Home battery can help with problems with power grid but also has its disadvantages

Home batteries can help with grid problems but also have disadvantages. That's what two industry experts said in an interview with ANP. When used correctly, a home battery can help reduce imbalance in the grid, but it is still expensive and has limited capacity.

In the low-voltage grid, which transports electricity to households and other consumers, there is sometimes more electricity than the grid can absorb. This is almost always because people want to feed too much solar power into the grid. With a home battery, this energy can be stored and used later without having to feed it back into the grid at peak times.

Stephan Brandligt, independent coordinator of the Low Voltage Grid Congestion Action Agenda, does not believe that every Dutch household will have a home battery in a few years. At a price of around 4,000 euros, they are currently still very expensive, he explained. Furthermore, there are only a few suppliers still producing them.

Those who use batteries today do so mainly for financial reasons. The current price incentives are based solely on the energy markets. The battery charges when the sun shines and discharges when there is demand but cannot store all the solar energy generated in a day. This leads to little or no reduction in peak load.

That's why a lot of research is still being carried out into the extent to which home batteries really represent a solution for the entire grid, Brandligt explained. "Before everyone uses home batteries, the grid problems get worse."

Cor Brockhoven, Portfolio Director for the Built Environment at grid operator Enexis, describes home batteries as "quite a charming solution" for storing solar energy but also emphasizes the disadvantages. "In summer, you want to store a lot, and then it turns out that a battery fills up quite quickly," he said. The capacity of a house battery, for example, is far too small to charge an electric car once. He also said that a battery is still too expensive.

Brockhoven sees the neighborhood battery as more of a solution. "You can buy them as a neighborhood and they work well for storing solar energy, " he stated.

Brandligt thinks more about using batteries efficiently in electric cars. "You can also charge them with your own electricity at a convenient time and then discharge them. So you can basically do the same with them."