Advantages of Solar Battery Use

Modern solar systems increasingly depend on solar batteries in addition to panels and inverters.

With their many advantages, solar batteries can be quite important for homeowners who want to become energy independent or protect themselves from power disruptions.

It’s important to weigh the advantages and disadvantages, though, as not everyone will find solar and battery storage to be a good match.

The Fundamentals of Solar Energy

Fundamentally, battery storage enables the solar energy generated by a system to be saved for later use.

Every solar system generates electricity at a different time than what households require. In general, solar systems will produce more in the middle of the day than the homeowner requires. Net energy metering is the programme used to feed this excess production back into the utility grid in the absence of battery storage.

Homeowners can earn credits by selling their extra electricity to the grid, which they can use to balance the power they use when their solar panels aren’t working at night.

When a battery is connected to a solar system, homeowners can choose to use their excess electricity to recharge the battery rather than returning it to the grid.

While it’s not strictly required, having both solar and battery storage when net metering is available has advantages.

The Advantages of Combining Battery Storage with Solar Power

Given that the utility will compensate you for any excess electricity you produce, there’s really no reason to purchase a solar battery. It turns out that adding battery storage to your solar system has a number of significant benefits.

Protection Against Power Failures

Planned Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) and backup power during a grid outage are two of the main advantages of solar batteries for most houses.

Solar systems must turn off during power outages according to electrical regulations to prevent unintentionally feeding live power back into the grid when utility companies send repair crews to restore broken lines.

In contrast, a backup gateway—an extra device—is built with a solar and battery system, enabling the home to “island,” or separate, from the grid.

The gateway immediately recognizes the outage, cuts the house off from the grid, and activates the batteries. After that, the system is closed loop, with the solar panels recharging the battery as it powers the backup circuits in the house.

With the exception of their slightly different runtime, solar batteries can perform essentially the same functions as home generators in this regard. In every quantifiable aspect, solar batteries are superior. See our previous piece for the top ten advantages of solar batteries over generators.

Savings on Time of Use

Time-of-use (TOU) rate plans are becoming more and more common for residential customers of several utilities across the nation. The variations in wholesale power costs throughout the day are more precisely reflected in these pricing plans.

These plans usually have their highest prices in the late afternoon and early evening, when demand rises as more people use more electricity after work. Midday, when solar panels are generating excess power worldwide, and nighttime, when demand is at its lowest, are the off-peak hours.

Chart of Time of Use

These rate differences impact not only how much it costs for households to use the grid for electricity, but also how much their extra power is worth when they feed it back to the system.

For homeowners on time-of-use rate plans, this means that they pay more for the electricity they consume in the evening than they do for any additional power they generate during the day. Therefore, even in cases when a homeowner’s solar system meets 100% of their net power demand, they may still owe money to the utility provider at the end of the month.

This is where solar batteries’ extra savings become useful. Batteries enable homeowners to store extra solar electricity locally and feed it into the house at night, reducing the amount of power they must pull from the grid during the most expensive part of the day, as opposed to feedbacking excess solar power when it’s less useful.

The amount of extra money a homeowner can save with a solar battery relies on a number of variables, such as how much electricity they consume, when they use it, and the details of their particular rate plan.

Independence in Energy Use and Self-consumption

Homeowners can also utilize a lot more of their own clean energy when they combine their solar system with a battery.

If there is no battery, homeowners will use a large portion of their solar energy during the day to transmit it to the grid and then use the dirty grid power to draw power during the night.

To be clear, the mining and recycling of battery storage components has an impact on the environment. Still, they are greatly exceeded by the catastrophic effects of continuing to consume fossil fuels.

Homeowners may generate, store, and use clean power on-demand 24/7 with a battery. This not only gives you the joy of using more clean energy to power yourself, but it also greatly increases energy independence by lowering your dependency on the grid.

Tesla discovered that a single battery from their line may boost a solar system’s solar energy consumption by more than 50%!