Anyone who requests quotes for solar panels is often told that they are suitable for a home battery. This way you are ready for the future, they say.
Tesla makes home batteries. Just like LG, Huawei, the German Sonnen and Dutch brands such as Zonneplan and Sessy. They can be purchased on comparison site Gaslicht.com from 9,700 euros.
No savings
But purchasing such a battery is not at all interesting for someone who hopes to save money with it. Even Roeland Nagel from home battery provider Charged admits this to RTL Z.
“Everyone recognizes that the payback period is too long. When we came up with this, the prices were different.”
Store like coffee or toilet paper
It sounds so logical. Power that you generate with your solar panels, but not use, can be stored in your own home battery for later use.
Just as it sounds logical to purchase electricity with a dynamic energy contract at a time when the price is low and save it for more expensive moments. Just like when you get a nice offer in the supermarket and buy coffee, tea or toilet paper for a longer period of time.
But anyone who does the math will soon discover that such a home battery is not worth it. Not now and not in the coming years.
Research agency CE Delft did one research and came to the conclusion that it will take you at least 15 years to recoup the purchase price of a home battery. But such a battery has a lifespan of up to 15 years; in most cases even only 10 years.
Loss guaranteed
In short: the loss is often guaranteed. How is it possible that battery suppliers have been claiming for a long time that you can make money with them? That’s how it is.
In theory, a home battery can be lucrative if you have a dynamic energy contract. More than 250,000 people have this and several small and large energy companies offer this contract form.
Because the electricity price varies every hour of the day, you can buy electricity cheaply at certain times. For example, at four o’clock in the morning when the wind is blowing hard, the wind turbines are spinning hard and there are few people using a lot of electricity.
Or in the middle of a sunny summer day when solar panels are producing full power, but we are more likely to be barbecuing in the garden than to have the induction hob and electric oven on.
You can save costs by adapting your behavior to those cheap electricity prices. But then you have to run the washing machine and dryer in the middle of the windy night or just around noon on that sunny day. You can also store the electricity in a home battery.
Decades of patience required
Here is a calculation example that we also submitted to CE Delft. Suppose you have a battery at home that can store 5 kilowatt hours of electricity. That is just under half of the 12 kilowatt hours that an average household uses in a day. You fill the battery during the cheap hours of the night for 16 cents per kilowatt hour. The battery can be full for 80 cents.
The next day you use that electricity at the most expensive time: at the beginning of the evening when electricity costs 26 cents per kilowatt hour. Those 5 kilowatt hours would have cost you 1.30. If you turn on two induction hobs for an hour and also turn on the washing machine and dryer, you will come close to 5 kilowatt hours of consumption. The saving is a maximum of 50 cents per day.
If you keep that up every day of the year, your savings will be 180 euros. And if you consider that such a battery will cost you 5,000 euros including installation, it will take more than 20 years to pay for itself.
Here you can see the electricity prices per hour. For this example we used the prices of Tuesday, February 6. As you can see, prices fluctuated less in the following days, which means less can be earned on storage.
Prices fluctuate less
But given current electricity prices and fluctuations, the savings with such a home battery are far too low to recoup the purchase price (see box). Nagel explains:
“When we made the calculations last year, the difference between the highest and lowest electricity price on a day, the so-called spread, was much larger. Up to 29 cents. Now it is 10 cents. And last year we also thought that the spread was much wider would grow.”
It was expected that there would be many more fluctuations in electricity prices, making home batteries lucrative. “But that spread has fallen and electricity producers are doing more to reduce that spread. Everyone now recognizes that the payback period for home batteries is too long.”
Afraid of a power outage
According to Nagel, you should not purchase home batteries at this time to make money from them. “We mainly sell them to people who already have solar panels, a heat pump, time and money to spare and are wondering what else they can do. And who would like to become self-sufficient. Want to stand on their own two feet in the energy field.” In other words: if you are afraid of a major power outage.
However, completely disconnecting your house from the electricity grid and doing everything with home batteries is impossible. The batteries are only suitable for storing electricity for a day or at most a few days. To have enough power to last weeks or (winter) months, you would have to fill your garden with batteries.
One day it might be lucrative
Yet Nagel does see a future for the home battery. “They can also be used to keep the power grid in balance. You can make money with that. Many companies are developing a system for this. We are also working on that.” You then make your battery available to the grid operator. it drains it when there is suddenly a high demand for electricity and little sun and wind.
But CE Delft tempers this optimism. The researchers are even afraid that if this becomes widespread, the balance on the network could be disrupted even more.
Only with subsidies of 60 to 80 percent of the purchase price can a home battery have a payback period that is less than the lifespan of the battery. That’s what the researchers think
And such a generous subsidy does not seem to be possible for the time being.
2024-02-09 06:08:25
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