I just did a quick calculation.
I got rooftop solar and I live in sunny California. During the summer months it produces tons of electricity with most of it being fed into the grid. And it produces quite a bit more for the whole year than we use. But in the 3 winter months, it falls short of what I consume by about 400kwh/month.
That means that for me to go off the grid, I would have to store 1200kwh in batteries in the summer months and hold in reserve for the winter.
To do that it would take about 100 of the biggest Powerwall batteries at a cost of $13000/battery, or around $1.6 million!!
I managed to get the solar installed under the old net metering plan where pg&e credits me roughly one to one with the power I feed them, and I give them more than they give me so I pay them little or nothing during the year but I get some cash rebate at the end of the year for the excess I give them.
So pg&e is acting as an infinite battery for me (and people like me) and saving me (and hundreds of thousands like me) $1.6 million in the process.
In other words they’re getting royally screwed. No wonder electricity rates here are about 50cents/kwh double and triple that of some saner states. Actually it’s the ratepayers without solar who are getting screwed by having to pay the exhorbitant rates.
They did make a change in the new net metering plan. Now if you have solar, any energy you use from the grid you pay pretty close to the full amount, there is no one-to-one offset like the old plan. You do get a bit of credit for the excess you feed the grid, but it’s only 3cents/kwh!
This seems a lot fairer all around. It also makes little sense to go solar (too little benefit) and as a result solar installs have cratered here in sunny California.
But I’m glad I snuck under the old rules.
One last piece of calculation.
If the batteries would cost my household 1.6 mil, and the whole national grid went solar, and there are 100 million households, that means it would require a minimum of 1 billion batteries at a cost of $13 trillions!! That’s just the batteries, not all the infrastructure associated with that. So you can probably double that number - 26 trillions!!
Did I do that right?