People seem to love those expensive solutions though.
I know so many people who invested in overly expensive battery storage systems for their solar. Power in Germany is expensive, but even with that expensive power many of those battery systems will never hit a positive ROI. But they’re still happy for the feeling of being „independent“.
I’ll turn 26 in a few months. The first time I experienced a power outage in my life was two weeks ago when a construction worker in our basement drilled into the wrong wall…
It's likely that battery backup solutions won't be expensive for long. Battery prices have been falling exponentially similar to Solar, and there is no reason to think it will slow down anytime soon (there is still room for improvement just from economies of scale).
I predict that home batteries will become a "no brainer" from a financial perspective (for anyone who has the upfront capital to purchase them) within the next 10 years.
I haven't seen battery price quotes for retail customers for a while now, everybody I know who wants one has one. But not too long ago a battery bank including installation was easily in the range of 800 to 1000 EUR/kWh of storage.
Battery storage may become a bit of a no brainer from a purchasing price point of view, but I don't think it will actually be more beneficial for people, especially if BEV adaption continues at a similar rate and bi-directional charing becomes widespread
You can put together a simple and fully independent solar island with 5kw/h capacity and 7kw nameplate generation for $4100. This is a plug and play system, with zero wiring and no knowledge needed. For the idea of the kind of profit margin that includes for the company, their "smart isolation switch" is $1k. Jackery has several competitors, and all of their build quality is pretty good, and the warranties are acceptable.
20kw/hr of just storage is about $10k. Every one of these companies also has standard DC input ports for bring your own solar panels, because their panels are overpriced.
The 8-Bit guy has been using such a system to maintain his studio. It is reliable, uses cheap solar panels. This stuff is commodity.
Not all of us live in (semi-)detached homes, and I’m also not sure how one would implement this at the building-of-appartments level, as in, who’s going to pay for it and how do you handle the battery storage capacity for hundreds of apartments from the same building in a safe and cheap-enough manner?
I was living in Brooklyn, NY during the 2003 blackout that knocked out much of the northeastern US for a couple of days. In those days we weren't quite so dependent on cell phones and such things. People walked home, since the trains were stopped. Guys grabbed flashlights and directed traffic. We listened to the news on the car radio. After that I went to J&R and bought a wind-up emergency multi-band radio. In the intervening 22 years, I've never used it. Though at the rate things are going, maybe that will change.
That is just shifting someone else's mistake into being my responsibility.