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Policy adjustments in California, the nation’s greatest residential photo voltaic market by far, have a lot to do with each the contraction of the rooftop photo voltaic market and the rising recognition of house batteries. In April of final 12 months, adjustments to the Golden State’s net-metering program took impact, slashing the speed at which rooftop photo voltaic house owners might promote surplus energy to the grid however boosting the worth of batteries, which allow owners to avoid wasting their solar energy for the instances when it’s most respected. The attachment fee in California rose to 14 p.c final 12 months.
But different elements are driving the uptick in house battery installations as nicely. Extreme climate occasions, made extra frequent by local weather change, are more and more threatening grid reliability. Batteries have gotten extra inexpensive. And rising utility charges are making the economics of solar-plus-storage extra enticing to owners.
The latter is actually a think about Hawaii, the state with by far the best residential attachment fee in 2023 — 95 p.c — and the one one with electrical energy charges larger than California’s. Hawaii had a beneficiant and extremely profitable battery incentive program operating for all of final 12 months, which it has since walked again.
Whatever the explanations for the rising recognition of house batteries within the U.S., the implication is evident: It’s yet one more signal that the period of battery storage has arrived. Big, utility-scale battery initiatives are being constructed throughout the nation at a fee that will have been arduous to fathom only a few years in the past. The new LBNL knowledge exhibits {that a} comparable pattern is underway for house battery programs too.
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