over the last three months, I've been paying on average 16p a unit. Thats with a car as well. On the days in the winter when solar isn't doing shit, we top up at the lowest price that day.
This kinda goes to the articles point which is to you can avoid, or limit the peak with local storage.
The issue with the battery is that its costs a shit tonne. a basic battery is going to cost something like £8k installed.
Its almost certainly cheaper to upgrade the grid compared to adding batteries to a million households. Especially as the lifespan of batteries isn't that long compared to the super grid.
The unsaid, "quiet part" about batteries is that they're a fire hazard. No matter how "safe" they are branded as, the failure mode is disastrous and life-threatening when they do fail. It's insane that those things are being sold and installed in homes at all. But then again this is in a country where installing solar power inverters in the attic of wooden houses was also a thing (no surprises as to what the outcome of a failure would be).
Proper solution is to pool them in a dedicated buildings so you still get the benefit of locality at the neighborhood level while containing the consequences of a failure and limiting them to property damage (vs potential loss of life), but that would use up land that can otherwise be used as a way to (literally) seek rent, so it cannot happen.
yes, although they are statistically much safer than fridges, or combined washer driers. (unless you include cheap e-bikes or hoverboards...)
I don't have mine inside the house, its very much outside with a wooden lintel supporting a surprisingly sandy flower trough.
I also have micro inverters, because they are more efficient, and less fucking noisy. They are also, as you hint at, much safer. Partly because they are not switching ~400v DC but also because they don't need to handle as much power.
As fire risks go, house batteries are pretty low on the list. You're much more likely to have a catasrophic fire from charging one of the many battery-powered gadgets that people have nowawdays (especially cheap low-quality ones!).
over the last three months, I've been paying on average 16p a unit. Thats with a car as well. On the days in the winter when solar isn't doing shit, we top up at the lowest price that day.
This kinda goes to the articles point which is to you can avoid, or limit the peak with local storage.
The issue with the battery is that its costs a shit tonne. a basic battery is going to cost something like £8k installed.
Its almost certainly cheaper to upgrade the grid compared to adding batteries to a million households. Especially as the lifespan of batteries isn't that long compared to the super grid.