Pair Your Solar System with Battery Storage

As renewables continue to take a hold of our energy matrix, onsite energy storage is the next big thing.

Are you looking to protect your business operations or your home during power outages? Are you a tech nerd looking to optimize your electricity consumption? Do you want to establish independence from the grid once and for all? Battery storage makes all this possible.

SCHEDULE A SITE VISIT

3 Reasons to Install Batteries

Emergency Backup

If your solar panels are grid-tied, they will not work during an outage. Protect your home or business operations with a battery backup system. 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.

Off-Grid Independence

If you want to be independent from the utility or don’t have access to the grid, batteries give you the freedom to use your solar power exactly when you need it. This application is best for low-consumption buildings and/or for a building owner who wants to be sure they are running strictly on clean energy.

Consumption Optimization

Take control of your electricity costs with consumption management. Commercial buildings can save thousands by avoiding utility demand charges, and residential buildings can avoid paying higher rates during peak hours.

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.

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?