Home Solar Plus Batteries May Be the Final Nail in Utilities’ Coffins

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The utilities are at an existential crossroads. Let’s hope they pick the road leading to grid-connected systems of solar plus batteries, before they lose thousands of customers and billions of dollars. Unlike their larger off-grid counterparts, leaner and meaner grid-connected battery systems could check electricity costs and increase savings no matter what peak retail prices...

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solarix

There seems to be a lot of drumbeating for adding storage to solar systems. Storage is definitely is the direction solar needs to go but I don't see that we are there by a long shot. The futurists at RMI always seem to be on the impractical side. I've installed a few systems lately for people that hate the utility and want to be off-grid with their typical on-grid homes. It costs twice as much as our normal on-grid solar system and still does not have the full capability to be totally divorced of the grid. Its pretty hard to take a 200A service off the grid without some serious sacrifice as well as deep pockets. Maybe we'll see new batteries that will be game-changers, but I've been waiting over 30 years for better/cheaper batteries and am not holding my breath. I can see adding some storage to a new generation of on-grid inverters that help to stabilize the grid and maybe even shift the solar generation to later in the day both of which will make solar much more palatable to the utilities, but to threaten the utilities with loss of customers by converting them to off-grid is not reasonable and counterproductive in achieving a cleaner, more renewable grid.

sub3marathonman

solarix wrote: »

I've installed a few systems lately for people that hate the utility and want to be off-grid with their typical on-grid homes. It costs twice as much as our normal on-grid solar system and still does not have the full capability to be totally divorced of the grid. Its pretty hard to take a 200A service off the grid without some serious sacrifice as well as deep pockets.

I'm thinking the future will be more "semi-off-grid" homes, as the utilities penalize those with interconnected PV, people will be forced to take the systems off-grid and remain as just a much smaller consumer of grid supplied electricity. As those off-grid people use propane for cooking and heating water to allow their PV production to be used for necessary loads, people will use batteries supplied with PV panels to power at least a portion of their home.

I set my house up this way when it was being built, with a separate panel for critical circuits, and totaling a capacity that can be supplied from a 6kw hybrid inverter ( XW6048 ). So it is saving me money since it was put in, plus I have the backup power if and when the grid is down.