About Solar Batteries

With electricity prices continuing to rise and homeowners becoming more conscious of running costs, the uptake of battery storage systems in Australia is expected to quickly grow into a billion-dollar-a-year market.

To find out the wealth of benefits solar batteries can bring to both your home and the grid as a whole, read on.

Benefits of Solar Batteries for the Home

Significant Electricity Savings

Investing in a solar battery system for your home can help you save more money on your electricity bills, compared to just installing solar alone. Rather than exporting your excess solar energy to the grid for a small feed-in tariff (across Australia the average is around 5 cents per unit), your solar battery will store any excess electricity, allowing you to use it later in the evening, when your solar PV system is not generating any electricity. This will greatly decrease the amount of electricity you’re required to buy from the grid at full price (around 25 to 26 cents per unit), resulting in significant savings.

Energy Independence

Installing a battery bank at your home or business lessens the amount of energy you’ll need to buy from the grid. This decreases your reliance on the grid and major energy retailers, giving you more energy independence.

Energy Arbitrage

If your home is on a Time of Use Tariff, installing a solar battery means you can benefit from energy arbitrage. By charging your battery bank during off-peak rates and using your own stored electricity during peak rates, you’ll end up pocketing the difference and saving a lot of money on your electricity bills. Energy arbitrage can be accomplished with or without a solar PV system.

Backup Power in Case of Grid Outages

In some cases, it’s possible to install your home battery storage system to provide your home with backup power. This gives you the convenience and flexibility of always having electricity, regardless of what’s happening on the grid.

Benefits of Solar Batteries for the Grid

Reduced Pressure on Electricity Networks

By installing a home battery and taking pressure off the grid, your home is helping contribute to the longer life of local infrastructure and resources. This lessens the frequency of costly network upgrades, which end up being paid for by all grid users.

Mitigating Power Intermittency Caused by Solar PV

While solar PV systems produce electricity steadily and predictably throughout the day when the sun is shining, if there is cloud cover or any sort of climate disruption, solar electricity output for an entire region can fluctuate unpredictably, requiring other generation plants (typically coal and gas) to be brought quickly online to meet demands.

This can cause a lot of stress and strain for the grid. Common adoption of home battery storage systems would mitigate the impact of this problem, using the stored electricity of their own batteries, rather than the grid, to make up for any power shortages. Widespread uptake of batteries could also help to manage unintended voltage level fluctuations, helping current grid infrastructure have a longer life.

State of the Art Technology

Installing a battery bank means your home will be able to take advantage of future regulatory changes which will allow households, small businesses, and community groups to trade rooftop solar generated electricity between each other. Investing in a battery will allow you to store your excess solar electricity, and selling it to neighbours for more than the gazetted feed-in tariff rate, effective bypassing major energy retailers.