Solar panels and battery storage may have started out as the unlikely couple but are becoming more and more inseparable in todays’ world. But just as the ups and downs of finances impact a relationship, so do the sinking costs of solar and storage. Here, they are helping make the marriage of the two not only more feasible but also sustainable for the long haul. The phenomena is active both for utility scale storage for wider scale PV farms and backup storage, and is also playing out on the rooftop of homes across the globe. Some key figures bear out the healthy upward trend linking solar to storage including:
- The U.S. will become the largest market for grid tied energy storage this year (IHS Markit)
- Solar-plus-storage combination is supercharging the deployment of batteries across the country (IHS Markit)
- Since 2017, every second residential PV installation in Germany has been paired with a battery pack
- In Germany as of September 2019, there are roughly 150,000 home storage systems with an estimated capacity of about 1GWh in circulation
Battery storage has given photovoltaic solar panels a boost in the market as the upfronts costs of solar panels drop through new financing arrangements and the ability lease panels through power purchase agreements. PPAs reduce or eliminate the need for upfront costs for both residential and commercial applications at a price that is typically below the price of power purchased from the utility.
The increasingly inseparable mash-up of solar and storage continues to reduce intermittency issues whereby some portion of solar power generated can be stored and consumed at a later time on the grid. For utility scale figures on the costs of solar paired with storage options the National Renewable Energy Laboratory provides a useful graphic below "PV Plus Storage Cost Breakdown" showing that for utility scale deployments, the varying costs of PV systems with x amount of battery power in Megawatts that can last for Y duration. Click here for more details.