Four benefits of home energy storage
As the daily sunshine hours are unpredictable, capturing solar energy can be tricky. If you’ve installed solar panels on your roof, you might have run into a common problem: during the sunniest times of day, you generate more energy than you can use, while at times, such as when it’s cloudy or at night, your solar panels don’t produce enough power.
Usually, during those times where you can’t capture the sun’s rays, you have to rely on the energy from the grid; but that could mean powering your home with fossil fuels and increasing your energy bills. That’s where home energy storage comes in. Energy storage technologies enable you to capture the energy you generate but don’t use and save it for later. In this way, you can ensure all the energy captured by your panels is used and never wasted.
Energy storage is also not only beneficial for you individually but also for society as a whole. Keep reading to find out the main advantages.
1. Save money by powering your home with self generated energy
By adding a smart battery to a solar panel system, the excess energy your home is not currently using goes into charging your battery, so instead of sending the electricity back to the grid, you can store it for when you need it.
Instead of switching back to traditional energy suppliers for all of your energy needs, when the sun goes down, you can use the energy built up during the day within the solar battery.
This will help you save on your electric bills, as you will be consuming less from the grid, and the energy produced from your panels is never wasted, enabling you to power your home with clean and self generated energy.
2. Better for the planet
Home energy storage is a critical tool in increasing the spread of renewable energy.
In many cases, the electricity you get from the grid derives from coal-fired power plants and other fossil fuels, which pollute the environment causing climate change.
By storing your solar power, you can ensure you are using as much renewable power as possible at all times. The more of your own renewable electricity you can store and use, the less electricity you will have to take from the grid, reducing your home’s carbon footprint.
3. Additional savings with time-of-use tariffs
Battery storage systems are particularly well suited to those who have time-of-use tariffs, as they can generate additional savings by using energy at off-peak times.
A time-of-use tariff is an electricity tariff where energy suppliers offer different prices at different times of the day. The price differences correspond to changes in demand for electricity, referred to as peak (generally 4-7pm, when more people are using electricity) or off-peak periods. Time-of-use tariffs can be static, with set peak and off-peak slots each day; or dynamic, with prices varying up to every half-hour.
By installing smart energy storage in combination with time-of-use tariffs, you can store energy from the grid when the wholesale energy prices are low so that you can use it at peak times. This will allow you to maximise your savings while still supporting more renewable energy on the grid.
On Moixa optimised batteries, this optimisation with time-of-use tariffs is carried out by our GridShare software, which will combine your time-of-use tariff with solar generation and consumption predictions to create an optimal charging plan for your battery, using the greatest amount of clean solar and low-cost grid energy available.
4. Be part of the energy system of the future
The main counterpoint against renewable energy sources is the variability of their power production. One of the most significant benefits of energy storage is that it helps the grid to better integrate renewable energy by providing flexibility at a grid level.
Before energy storage like smart batteries, the only way for the grid to meet the high energy demands across the UK was to rely on a range of traditional energy sources, often done by burning fossil fuels.
However, through new smart technologies, these batteries can be aggregated into virtual power plants (VPPs) to take pressure off the grid by charging up when there is a surplus of renewable energy onto the grid and discharging when the energy demand is high across the network.
Home energy storage not only makes individual houses more sustainable but also helps support a cleaner grid, enabling you to join the community that is making the energy transition a reality.