[lazyier]

The OP is right.

If you are off-grid and adapt everything to using solar and battery then you can get "free operating cost" with enormous costs and loss of reliability.

However if you are grid-tied then the power company is going to regulate the power output of your solar panels in order to avoid the "duck curve" problem. Meaning that during times of peak potential output the panels are effectively going to be turned off.

Also don't try to get fancy with copex versus opex stuff. It's nonsense for anything other than company valuation and depreciation, especially when it comes to taxes. It's meaningless for home owners. Costs is costs. Money is fungible.

While laudable that you want to get energy independence, if that is your actual goal... the chances of you ever recouping your costs over just using the power grid is extremely small.

And those expenses are real. That is in terms of real resources... raw material, manufacturing, and labor. Unless you can get those costs inversed then chances are extremely likely that you are consuming far more actual resources and creating greater "carbon footprint" than if you just stuck with grid power.

That is... if everybody did what you did then there would be significantly higher ecological impact than the current status quo.

[wikfwikf]

1. If a large number of people are off-grid or effectively off-grid then the cost of consumer will have to decrease until it's comparable with the total cost (capital and maintenance) of private solar and battery.

2. The duck curve will be a non-issue when storage availability and cost has evolved sufficiently. Private storage can also force utilities' hand here - it makes sense to pass pricing signals through to some consumers, and they will be able to quickly react by buying storage (sometimes at levels which won't make strict economic sense) and/or moving demand.

3. The suggestion that the (admittedly significant) redundancy in the use of resources from people having their own solar and batteries is comparable to the ecological impact of fossil fuels is far, far off the mark.

[bumby]

>1. If a large number of people are off-grid or effectively off-grid then the cost of consumer will have to decrease until it's comparable with the total cost (capital and maintenance) of private solar and battery.

I don't think this is how it works. As the OP said, costs is costs. If a fossil fuel fired plant cost $X to build and run, you can't just hand-wave those costs away in the vein of competition. The costs will be passed on to the consumer.

Those privileged enough to have the option to build solar/battery can extract themselves from that market, but there will still be some left on the grid who will have to bear that cost. For example, renters and those too poor to afford the costs of solar will likely be stuck paying increased costs as the consumer base shrinks.

[doctor_eval]

> If you are off-grid and adapt everything to using solar and battery then you can get "free operating cost" with enormous costs and loss of reliability.

Well, it turns out that the costs are not at all enormous, and I don't understand why you think the reliability will be less. I've already had one major and several minor unplanned grid power outages since I moved here 6 months ago.

Are in-home batteries less reliable than the grid? I haven't heard that, and I don't know why they would be.

I think the payback time for the system I'm looking at (panels + batteries) will be ten years, but I'd much prefer to reduce my emissions than to save money through buying dirty (black coal) power from the grid. Of course there is the embodied energy and CO2 of the system and I haven't looked at that (yet). I'm still starting out.

That said, power prices are rising dramatically in Australia, and battery prices have been falling for years, so in 6-12 months time when I actually purchase the system, I think it's likely that the payback time will be significantly lower.

The point being that, at some point, the price will come down to the point where people will take out loans to buy these systems, because the loan repayments will be lower than the cost of buying power off the grid.

That's the opex/capex equation kicking in, of course, which I didn't think was trying to be fancy at all.

[zasdffaa]

You make strong claims, use emotive terms and conclude with a very definite "..there would be significantly higher ecological impact than the current status quo", but you give no facts or figures, and it's not a good post.