Can off-grid photovoltaic energy storage pay for itself

Thanks to recent technological advances, which have made large-scale electricity storage economically viable, a combination of solar generation and storage holds the promise of cheaper, greener, and more reliable off-grid power in the future.

The reason is that such off-grid locations exhibit known, constant backup costs as they typically have only one type of generator as backup, no merit ordering, and no capacity or energy auctions. As a consequence, the value of solar is easy to compute and equal to the cost of the backup generation it replaces.

However, for most solar systems, the amount of electricity curtailed is small, so the savings from reducing curtailment are modest. The payback period is the amount of time it will take for your electricity savings to match the cost of the system. For a rooftop solar system, this is typically much less than the lifetime of the system.

used to charge a battery if the system includes one. Solar can reduce your electricity bill through: You can save the most money by self-consuming, or using, the electricity generated by your solar system. You can think of a solar panel as being a bit like a tap with water flowing out of it.

If this peak demand is at a time when the solar system is not generating electricity, your battery can be discharged to reduce the peak demand and therefore reduce the demand charge. A virtual power plant is a network of batteries that is operated in a co-ordinated way by an electricity retailer or other organisation.

reduce curtailment (likely to be only a small saving). A battery can store energy generated by your solar system for later use, when the solar system is not generating electricity. This increases solar self-consumption and reduces the amount of electricity you need to buy from your electricity retailer.