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  • If "everyone" uses plug-in batteries, the peak demand curve will be flattened and the utility companies will likewise flatten the rate. Then there goes the arbitrage; everyone is left with just an expensive piece of emergency equipment for blackouts.
    by kazinator
  • I don't see the point in panels without a battery, so I'm looking at a DIY system. RCBO for new circuit = £20, 5.12kWh battery = £700, ~3kW hybrid inverter from eBay ~=£400, Panels ~= £100 each. I'm not the including cost of a registered electrician for a new circuit in my case.
    by jonatron
  • The plug in "balcony panels" are usually limited to 800W here in Europe, so having them without a battery can make sense because you're probably going to use that power on the spot most of the time.
    by danmaz74
  • I've been following this for a while: Regen have a beautifully designed product. The idea that people need to be able to access time of use tariffs in a way that yields lower energy costs makes a lot of sense. But this is about energy costs rather than infrastructure, and the actual problem is that products like this are a) a bit scary to have indoors and b) a hack to compensate for deficiencies in the UK energy market.

    I'm also a member of the lovely https://kirkhillcoop.org/ - an energy coop. I own around 1kW of potential overall production from a number of pretty big turbines in southern Scotland, for which I paid around £1k. The benefit to me is I pay opex cost for energy according to the performance of that farm. I believe this is projected at around 5p per kWh - we're getting our first payouts this year.

    The coop model means I don't need anything in my house. It is also, sadly, not accessible because of companies like Ripple Energy collapsing. They facilitated the coop being started in the first place. No more of them can be founded. Starting these things in the first place was just too hard and too slow.

    Whereas batteries.. are an incentive to use domestic headroom to balance the grid at considerably lower costs than if a commercial operator did it. High costs generally mean time of use tariffs give an incentive to people to do what ought to be grid scale investments, but there's the problem: the only way individuals can capture the benefits of grid scale investment is via specially designed shareholdings in those investments.

    Nobody is offering that chance now that ripple is gone. Buy shares in companies operating wind turbines, or retail energy suppliers, and your gains are so much worse than with a Ripple co-op like Kirk Hill. They're worse than a battery, too.

    I'll be getting a plug in battery when the time comes, but it is truly insane that I have to personally take on that responsibility to feel the benefit, and that there is no easy route to buying at grid scale. Ripple were a very brief oddity I'll derive a small benefit from for a long time, but now they're gone, and all we have instead is the prospect of storing pretty scary substances in our homes instead, on time of use tariffs which also don't let us reap the full benefit from our investment. It sucks. Cooperativism and mutualism would be a nicer alternative.

    by hkt
  • UK-based reader here. Homeowner, with no solar or battery, but interested in getting some decent, independent advice, how would I go about it?

    We are a two EV household, with oil central heating. Don’t mind paying for solid unbiased advice.

    by yhcehb38r
  • Can give free advice, contact in profile
    by jonatron
  • I think the move to allow plug in solar is good, but its just a sticking plaster over the issue. And that is rental houses not having solar, or much of anything.

    In the 60s many houses only got indoor toilets because the government forced the issue. Maybe we should be doing the same for insulation, energy efficiency and solar panels.

    This goes double for social housing. Poor people can't borrow money as cheaply as the government, so we're left giving money to people to pay their electricity bill. Why not put solar power on their rooves instead. This can be counterbalanced if needed by taking money from the benefits, so it pays for itself.

    by benj111
  • We already have several plug-in batteries?

    Simple search: https://www.ecohome.net/en/guides/4189/best-plug-and-play-ho...

    by ghusto
  • We've had these for years? My brother has two solar panels on his balcony and plugged into a normal socket.
    by apexalpha
  • I assume plug-in batteries are considerably more workable in the UK on 240V, since they could charge and deploy at double the rate of a plug-in system here. Of course 240V plugs exist in North America, but they're generally only installed for dryers, ranges, and EV chargers, so people don't tend to have one just free.
    by tempestn
  • What makes it easier on 240v systems is that your entire household is on the same “circuit”.

    If you’re on a 120v system, there’s a ~50/50 chance that your load is on the wrong side (except for 240v loads where you’ll imbalance things a tad but it should average out).

    Unless you’re in an apartment/conso and have 208v instead of 240v… dunno what happens then.

    by Scoundreller
  • What percentage of buyers do you imagine are gonna buy a battery big enough to saturate 15A*120V=1800W for long? The average home uses 30 kWh per day = 1250W. Batteries don't need to handle peak load. Approximately nobody has a whole home UPS.

    Also 240V power strips are fairly common in my circles because GPU server PSUs tend to be more efficient at 240V. They're marketed as PDUs, not strips. You're not gonna install a new outlet for every server. One dryer outlet in the garage is enough for most people

    by NavinF
  • Plugs and sockets have the wrong gender for this. On the battery, you'd have a male plug with live 240v contacts, ready to short against anything, or anyone, that's conductive. This is the same reason why male-to-male extension cords are labeled "suicide cords".
    by satiric
  • Well, yes generally speaking. But the way this works with these plug in panels is that the micro inverter won't actually start delivering power to the grid in the absence of an energised plug in the first place. So just sitting there, the contacts are completely harmless. Obviously actual physical safety where you literally can't touch the contacts would be better.
    by gambiting
  • There are several variations on this idea, and the web sites are confusing.

    First, there are ones that are just a big UPS. You plug them into the wall, and plug loads into them. They may try to level your power usage. No problem with that. Good for refrigerators. That seems to be what "Pila" is selling. This class of device seems to come with deceptive ads which do not show cords from loads plugged into the box.

    Then there are ones that purport to pump power back into their wall outlet. That has safety issues, starting with its male power plug being an output. It can't provide power when there's no input power, because it would try to drive the the whole grid during an outage. It's mostly for taking advantage of variable power pricing. This seems to be what "Regen" is selling.

    These are apparently available in Germany, but must be installed on their own dedicated circuit, so you don't have a load and a source on the same side of the breaker. Otherwise, you could potentially have an overload without a breaker trip. Regen is trying to get them into the UK, but old UK ring main wiring is a bad match to this. Gotta have a breaker between load and source.

    The trouble with these things is that, plugged into the wrong outlet, they create a gap in overload protection that won't show up until something goes wrong.

    by Animats
  • That’s largely correct but misses the point that the battery+pv system is legally only allowed to feed in 800W [1]. On our circuits you can draw ~3.5kW without tripping the breaker. This brings you to 4.3kW max load, which - as far as I understand - is still what all the circuitry must be rated for anyways.

    The downside is that we have three phase power supply anywhere halfway recent. And that only gives you a single phase. In _most_ cases that’s fine, because you get a net-sum of all three phases at the meter, but technically you are only drawing/supplementing one out of three phases. In practice this likely doesn’t matter since different house put theirs on different phases and it all washes out.

    [1] the DC side can have up to 2kW of panels. But that’s not visible to the grid

    by hnaccount_rng
  • Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0). This is California.

    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.

    by reenorap
  • 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.

    by thelastgallon
  • > Why bother? Power companies will complain they are losing money and regulators will allow them to buy energy from residential solar panels basically for free (NEM 3.0).

    The way I would see this working is that you charge the batteries when electricity is cheap (generally, midnight through early afternoon), and then run the house (not supply the grid) the rest of the time.

    LFPs are cheap enough now that a strategy like this would pay back after about 2 years.

    If they try to adapt with a “NEM 4.0”, the whole thing will collapse because solar and LFPs are so cheap that everyone will just pay their mandatory $50/month grid connection fee and not buy any electricity from the grid.

    by labcomputer
  • NEM 3.0 is more fair. The grid is expensive and just as expensive if it is needed to be fully utilized 1% of the time or 100% of the time.

    The problem is California forcing new construction to buy overpriced solar from builders that makes little sense compared to commercial solar installations + grid.

    by searealist
  • The solar situation in CA is truly mind boggling for a state that is ostensibly progressive.
    by appplication
  • 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.

    by Aurornis
  • The new rule here requires you to pay for part of your imports (up to ~60%), even if you export more. I know people who installed batteries in the inverters because of this. It is more expensive overall (hybrid inverter + LFP batteries) but has other benefits (blackouts are not a problem, most months you don't even use the grid). I imagine that once sodium-ion battery production scales and costs decline, this will become the "default" option for a solar installation.
    by jampa
  • Similarly here in Australia.

    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 than letting private enterprise pick winners, and potentially failing, in an open and free market.

    Wild.

    by perpetuallunch
  • It's not a scam. Connecting to the grid has enormous value, and keeping the grid up has real costs. A model where your generation pays you retail prices doesn't make sense.

    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.

    by mkozlows
  • Bluetti already has a product for this available in the EU. I have been posting eveywhere that they need to bring it to the US.

    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 (attached to independent circuits) each with some different critical loads and solar attached to them.

    by chris222