Kudos to Scotland for being an early adopter on this.
Buy a big battery and make money doing nothing. 😋
Charge when prices are low, and sell when prices are high.
Just a few of years ago there was no money in this, because the wear on the battery was more expensive than the profits from buying and selling.
But prices have increased a bit since on electricity, and battery prices have dropped a lot, and new batteries can handle way more load cycles. Which is a very significant part of the equation too.Batteries seem likely to become a lot more part of our green electricity infrastructure in the future. 😎 👍
The UK closed its last coal power plant a few years ago - kind of symbolic for the end of an era. Scotland in particular now mostly relies on wind power, which is cheap but has variable output. This has also significantly increased the business case for battery arrays. It’s not necessarily that prices have increased, but at least in part that prices are much more variable than they used to be.
Scotland has the best conditions in Europe to make cheap wind power, and it’s nice that they use the opportunity and do this too. 👍
Offgrid personal solar systems may improve their appeal? I’m in doubt on inverters costs
Price of inverters have plummeted too, we can get way better inverters now at half the price they cost 3 years ago.
The new ones allow you to continue using your battery when the grid power fails, ours doesn’t.We would be able to get twice the battery and better inverter, and it would still be cheaper if we bought today instead of 3 years ago.
Not a good idea to go off grid here though, because then you can’t sell your surplus power. And you would have to calculate with a pretty high amount of surplus power to have reliable power without the grid.
The calculation may look different where you live, for instance if you have more reliable sun than we have. But we have 3 months per year where we can go days without getting any sun at all. And when the sun is highest, we can only utilize about a fourth the capacity of our panels. So here that is completely hopeless. Maybe with a wind turbine it would be possible, but those are next to impossible to get permission to have unless you live I think 3 km from everybody else. And we have 8 neighbors within 100m.I’m thinking about a common family with a plug-n-play balcony kit, with mediocre solar exposition; I think when you are appealing in this context you win.
AFAIK those systems are pretty cheap already, at least they are in Germany AFAIK, and AFAIK all you need is a modern meter.
But from a balcony you will never be self sustained so you can disconnect from the grid.
In Germany you can buy 1kW solar cells, 2.24kWh battery, inverter and cables for 629€.