why are electric cars more financially viable than home batteries?
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If you take a Tesla P100, the 100 is for 100kW. If we assume central AC / HVAC uses say 4kWh, then at 25hrs it would have depleted the Tesla’s battery, let alone all other appliances and electronic devices.
When you say a solar system with a Tesla battery, that battery is only going to run at night (or when it’s raining/cloudy) and will get depleted really quickly, it’s not going to last even 4 nights.
I’d imagine it’d have to do with not needing to have both a home battery *and* a car.
If you don’t need a car, then by all means, just get a big battery pack, but there are lots of places where cars are required, and little infrastructure on the way to change that, so it makes sense to get an electric car.
Electric cars are just more relevant to a larger group of people than home batteries. Cars are useful to a ton of people, but buying electricity off of peak hours isn’t as useful to as many people.
However, home batteries can be financially viable if you live on a grid that has more variable electric costs throughout the day. This is usually due to a grid saturated with solar energy that is very active at noon, but inactive at night. California is a good example of a grid with volatile daily energy prices due to solar power.
The issue with this volatility is that energy is being produced at the time of day when it is least used by the grid: in the afternoon. Typically, peak load occurs in the early evening. So, a home battery can help you ‘buy’ energy at the cheapest rate during the afternoon, and supplement your load at night when you are actually using it. In theory, it is a form of energy arbitrage where you earn relative returns by buying energy you already plan to use, at a discount. A lot of home batteries are designed to do this kind of charging and discharging on a programmed schedule or at set electric rates.
That said, if you live in an area with non-volatile energy prices the battery won’t be very useful. It can serve a function if you run *a lot* of home solar, and you want to be more grid independent. But, from a financial perspective, it likely isn’t worth it.
There really isn’t much need for a home battery. The electric grid is very reliable and extended outages are rare in first world countries.
For grid-connected houses, batteries need a big difference between the cost of peak-period electricity and off peak to pay for themselves. In most places, the cost of the batteries and installation means the economics don’t work yet. As peak electricity prices rise, and as more solar panels push the price of midday electricity down, batteries will become worthwhile investments.
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