I get asked this questiona ll the time. As of June 2019, the answert would be NO in most cases. The exceptions are:
- You are a freak and don’t care about the financials
- You experience frequent blackouts and want protection from it
- You aree living in a state that offers signifcant subsidies for installing a battery system
The high interest in batteries has lead to a situation where, despite economies of scale getting better all the time, prices are not dropping as many expected. In fact TESLA at the beginng of the year, increased their prices in Australia.
The smart answer to that would be to say ‘no’ to batteries for the time being. Without spending big bucks on a battery, you can improve or even eliminate your power bill greatly by:
- Oversizing your solar panels and maximising your exports to the grid (most networsk allow 3-5kW of export)
- Sign up to a plan that provides a good feed-in tariff without punishing you with a high rate for grid consumption
- Be smart about how you use energy: try to shift energy hungry tasks to the middle of the day
You’ll be surprised how easy it is to reduce to powerbills to less than $200 per quarter or even less. That is, if you own your home and have a largely unshaded roof. If not: this will be covered in another post.