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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.