Tesla Motors Announces A New Home Battery; Living Off The Grid Will Soon Be Status Quo

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60. Hopefully the pack would store enough to last until the sun comes back out

For instance, here in North Florida, we might have several days, at most a week, without sufficient sun to power PV. A battery pack that can supply power for that amount of time would make a house grid independent.

That could make the difference for me to go to a PV system. I haven't yet put in one - when I checked out the possibility ten years ago before building our house, the cost of the PV panels was too high (over $30,000), the number of batteries took up too much space, and the battery capacity was not sufficient to power a house for more than a day or two. We would have needed to add an extra room just to store the batteries and the extra electronics for the PV system, bringing the total cost to about $50,000 once we were done.

Thing final straw was that the local electric coop was not set up to buy extra capacity so we couldn't even stay on the grid without batteries and offset our costs with the PV panels.

Now I hear PV panels are a lot cheaper, our coop has changed their meters to "smart meters" so I think they can buy excess power, and if battery systems would take less space I will seriously consider adding solar PV down the road.