Do you feel lucky? Maybe you can make a great return with Reposit by selling electricity to the grid, and maybe you can’t. Find out with our Reposit Power review.
Reposit is a Canberra based startup. They make software which optimizes the performance of a home battery system. The software is installed on a controller the size of a circuit breaker that sits in your switchboard. [Read more…]
The lovely looking Sonnen Battery. Don’t ever put one in your living room. That would be silly.
Sonnen is a German company who have been making home batteries longer than Tesla. They were originally known as sonnenBatterie but shortened their name and called their battery system that. Its full name in Australia is the sonnenBatterie eco.
Their system is 100% made in Germany using 100% made in Japan batteries and their inverters appear to be 100% made in either Spain or Bulgaria. All other components are 100% made in whatever countries they were made in. [Read more…]
Elon Musk proclaims the coronation of Powerwall 2.0
Today at 12:15 Eastern Standard Time, Elon Musk announced the arrival of the Tesla Powerwall 2.
Some people were enthusiastically looking forward to this announcement, but I was not. I fully expected to be underwhelmed, and as soon as Musk finished his two or three sentences on the actual system, I felt a near fatal lack of enthusiasm sweeping over me. [Read more…]
I feel so strongly about this that I though I’d shout at a video camera about it for 7 minutes. Hit me up in the comments if you think I’m being too harsh.
You can buy 60kWh of storage in a Chevy Bolt for a similar price to 60kWh of uninstalled home battery packs.
Looking to buy some LG Chem batteries but don’t want to pay full price? In that case, I have a little scheme you might be interested in.
If you want to, you could buy an LG Chem RESU6.5 battery system which will set you back around $1,000 per kilowatt-hour of storage. Or you could do a little better by buying a RESU10 as that will only cost you around $900 a kilowatt-hour. But if you follow my advice you can net yourself LG Chem batteries for only $822 a kilowatt-hour.
There is a slight drawback to my plan in that you have to buy 60 kilowatt-hours of batteries to get them for that price. But trust me, it’s well worth it because if you buy these batteries you get a free stereo system! There is no denying that’s a sweet deal. [Read more…]
Smaller, cheaper, more powerful. LG Chem’s new batteries look very compelling compared to a Powerwall.
If you are in the market for a home battery and are tempted to buy a Powerwall, then I urge you to also consider the new range of LG Chem batteries announced last week.
Whilst LG have been unable to compete with Elon Musk for mainstream media coverage, the LG Chem RESU, or Residential Energy Storage Unit for the long winded, has been one of the biggest successes in on-grid home energy storage in Australia. While solid figures are hard to come by, it may have been used in almost half of all on-grid home battery installations.
The scene in the Brakels’ household last Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning the program Sunrise had a segment on solar power and battery storage. While I am glad whenever popular TV takes the opportunity to educate people on these topics, that wasn’t what happened here. It was the opposite of education, as anyone watching it could easily come away believing the following three things:
1. Battery storage pays for itself.
2. Battery storage cuts CO2 emissions.
3. Rooftop solar needs batteries to be worthwhile.
None of these things are true.
Battery storage does not pay for itself when used on-grid and it may be years before it does.
Home batteries do not cut emissions, they increase them. In the future they may allow us to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, but that point is still years away.
Rooftop solar by itself is cost effective. It is adding batteries that can make it uneconomical. The mistaken belief that rooftop solar needs batteries to be effective is causing harm to both the solar industry and the environment, as people are delaying installing rooftop solar until batteries become affordable. [Read more…]
This yellow box is a DC converter (not an inverter) that lets batteries share your solar inverter.
If you own a solar system and want to add batteries then, in theory, the cheapest way to do this is to simply plug your batteries into your existing solar inverter. The solar inverter can then convert the batteries’ DC power into AC power, just like it does for your solar.
Unfortunately, in practice, regular solar inverters are not designed to be shared by solar and batteries, so this hasn’t been possible and battery upgrades have been jolly expensive as a result.
But Goodwe, a major Chinese inverter manufacturer, has just released a battery DC converter, going by the catchy name of GW2500-BP. It is designed to allow batteries to interface to existing solar inverters.
This DC converter may be the cheapest way to add batteries to an existing solar home. It will also bypass any restrictions that Australian network operators may put in the way of using battery-inverters, such as the Sunny Boy Storage.
By itself it won’t make battery storage pay, but it brings it one step closer to being cost effective. [Read more…]
If you want to save the environment and have limited funds, then buying batteries should not be a priority.
Millions of Australians have installed rooftop solar to help the environment and save money.
Many are hoping home battery storage will soon let them do the same.
The cost of home energy storage is falling rapidly and it may not be long before it pays for itself. But at its current price it will not save money, even under favourable circumstances, when used on-grid. Despite this, there have been hundreds, or possibly thousands, of people who have installed home battery systems because they want to help the environment.
Have these people made a horrible mistake? [Read more…]
Simon Hackett with an early customer’s double Zcell off grid system.
Yesterday, Aussie solar veteran Tony Smith left an interesting question at the bottom of our ZCell battery review. Tony asked, for an off grid application, how to handle the fact that the ZCell battery needs to shut down so it can perform maintenance mode every week or so: [Read more…]
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