Consumers to pull plug on power companies as solar batteries improve
FED-UP households have warned the Newman Government [Australia] they are prepared to abandon the energy grid to escape big bills as the prospect of producing their own power becomes a reality.
by Kelmeny Fraser, The Courier-Mail -- Dec 26, 2014
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Solar industry representatives estimate the cost of battery storage units, which enable households to generate and store solar power to use day or night, will plummet in five to 10 years.
Solar Energy Industries Association spokesman Geoff Bragg said this would lead many people to go “off the grid”, a trend he said government and industry had underestimated.
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Solar + Batteries: Are we all going off-grid?
by Pablo Astorga, pvsolarreport.com -- Dec 9, 2014
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Better with batteries
So, solar by itself cannot meet our needs. But what if we were able to store energy in batteries that we could charge during the day and discharge at night? This is precisely what many see as the natural evolution of the solar market. And given that battery technology cost is expected to drop dramatically, this might very well be the single most important driver of future solar adoption.
Picture this: solar panels on your roof and batteries in your garage. Drive to work in your electric vehicle (EV), which significantly reduces your total cost of car ownership, and let your solar system charge those batteries; when back home in the evening, let them recharge your EV and power your lamps, TV and dishwasher. Here lies the paradigm of the future energy system: customers are able to go entirely off-grid and, for the first time in history, become their own electric utility.
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Winfried Hoffmann: Stored Electricity As Low As $0.06/kWh By 2030
by James Ayre, cleantechnica.com -- Sep 29, 2014
You can expect to see the cost of storing electricity via lithium-ion battery cell systems fall drastically by the year 2030, according to the relatively well known figure Winfried Hoffmann.
Hoffman -- best known for his rather accurate projection of the solar module pricing curve of recent times -- predicts quite bluntly that battery storage costs will fall considerably faster that most experts are currently projecting.
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Hoffman is expecting lithium-ion batteries (for EVs+electronics) to “break the sound-barrier” of $100 per kWh capacity at right around the same time as batteries with a cumulative capacity of 1 tWh are installed.
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Solar With Batteries to Hit $1 Billion in U.S. by 2018
by Ehren Goossens, bloomberg.com -- Dec 19, 2014
Demand for rooftop solar paired with energy storage systems will reach $1 billion in the U.S. within four years, according to GTM Research.
About 318 megawatts of solar-storage capacity will be in operation in the U.S. by 2018, the Boston-based research company said in a report.
Combining solar panels with batteries means users can store power during the day and use it at night, reducing electricity bills. Those savings can be more significant for customers who pay higher rates for electricity during peak periods, Shayle Kann, senior vice president of GTM, said in an interview. So-called time-of-use pricing is typically more common now among commercial users.
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The biggest market for solar-with-batteries will be California, followed by New York and Hawaii, Kann said. [...]
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handlemanpost.wordpress.com -- Lithium-ion Battery Experience Curve -- Cost Curves for Batteries, Solar and Wind
-- scientificamerican.com -- Smaller, cheaper, faster: Does Moore’s law apply to solar cells?
It would seem so.