Generate Your Own Power
Solar batteries to power your home or business
About Solar Batteries
With electricity prices continuing to rise and homeowners becoming more conscious of running costs, the uptake of battery storage systems in Australia is expected to quickly grow rapidly.
To find out the benefits solar batteries can bring to both your home and the grid, read on.
Benefits of Solar Batteries for the Home
Significant Electricity Savings
Investing in a solar battery system for your home can help you save more money on your electricity bills, compared to just installing solar alone. Rather than exporting your excess solar energy to the grid for a small feed-in tariff (as of the 5th of April 2020 the Northern Territories Jacana Energy FiT is 8.3 cents per unit), your solar battery will store any excess electricity, allowing you to use it later in the evening, when your solar PV system is not generating any electricity. This will greatly decrease the amount of electricity you’re required to buy from the grid at full price (around 23.68 cents per unit), resulting in significant savings.
Energy Independence
Installing a battery bank at your home or business lessens the amount of energy you’ll need to buy from the grid. This decreases your reliance on the grid and energy retailers, giving you more energy independence.
Energy Arbitrage
If your home is on a Time of Use Tariff, installing a solar battery means you can benefit from energy arbitrage. By charging your battery bank during off-peak rates and using your own stored electricity during peak rates, you’ll end up pocketing the difference and saving a lot of money on your electricity bills. Energy arbitrage can be accomplished with or without a solar PV system.
Backup Power in Case of Grid Outages
In some cases, it’s possible to install your home battery storage system to provide your home with backup power. This gives you the security and flexibility of always having electricity, regardless of what’s happening on the grid.
Benefits of Solar Batteries for the Grid
Reduced Pressure on Electricity Networks
By installing a home battery and taking pressure off the grid, your home is helping contribute to the longer life of local infrastructure and resources. This lessens the frequency of costly network upgrades, which end up being paid for by all grid users.
Mitigating Power Intermittency Caused by Solar PV
While solar PV systems produce electricity steadily and predictably throughout the day when the sun is shining, if there is cloud cover or any sort of climate disruption, solar electricity output for an entire region can fluctuate unpredictably, requiring other generation plants (typically gas for the NT) to be brought quickly online to meet demands.
This can cause a lot of stress and strain for the grid. Common adoption of home battery storage systems would mitigate the impact of this problem, using the stored electricity of their own batteries, rather than the grid, to make up for any power shortages. Widespread uptake of batteries could also help to manage unintended voltage level fluctuations, helping current grid infrastructure have a longer life.
State of the Art Technology
Installing a battery bank means your home will be able to take advantage of future regulatory changes which will allow households, small businesses, and community groups to trade rooftop solar generated electricity between each other. Investing in a battery will allow you to store your excess solar electricity and selling it to neighbours for more than the gazetted feed-in tariff rate, effective bypassing major energy retailers.
Tesla Powerwall
The most famous solar batteries
Tesla Powerwall 2 is the leading residential and small commercial energy solar battery backup and storage component on the market. Pictured above is the Powerwall 2XL made by the internationally renowned Tesla.
Arguably the cheapest solar battery
In the Australian solar batteries market Tesla Powerwall is:
- Per Kw, the cheapest battery backup system
- Largest storage capacity for home use available
- The most simple solar battery to install
- Compatible with any inverter
- Simply the best solar batteries on the market
- The only solar battery that regulates its temperature
Tesla History
A little bit about Tesla
Tesla Motors was founded in 2003 by a group of engineers in Silicon Valley who wanted to prove that electric cars could be better than petrol-powered cars.
Tesla began its mission by designing a power train for a sports car built around an electric AC (Alternating Current) induction motor, patented in 1888 by Nikola Tesla, the inventor who inspired the company’s name. The Tesla Roadster was launched in 2008 and set a new benchmark for sustainable transport.
Since then, Tesla engineers have continued to design fast, efficient and practical cars that push the boundaries of what is generally considered possible.
The company is also creating a network of charging stations, the Destination Chargers, for it customers around the world.
Tesla is a technology and design company with a focus on energy innovation and the mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. The company entered the solar home storage battery backup market with its Tesla Powerwall Battery in 2015, and halved the cost of battery storage within a year when launching Powerwall 2 in 2016.
Batteries & PV Cells
The Photovoltaic (PV) cells on your roof need to deliver the power you need without degrading. And for as long as possible.
For premium quality rooftop panels, expect 20 to 30 years of FREE electricity from the sun.
While PV panels are the largest component to your solar system, battery storage can be the most costly.
But the good news is that research, technical breakthroughs and the benefits of large-scale production have dramatically reduced the cost of rooftop panels while also increasing their efficiency.
Lower component costs are the key to making solar energy the world’s cheapest form of new electricity.
Country Solar NT has access to the entire solar panel market. We are not tied to any particular brand or manufacturer and we keep abreast of new and improved solar technologies and products.
We also know which manufacturers consistently deliver quality and reliability and always recommend the best solar panels for your particular situation.
Questions for your solar panel provider
Tesla’s products are produced at its own factory in Fremont, California, providing thousands of jobs to the area and with a production capability of 1,000 cars a week.
The company is expanding its manufacturing footprint into other areas, including in Tilburg, the Netherlands, where it has an assembly facility, and Lathrop, California, where it has a specialized production plant.
To reduce the costs of lithium ion solar batteries, Tesla and key strategic partners including Panasonic have begun construction of a gigafactory in Nevada. The massive giga factory will be a zero emissions building and facilitate the mass-production of affordable electric vehicles and battery packs for cars and home storage. By 2020 the giga factory will produce more lithium ion cells than all of the world’s combined output in 2013.
Tesla offers the Powerwall and Powerwall 2 battery for residential customers as well as the Powerpack for commercial and utility-scale applications.
The video above is hosted by Robert Llewellyn who played Kryten in Red Dwarf (series 3 onwards). This is the web series “Fully Charged” but Robert is so good we had to include the whole episode.
Non-Tesla Solutions
Other Batteries & Goverment Incentives
Other battery options;
> Enphase solar batteries and
> BYD Battery Storage Solutions
Business & Job Opportunities in NT
> More batteries, More Renewables, More Local Jobs for NT
Some of the PV panel brands we currently recommend
We are continually trialing promising solar products as they become available to assess their suitability under Northern Territory conditions.