Canary Media’s Electrified Life column shares real-world tales, tips, and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power.
During apower outage or in the evening hours, ahome battery can have your back. Working along with solar panels on the roof, batteries can store excess clean power for when you needit.
But that flexibility doesn’t come cheap. Installing atypical battery that stores 10 to 13kilowatt-hours (kWh) costs $10,000 to $15,000, according to the clean energy marketplace, EnergySage. Contractors report that the No. 1reason people decide not to buy home batteries is because they’re too expensive.
Luckily, there’s agenerous 30 percent federal tax credit for solar and batteries that wrangles those costs down. Other incentives might be available to you too (more on thatbelow).
But given the high upfront cost of batteries, they won’t make sense for everyone. So are they agood fit for you? And if yes, what are the different features to consider? Electrified Life will help you answer these questions and more in two parts: This week, we’ll dig into what exactly having abattery gets you so that you can decide whether it’s aworthwhile investment. Next week, in part 2, we’ll discuss in more detail what to know about battery systems themselves before committing — for example, their sizing, chemistries, and energy management. Let’s get started.
What’s sparking your interest in batteries?
Before you decide whether to purchase abattery, it’s important to think through why you want one to begin with. There are two main reasons for getting batteries, according to experts: the resilience they offer and the financial savings they can deliver overtime.
In terms of resilience, abattery can supply backup power when the grid can’t. So as you weigh abattery’s pros and cons, it makes sense to think about how grid outages in your area do or could affect you. How frequent are they? How long do they last? And how much advance warning do youget?
Power outages can range from just annoying to life-endangering. Households on average in the U.S. experience 5.6hours per year without grid power, but some can lose it for days, weeks, or even longer. Sometimes outages have lead time, as when grid operators shut off power in order to prevent deadly wildfires sparked by downed power lines. But the extreme weather increasingly prevalent in awarming world — from blistering heat waves to freezing winter storms — can also knock out power unexpectedly when it’s needed most, plunging homes into darkness and precarity.
A battery system that can isolate — or “island” — itself from the grid will cocoon you from these disruptions. For at least afew hours, it’ll be able to provide backup power to afew essential loads, keeping the internet up, phones charged, and food and medicine cool.
While afeeling of security and stability might not be quantifiable, avoided property damage is. For example, during intense storms, batteries can keep asump pump running so abasem*nt doesn’t flood: that can be an avoided cost of up to $25,000, according to EnergySage.
A typical battery system isn’t going to be big enough to back up your whole home though. Abattery might be able to store 10 kWh of energy, but an average home uses 29 kWh every day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. While you could buy enough batteries to supply that amount, it would likely cost $40,000 or more, says Emily Walker, the senior writer at EnergySage who leads its consumer education strategy.
A whole-home backup gas generator may cost less upfront than asolar-plus-battery system, but asolar-battery combo could save an owner money in the long term — up to $22,000 over 20years, an EnergySage analysis found.
Does abattery make financial sense given local policy andrates?
The other important point to consider is whether abattery along with solar panels will help you break even faster on the overall investment than you would with solar alone. The answer depends on your local electricity rates and how much your utility will pay you for solar power you send to thegrid.
If you live in one of the 34 states, Washington, D.C., or Puerto Rico that currently have mandatory net-metering policies, then abattery might not gain you alot financially. Net metering allows customers to sell their excess solar energy to the grid at the retail electricity rate, earning them credits they can use on their bills. When their solar production is low, and they need to buy energy from the utility, the credits can cancel the costs, driving the electricity bill down to even $0. In effect, the grid is acting like abattery — so solar owners don’t have to buy theirown.
