As the costs of solar batteries continue to decline, more and more homeowners are adding energy storage to their solar installations: in California, for instance, one in every twenty solar installations now also includes a solar battery. As utilities become more familiar with the benefits of distributed solar + storage on the grid, from added operational flexibility to decreased electricity demand, several utilities in the Northeast are now offering large incentives for home energy storage pilot programs.
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Does your battery come with its own inverter?
While shopping for storage solutions, it can be hard to break down which products come with an integrated inverter, which will need an additional inverter, and how many boxes will be installed on your wall. This is one of the key factors to pay attention to as you’re comparing storage solutions, as it will impact the overall efficiency and cost of your battery setup, as well as how you integrate it into a solar panel system.
Here’s a breakdown of this info for some of the biggest storage companies in the market today:
Continue readingBattery warranties: what you need to know
Similar to your laptop or cell phone battery, solar batteries degrade over time: as you continue to use and charge your battery, it loses the ability to hold a charge. Fortunately, solar battery manufacturers provide warranties that guarantee the performance of a battery to a certain level. In this article, we’ll dive into what matters in a solar battery warranty, and how some of the top solar batteries – Tesla Powerwall 2, LG Chem RESU 10H, and sonnen eco – stack up.
Continue readingTesla Megapack: what you need to know
Tesla’s new product isn’t an electric car or a solar tile design – instead, the company has announced a new utility-scale energy storage solution: the Tesla Megapack.
Continue readingSelf-consumption: what you need to know
One concept gaining importance in the world of solar and home storage is self-consumption: producing and consuming your own electricity at your home or business. As net metering policies start to shift in the coming years, a self-consumption setup may be the key to maximizing your solar savings.
Continue readingQ&A with Blue Planet Energy: the Blue Ion HI
The energy storage industry is always evolving, and new and improved battery options for homeowners come out constantly. Take Blue Planet Energy, for example – this innovative company out of Hawaii recently released with a sleek new product called the Blue Ion HI. We recently (and virtually) sat down with Blue Planet Energy to learn more about their newest offering, and to hear about what’s coming up next for the company.
Continue readingAdding a battery to your solar energy system as a retrofit
The market for home energy storage options like the Tesla Powerwall has taken off in recent years, and costs are falling quickly. Many homeowners and businesses are thinking about adding a battery backup to their solar panel system.
The benefits of a home battery can be significant, especially if you have solar: you can use more solar energy onsite, or save it to use as backup power in the event that the grid goes down. If you are on time-of-use (TOU) rates for your electricity or pay monthly demand charges, you can even save money by using power from your battery when rates are high.
Continue readingThe SolarEdge Energy Hub: what you need to know
In 2020, SolarEdge launched their newest and most versatile home inverter: the SolarEdge Energy Hub Inverter. The aptly named Energy Hub combines the functionality of all of SolarEdge’s existing inverters under one hood to provide a future-proof solution that allows you to easily integrate additional SolarEdge home energy products into the same inverter product, from home battery backup to a Level 2 Smart EV Charger to their growing line of additional smart home/smart energy options. And the best part? Energy Hub has been well received throughout the industry, with the inverter winning PV Magazine’s 2020’s Inverter of the Year Award.
Continue readingWhat’s happening to net metering in California? A Q&A with CALSSA
California has historically been the best market for solar in the US, and the success of the solar industry as a whole can largely be traced back to the success of solar in California. In fact, out of the more than 2.5 million residential solar installations in the US, more than 1.2 million are in California alone!
However, the future of solar in California –and of residential solar in particular–hangs in the balance. In a current review of the future of net metering in the state, a series of proposals before the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) recommend significantly reducing the value of residential net metering credits. For a sense of the types of proposals submitted, check out this joint proposal from the major utilities in the state, which would reduce residential net metering credits to 23 percent of their value today and impose a monthly fee on solar owners of nearly $80 per month, making new residential solar all but impossible in the state.
Continue readingComparing storage capacities of home batteries
The home storage revolution is here, and there are plenty of options when it comes to home batteries that you can install. In this article, we’ll talk about battery capacity – what it is, why it matters (or doesn’t), and how battery models stack up against one another.
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