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He could depend on the 16 solar panels mounted in his backyard and a battery system to provide for the basic needs of his house in the suburban community of Hilshire Village.
He was one of the people I reached out to this week to get a sense of whether Beryl, along with longer-term concerns about the reliability of the grid, have made Texans more receptive to rooftop solar.
Such customer-owned resources are an essential part of the shift away from fossil fuels, helping to reduce demand on a grid that relies on natural gas power plants to produce electricity.
How much room is difficult to say, but a good way to frame it is that the state’s generation from small-scale solar last year was equivalent to about 1% of the total from large power plants.
Some of the main drivers of rooftop solar in Texas have been a desire to reduce exposure to rising utility costs and concerns about reliability of the grid, said Ryan Barnett, senior vice president of policy and market development for Palmetto, a North Carolina-based climate tech company whose products include solar and battery storage.
Disclosure: CenterPoint Energy has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors.
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You MUST have a battery for your solar panels to be of any use during a grid outage. When I got panels installed in 2020, I paid $24,500. A whole-house battery would have been almost as much again. I skipped the battery because, at the time, I was not particularly concerned about grid reliability.
Yeah, 2021’s freeze was the final straw for me. Our grid sucks, and solar/batteries are relatively inexpensive in terms of prices through Austin Energy, so there was no upside to remaining on the grid.
I was paying ~$1,000 per year in a 1/1 for what was usually 30kWh/month and often lower. 600Ah of LFP ran $1,700, 1200W of A-grade 9BB panels were $900, and a hybrid inverter was $600, all at 0% interest.
So recoup time is roughly three years, except I’m not at the whims of ERCOT. Between that and switching to 5G internet, grid failures simply don’t affect me. I read about them on Reddit and have the “Oh, no! Anyway …” meme reaction.
