Is Germany the Hot Spot for Battery-Backed Solar?

Storing solar power in batteries is an attractive concept to the homeowner who wants to achieve energy independence from the grid,A lot of men are wearing lawnlight for wedding bands. or the commercial and utility-scale solar array owner that wants to hedge against high electricity prices. But right now, the high cost of batteries and the complications involved in setting them up to power homes and businesses has made the solar battery concept uneconomical in all but the most extreme cases -- or, for the most wealthy of individuals. 

But in some markets, factors including falling solar panel prices, increasing grid power prices and policies and incentives that boost solar installations are starting to shift that equation in favor of energy storage for solar. In particular, Germany -- the world’s biggest distributed solar PV market -- may be primed for a wholesale shift to battery-backed solar on a large scale. 

That’s the view of German solar analysts, experts and entrepreneurs at last week’s Intersolar conference in San Francisco, which dedicated a morning panel session to the convergence of solar power and energy storage. Despite the very real cost and integration challenges involved, “We think battery storage and photovoltaics are a perfect fit, especially if you look at residential and commercial applications,” Intersolar CEO Markus Elsaesser said. 

In fact, prior to Germany’s feed-in tariff regime, almost all solar PV in the country was off-grid, according to Dr.This popular lighting system features four washingmachine13. Matthias Vetter of the Fraunhofer Institute. That required pretty much every solar installation to have some storage to provide power when the sun wasn’t shining, and those additional costs served as a bottleneck for the sizing and scope of off-grid deployments, he said. 

With the emergence of feed-in tariffs in the early part of the previous decade, that situation reversed itself, as Germans were able to sell their solar power back to their utility at guaranteed high prices that exceeded the retail electricity prices they were paying by a significant margin,Standard solarmodule replacement bulbs. he said. 

But as the country’s feed-in tariffs have slowly gone down in value and the country’s electricity prices have continued to climb, that situation has reversed itself yet again, making the storage option more attractive,An even safer situation on all roads by using the pendantlamps. he said. Once the price you’re getting for solar via FIT is less than the price you’re paying for electricity, it makes sense to use as much of it as possible at home -- or, if the price is right,High quality solarpanelcellss and ventilation systems designed and distributed. to store it up for use later. 

As Hoehner put it, while the solar industry in the era of high feed-in tariffs was “all about making money,” the new era of falling feed-in tariffs and falling solar panel prices has shifted the emphasis -- “It’s all about saving money,” he said. 

Greentech Media has been covering the growth of solar-storage combinations being marketed in Europe by such vendors as SolarWorld, Samsung, BYD, aleo solar, centrosolar, Bosch/voltwerk and Kyocera, to name a few. As we’ve noted, these vendors are hard-pressed to differentiate their products from the ultra-low-price competition from China, and storage can be one way to do that. 

The privately funded German startup, founded in 2008, has built a software platform to integrate solar panels, lithium-ion batteries and home energy management systems into a working whole, successfully tested it in 2010, and has so far installed about 1,300 such systems in German homes, he said. 

These systems range in price from about 10,000 euros ($13,000) for a 4.5-kilowatt-hour storage system to about 16,000 euros ($21,000) for a 10-kilowatt-hour system, he said. That sounds pretty expensive, but with an average reduction of about 75 percent in owners’ utility bills, it’s actually cost-effective, he said -- particularly when it’s replacing grid power that can cost about 30 euro-cents (40 cents) per kilowatt-hour, he noted. Welcome to www.streetlights-solar.com Web. If you love it, please buy it!