Pair Your Solar System with Battery Storage
Energy storage systems can offer you a new lifestyle of independence, and resilience, where you have complete control over your electricity and peace of mind.
3 Reasons to Install Batteries
Resilience
Solar systems are designed to shut off during an outage. Protect your home or business operations with a battery backup system and become independent from the unreliable grid and resilient to power outages. Batteries can also be installed without a solar system for use during emergencies, but the solar panels allow you to recharge the batteries even when the grid is down.
Independence
Take control of your electricity costs and reduce your bills with consumption management. Discharge your battery after sunset to use the stored energy produced by your solar system during the day. This is a great strategy for both residential and commercial customers to avoid peak hour rates. In addition, commercial buildings can save thousands by avoiding utility demand charges.
Control
As utility bills have significantly increased over the years, both in generation and distribution charges, installing a battery and consuming your stored solar energy when desired will decrease your reliance from the grid and protect you from ever increasing bills. The more the utility increases its rates, the more solar customers will save in avoided costs.
Our Stand For The Environment
Most batteries on today’s market are lithium ion, but some are made with more environmentally responsible and safer chemicals than others. Brighten Solar Co. chooses to install Cobalt-free batteries that use Lithium Ferro-Phosphate (LFP) chemistry and here are the reasons why:
- They are a safe choice for your home as they do not risk thermal runaway.
- They are landfill safe and some are 100% recyclable.
- They are an ethical choice, as Cobalt is one of the worst ethically mined minerals.
- They are durable as they have a warranty of 15 years.
How Do Batteries Work?
To understand how energy storage works,
you must first meet your equipment:
Battery Backup Systems
- Solar panels generate electricity in the form of direct current, or DC. This is fed into the inverter-charger.
- During the day, excess power can be used to charge your battery.
- Once converted to alternating current (AC) by your inverter-charger, electricity is sent to your appliances via your main electric panel and backup subpanel.
- If your battery is charged, you can send excess electricity back into the grid via Net Energy Metering, or NEM, and earn credits from your utility. On cloudy days, you can also pull from the grid to charge your battery or power your home
- At night when your solar panels are not producing, you can pull electricity from your battery.
- Your inverter-charger will convert the electricity and distribute it to both of your electrical panels.
- You also have the option to pull from the grid at night, in which you will use the credits you sent to the utility during the day. This is the best option for batteries intended for emergency backup only.
- With the help of batteries, you can use your solar panels to power your essential devices during an outage.
- You can use solar power for your backed-up devices, and the excess will charge your battery.
- Essential devices like your refrigerator, internet router, and certain lights will be rerouted to the backup subpanel to isolate the circuit from your main panel. When the grid is down, your emergency backup systems acts like an “off-grid” system.
- There is an automatic shutdown in place during power outages to protect utility workers from unexpected electricity flowing into the grid. This means that without a battery and backup subpanel, your solar system will not work during an outage.
- At night when your solar panels are not producing, your battery can discharge stored energy to power your essential devices in the backup subpanel.
Grid-Tied Battery Systems
- During the day when your solar panels are producing, you have the option to consume the energy right away, or to charge the battery if you are not home and do not need the energy being produced. The stored energy in the battery will be used later in the day, when the solar panels are no longer producing and your electricity demand increases.
- If your appliances do not need to be powered, and if your battery is fully charged, you can also send excess electricity back into the grid via Net Energy Metering (NEM), and earn credits from your utility.
- At night when your solar panels are not producing, you can pull electricity from your battery which was charged during the day with excess solar production.
- If your battery does not have enough stored energy, you also have the option to pull energy from the grid at night. In that case, you would use any credits collected during the day in exchange of your excess solar energy fed to the grid.
- A grid-tied battery does not have a backup function and will not provide resilience to the home in case of a power outage. Without a smart switch to recognize a power outage and disconnect the solar and battery system from the grid, and a backup subpanel where essential loads are isolated, the battery alone cannot supply the home appliances.
- Less equipment required means a more affordable storage solution. A grid-tied battery is about 35% less expensive than a backup battery system.
Battery Fast Facts
- Your solar PV system will not operate during a power outage without a battery.
- The 30% tax credit for solar applies to energy storage, as long as the battery is being charged by the solar panels. We will provide you all the information you need to maximize the tax benefits of your solar installation.
- The Self Generation Incentive Program reimburses consumers part of the cost of their battery. No need to stress about paperwork: Brighten will process all incentives and rebates for you!
- Most batteries on today’s market are lithium ion, but some are made with more environmentally responsible and safe chemicals than others. Brighten has committed to exclusively installing cobalt-free batteries and will provide you detailed information about the chemistry of your batteries.
- A battery’s warranty strongly affects the viability of your investment. Be sure to discuss this in detail with your installer.
- Solar and energy storage are long-term investments in which quality and safety outweigh quantity and discounts. If you have any questions, we are here to provide you all the information you need to choose the right energy storage system for your needs.
Battery White Paper
Batteries for storing solar energy have recently gained a surge in popularity. With this hype, it is common for misleading or confusing information to become widespread. In this white paper, we break down the very basics of batteries so that you can make the right choice when it comes to your system.
At Brighten Solar, our team of engineers and designers have received extensive training on battery systems design and keep being trained on the latest storage technologies. Education being at the core of our approach, this is part of our mission to bring more information on the latest products and services on the market. Some very good batteries are available to the residential and commercial markets but considering storage can seem overwhelming.
In order to help you figure out if adding batteries to your solar system would make sense for you, we gathered information in a white paper (free download).
White paper overview:
- What are batteries for?
- Why would I need batteries?
- How do I get batteries installed?