Residential Battery Storage Not Yet

Australian homeowners may be flocking to energy storage in droves. But one of the country’s biggest engineering consultancies doesn’t see the financial sense in it.

Victoria-based Aurecon, which has operations across Africa, Asia, Australasia and the Middle East, and which has been associated with major renewable energy projects such as the Kogan Creek Solar Boost plant, says the financial impact of adding batteries to residential PV is “negative."

“Aurecon has modeled multiple scenarios with a Tesla Powerwall lithium-ion battery coupled with a 4-kilowatt rooftop PV system,” said Victor Young, the company’s market director for energy, oil and gas. “Adding batteries increases the cost of power even in the most favorable circumstance of a zero feed-in tariff from the network provider.”

As it happens, the Powerwall might not be the best battery on the Australian market, on a cost per total warranted kilowatt-hours basis. That honor currently goes to the Redflow ZCell zinc-bromide residential flow battery, according to SolarQuotes.

However, said Young: “The advertised higher cost of current-generation flow batteries does not encourage us to expect that the return on investment for this type of battery would be better.”

This article is comes from http://www.storagebattery-factory.com/news/Residential-Battery-Storage-No.html.