll probably want to upgrade every 8-10 years or add/swap out a 1/4 to 1/2 storage by that time, still able to use effectively even if a little lower top end. Depends on your usage and if you're still on grid.
I assume these would be batteries that are relatively robust in terms of cycle count, like LiFePO4.
Lithium irons are often 4000 cycle now. For full cycles.
I forget who but I really want to say I was looking at some cells a year or three ago that were 10k cycle count.
And it's not like the battery is worthless at that point. It just means the battery is down to 80% max capacity. You can down cycle it, find some other consumer to use it, replace it, if you need the capacity. But should keep running for a long time.
What was the breaking point for modern British society where housing unwieldy and potentially hazardous electrical equipment in your living room seems like a completely normal and just thing to do?
I guess you've never come across electric heaters or if you want to go into the bedroom electric blankets ( 5000 fires per year in the UK in 2011 )
Presumably it helps that these things have their own fire suppression systems, time of use tariffs are cheap, and everybody needs a win.
(I'll be putting mine outside)