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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(I'll be putting mine outside)
Also 240V power strips are fairly common in my circles. They're marketed as PDUs. GPU servers consume slightly less power on 240V because server PSUs tend to be more efficient at 240V. You're not gonna install a new outlet for every server lol
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 each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.
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.
Plenty of places in modern and developing countries don’t have these issues.
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.
If disconnection were legal for those who want to be energy self-sufficient, then charging just to connect would be more defensible.
The problem is California forcing new construction to buy overpriced solar from builders that makes little sense compared to commercial solar installations + grid.
We left California last year for this and many other reasons. They just don't want anyone to be productive here.
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 letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially fail, in an open and free market.
Wild.
slackfan•59m ago
kibwen•52m ago
alexjurkiewicz•48m ago
Yes, more electricity means more risk of fire. But 800W batteries do not seem like a major safety issue
xbmcuser•23m ago
hkt•8m ago