So ecoflow has come out with some crazy product that lets you offset your energy usage by using Solar. The target audience for this specific tech is apartment and rental units. (Anker is also currently working on one, but I think their product is only available in Germany at the moment)
While this can’t/isn’t designed to run your whole home, it can offset some of your energy usage, and since it utilizes a standalone backup battery you do have some small off grid redundancy.
What are the thoughts on this? Is distributing solar and batteries to potentially every appartment and environmental mistake? Or is this potentially a massive step towards a function and sustainable future grid?
They are a really good option for places without a good grid. Having some electricty makes your life so much better. You can already find solar panels in slums and nomads use them a lot. That makes sense. Other then that it is a decent way of adding a lot of solar panels to buildings, instead of large solar farms covering up valueable land. Having a decentralized grid has its advantages and being somewhat independend from the national grid also has its merits. However it is more expensive then solar farms and other large installations as economies of scale do not apply. Batteries in case of no or a bad grid are okay, but for a properly working grid they are just too small. However what makes sense is to use batteries you have at home anyway smartly. Charging your electric vehicle at the right time for example makes a lot of sense. In a way heat pumps and freezers heating up or cooling down more, when electricity is cheap is also a good idea. However purpose build electricity storage at home is wastefull, as just by it size a national grid will have much smother consumption and more different electricty source in more place to require significantly less storage. In theory it is always windy or sunny somewhere in the world, so a global grid, might not need much storage at all.