Get a battery bank for your home to smooth out the demand curve.
I’d advise anyone considering buying a battery bank to look at this one simple metric:
Take the price of the battery bank, divide it by the total number of kWh that the battery bank will source to your electric devices over the battery bank’s lifetime. That should give you a figure of $ per kWh that you can compare with what you currently pay for electricity.
Anytime I have run that exercise, the battery bank is costing me near or more per kWh than I pay for electricity from the grid, even if I am charging the battery for free (which is never the case, even with solar there’s a cost of installation and maintenance.)
If you want the battery bank for grid independence, it’ll do that, but know there’s a cost.
If you live in some crazy demand variable tariff area where you pay $0.20 more per kWh during peak than you do in off hours, the battery may make financial sense for you there, particularly if you can sell power back to the grid at peak tariff rates during peak hours.
Most people: batteries are a waste of effort that don’t save you money, plus they have the added thrill of being a non-zero risk source of a signifianct fire.
It also serves the purpose of a generator, and with solar you might be able to cut your grid draw to basically zero
The fire risk is generally overstated, plus different battery tech, like sodium, are much less flammable. Weight and size are much less of an issue, so as adoption increases they’re going to get much cheaper and longer lasting as production ramps up
Not to mention it does meaningfully reduce load on the grid with increased adoption. Not everything needs to be financially min-maxed… If you’ve got the money, it’s a good thing to invest in
I’d advise anyone considering buying a battery bank to look at this one simple metric:
Take the price of the battery bank, divide it by the total number of kWh that the battery bank will source to your electric devices over the battery bank’s lifetime. That should give you a figure of $ per kWh that you can compare with what you currently pay for electricity.
Anytime I have run that exercise, the battery bank is costing me near or more per kWh than I pay for electricity from the grid, even if I am charging the battery for free (which is never the case, even with solar there’s a cost of installation and maintenance.)
If you want the battery bank for grid independence, it’ll do that, but know there’s a cost.
If you live in some crazy demand variable tariff area where you pay $0.20 more per kWh during peak than you do in off hours, the battery may make financial sense for you there, particularly if you can sell power back to the grid at peak tariff rates during peak hours.
Most people: batteries are a waste of effort that don’t save you money, plus they have the added thrill of being a non-zero risk source of a signifianct fire.
It also serves the purpose of a generator, and with solar you might be able to cut your grid draw to basically zero
The fire risk is generally overstated, plus different battery tech, like sodium, are much less flammable. Weight and size are much less of an issue, so as adoption increases they’re going to get much cheaper and longer lasting as production ramps up
Not to mention it does meaningfully reduce load on the grid with increased adoption. Not everything needs to be financially min-maxed… If you’ve got the money, it’s a good thing to invest in