Battery Insiders Reflection - Residential Energy Storage Systems

0:00Transcript

0:00Welcome to Battery Insiders, your podcast providing you insights on the fascinating world of batteries. Hosted by Bhavya Jha and Simon Engelke. And welcome back, everybody. Thanks for joining our 61st session on residential energy storage. I'm Bhavya, and as usual, I have Simon here with me. We are excited to have you all join for this discussion today. We had some interesting conversations from, or rather heard interesting tidbits from Yael, who I think elaborated very nicely why energy storage in the residential context is very important and what the benefits are. Happy to discuss that with you, Simon, today. Did you have any initial reactions to the conversation? Yeah, I think it was super interesting because on the one hand, we had our speaker who's based in Singapore, and I think it's an interesting perspective. She was contributing through that as well in her work. Of course, covered quite a few different topics, also with solar integration and central storage topics. But then also, I really enjoyed some of the contributions also by the other participants who joined us spontaneously or joined us for the discussion.

1:20And I remember this great person in the UK who was installing his own system as we spoke. And you could hear the drilling in the background. And he had all of these hands-on numbers and hands-on experience from setting up his own residential energy storage system. So I think this was quite nice on one hand, to have a bit more theory. On the other hand, we had a lot of very practical experience shared in real time. So that, I think, was a nice combination. How about you, Barbara? That was really cool. Very interesting and just a very hands-on experience to have somebody tuning in while they're installing or building the thing that we talk about. That's very, very cool. I also felt, I think, I tend to think about things from that policy and regulatory perspective. And it reminded me of when I, once upon a time, you know, in my previous work, looked at the regulation of second life batteries. And that was also a concern that had come up during that research was when people are installing their own batteries and how do we register and track and trace the residential context in which people, you know, may be more creative, more handy, more able to just do things on their own.

2:40How do you regulate the DIY, the do-it-yourself projects that people in the residential context execute? And so I thought that was like an interesting juxtaposition that came up. You know, we're talking about it on the podcast. I had that little background on that specific instance. And then, of course, we heard from our listener that, you know, he was also doing that, which is great. I think there's so many benefits to having, it addresses one of the main concerns with renewables, right, of intermittency and seasonal concerns with harnessing that renewable energy, whether it's like solar, wind, what have you. And I think we had a really interesting discussion. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think it's definitely one I was asked recently also about like, you know, the, yeah, you know, where's the most demand coming for batteries or for cells in the stationary market, right? And is it more residential or is it more kind of grid systems or like larger, you know, installations, right? More utility scale.

3:42And I think it's very interesting also to see how this might develop, right? I think it's a very hot market in some way in both ends in many ways. There's a lot of development. But I think it would be interesting to see, as you said, from a regulatory perspective and how these, you know, things push it, but also new markets, right? Like looking at India, massive growth opportunity there for residential, also energy storage. And already a lot of people use, you know, that asset and things already to balance or like to overcome any demittency of the grid. So, yeah, I think it's just a super fascinating topic. And at the end of the day, also something a lot of us might have to figure out ourselves, right, at some point. I mean, I'm living here in a flat, so I don't have my own energy storage system yet, even though I thought about it a lot to get my own UBS system in a way or my own backup and put some solar up.

4:32But, yeah, I think it's just super interesting to see, yeah, the growth of it, but also compared to utility. Yeah, in the U.S., and for those who are listening who may be less familiar with the U.S. context, battery storage and, you know, solar on your roof, it's all distributed generation. And how we regulate that, how we price that, how we connect that to the grid, make it available to others, whether it's on your rooftop, for your community, what have you, or for a larger like utility or commercial scale project. That has always, that's an ongoing conversation and storage keeps coming up. I think that when I talk about batteries and now it's always people assume more I'm talking about long-term storage and less about electric vehicles, even though that's where I started out. And so for those reasons, I think our conversation and a lot of what Yaa discussed was very relevant. And so for those listening, if you haven't had a chance to listen, I do recommend listening to, tuning into Yaa's bit, or rather bits throughout the conversation.

5:48I think she did a really awesome job of breaking it down for people who are new to the field. It was a great primer, a great refresher for me as well. And it could be a good primer for many of our listeners as well. So I hope that you will tune in. And with that, Simon, I think we can say adios for now and hope to hear from you all during our next session, which will be in April, later this month. And look forward to including your conversation in our discussion later on on Battery Insiders. Thanks for joining. Thanks for joining, everyone.