This is sort of my problem with pushing at-home solar as a primary means to de-carbonize our electricity production. We still need grid access, but with more people not getting their electricity from the grid, the cost to maintain it gets shifted to those who still use it as their primary source of energy. And, well, it's not the poor who are installing kilowatts worth of solar capacity and battery storage on their property.
We _need_ grid access, for now. Batteries are getting so crazy cheap. LFP is hitting the market en masse, and right behind that is sodium ion to halve the price again.
And, at least where I am, grid _access_ isn't really the biggest cost, capacity is. My power company would love it if I hooked some batteries up to solar and used that during peak hours so they don't have to upgrade every transmission line between me and a bunch of coal in Idaho. In fact, I know this because they pay me to do *exactly that with time-of-use metering.
* I don't actually have any solar, but I do have an electric water heater and an electric car, which are both huge batteries, and easy to time shift the charging of.
If you get two EVs equivalent to average size American cars, that’s over 200 kwh of storage.
That’s equivalent to roughly 15 tesla powerwalls, and newer models can charge your (tiny) house battery as needed during power outages.
Having said that, community net metering makes way more sense in urban areas than per-building solar. The idea is that, by law, you can buy a small fraction of a neighborhood wide solar or wind farm (e.g. on a commercial parking lot, or a few blocks away, etc), and the power company offsets your power consumption bill with the electricity your fraction of the solar installation produced.
sodium ion tech is largely on hold because LFP got cheaper than expected and made it largely non-viable at current pieces. The expensive thing about batteries aren't the raw materials but manufacturing the cells, and those costs increase massively when you're trying to match kWh produced with a lower energy chemistry.
This is only the case in a few markets that still do 1:1 net metering. I still get charged a grid connection fee (which you’re charged even if you use zero electricity) and when I sell power back to the grid I only am credited the production value and not the full kWh rate. As a result anything I net back I still pay the cost of the transmission infrastructure.
