Solar and Energy Storage Systems for Grid Outages
Special report by Andy Cochrane
A solar and battery hybrid system can now provide significant backup power for your home. Whether or not emergency back-up power is important to you, the most sensible electrical step you can take is to put solar on your roof and make clean power to reduce your bill and reduce your carbon footprint. The addition of batteries is something that you can easily do initially or at any point in the future for security and energy resilience during an outage.
Prior to installing solar, it is important to use your electricity as efficiently as possible. With our reliable and relatively inexpensive grid electricity, energy efficiency sometimes becomes a lower priority. However, during an outage, you will need to be self-reliant, and the efficiency of your home will quickly come into sharp focus. The installation of proper insulation and air sealing around doors and windows is crucially important for keeping your home comfortable with as little energy input as possible. Replacing an old furnace with a heat pump can save you a lot of money and make your home more comfortable, and you should also consider a non-electric heat source as an option for the depths of winter.
For the solar part of the installation, you will want to share your power bill with the solar designer so they can target the right amount of energy production over the year, and also consider the potential production during an outage.
In regard to battery storage that can carry you through a power outage, you will want to analyze the loads that you need to back up in your house. If you keep safe and comfortable with a few smaller circuits, then your battery system will be much less expensive. A whole-home backup is possible, but remember that project budgets increase along with the amount of energy storage. The home ESS (Energy Storage System) will use an automatic transfer switch to provide power from the batteries when the grid goes down, will be able to utilize all of the solar you can produce, and will often have a generator backup in addition to solar.
There is an art and a science to designing such a system that incorporates the solar and batteries, along with many considerations of your individual home. It is a good idea to work with a dependable local company that will take the time to put together the best that the current state of the industry has to offer for your project. We have 22 years of grid-tied and off-grid experience that we bring to your project, and we enjoy serving the community in this way.
