Green Mountain Power is asking state regulators to let it buy batteries it will install at customers’ homes, saying doing so will be cheaper than putting up more power lines.
Lack of batteries hasn’t really been a barrier; people generally sell excess power generated back to their utility during the day and use electricity from their utility at night.
Terms are almost always that the rate you get paid for generation is less than what you pay to have electricity delivered though
Ah, I’d had this impression from other conversations that batteries were half the cost of getting into solar, but perhaps that was for going off grid altogether (in which case I’d imagine the power company would want their battery back)
Yeah, if you want to go fully off-grid, it’s a lot more expensive; you need enough batteries to store full overnight power, and you need enough solar panels to charge them on a cloudy day in winter. It’s cheaper to do an on-grid system where you generate as much electricity as you use over the course of a year, which is a lot more common.
This seems like it would remove one of the barriers for entry from installing solar panels
Lack of batteries hasn’t really been a barrier; people generally sell excess power generated back to their utility during the day and use electricity from their utility at night.
Terms are almost always that the rate you get paid for generation is less than what you pay to have electricity delivered though
Ah, I’d had this impression from other conversations that batteries were half the cost of getting into solar, but perhaps that was for going off grid altogether (in which case I’d imagine the power company would want their battery back)
Yeah, if you want to go fully off-grid, it’s a lot more expensive; you need enough batteries to store full overnight power, and you need enough solar panels to charge them on a cloudy day in winter. It’s cheaper to do an on-grid system where you generate as much electricity as you use over the course of a year, which is a lot more common.