It does not makes financial sense to add storage in order to cover the few hours a year that one might be without electricity. Financial sense.

The discussion was not about running a house on a generator “all winter 24/7″.

Image a city of 4 million people with about 500,00 to 700, 000 houses surrounding it. In the solar future you describe, all of those houses would be churning out pollution. Imagine every house in your area with a car (more often a diesel truck) running in the driveway all winter 24/7. Imagine every summer night (when you want to open your windows) that all those generators are running tto provide night time air-conditioning

China launched a big VAWT program a few years back and abandoned it.

Numerous people have shown up with “new, exciting” VAWT designs and, as of today, none have produced performance data that shows that they work well enough to be usable.

Now, seems to me that we should curb our enthusiasm about VAWTs until one is evaluated by a reliable independent lab and found worthy.

Batteries, solar panels, inverters, etc. There’s data on them that show them to be sorth the investment.

If it were my house though, I’d forget about the math and just cover the whole thing with panels and sell the rest back to the grid, but that’s just me.

On the wind – Yes, but it is fairly easy to throw $100 into a small turbine to put in the back yard one afternoon, it’s exponentially more work to get a share of a large wind turbine. When you factor in the cost of your time, I don’t know that they’re significantly different… But yes – solar will likely always be cheaper on small scale.

As for charging EVs – Yeah, didn’t think about the time of charging. But for the EVs, assuming 4,000 Wh/day/m^2 in his area at 10% efficiency and the 18KWH battery of, say, a focus electric, that’s

18/(4*0.1) = 45 m^2 per car or 90 m^2 total or 1,000 sq feet of roof top just for the cars. That quite a fair chunk IMO…

What I’m seeing is that the least expensive battery storage is likely to be something like flow batteries or Ambri’s liquid metal batteries. Those aren’t likely to work small scale, but you should be able to stack up ‘shipping containers’ full of them on cheap real estate.

I can’t see a ‘household’ battery that would be cheaper than a large scale utility battery.

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A hundred dollars invested in a small wind turbine will produce far less electricity than a hundred dollars invested in a 80 meter high 5MW monster with enormous blades. Sitting up high where the wind blows hard and steady.

Solar panels are different. A hundred dollars worth of panels on a house produces the same amount of electricity as a hundred dollars worth of panels installed in a very large solar farm (assuming equal insolation).

Your brother isn’t likely to charge his EVs off his own solar panels. Most folks charge at night when their cars are parked for a long time. The best solution for him is probably to cover his barn with panels, ship the surplus power to the grid and take back (cheap wind) power at night. Storing in a separate battery bank for nighttime charging adds a lot more expense and inefficiencies.

(Have you calculated the area needed for that many solar panels? When I have for a single EV it didn’t take a lot of my roof space.)

And about the windmills – in most cases I would say you are correct, but there are a substantial number of cases where small scale wind might work. For one, I know my brother’s house has a great roof for solar, but if they were to drive 2 EVs for their normal commute, solar would not be enough unless maybe they covered the barn. But for those who don’t have a barn to cover, such as their neighbors, they could easily put a small scale turbine in the back yard. And neither of these houses are anywhere near remote… they’re walking distance from the city limit of a top 10 largest US city.

Also, licencing and certification for this would be prohibitive. I wouldn’t even know where to start from that perspective.

Overall, it comes down to a battery cost problem. We don’t have it because it’s not economical to buy batteries solely for the purpose of grid smoothing in all but the most extreme circumstances, even for large utility companies. Once it is, expect something to do all of this on the market rather quickly.

Small windmills are unlikely to ever play a role in energy production except at remote areas which have no grid access. In the case of wind, small is not beautiful.

– Store a couple of days’ worth of power
– Accept power from solar panels and small windmills
– Sell power to the grid when that’s profitable and buy when cheap to maintain a minimum backup store
– Exercise the batteries as required to maintain their performance and alert owner when replacement is required
– Charge or sell the energy in a connected car’s batteries as appropriate
– Pump energy between hot water tanks, passive solar panels, hot tub, swimming pool and a geothermal ground loop (including storing heat in the ground during the summer for use in the winter)
– Respond to requests and price signals from a neighbourhood or central smart grid.
– Interlink directly with neighbours’ systems, buying or selling power at prices undercutting the grid, enabling self-organizing power collectives.
– Present a web interface for (strongly-authenticated) control and monitoring from anywhere.

With such a box, even a small property could support an energy-affluent lifestyle while using the grid as a backup of last resort.

http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/chinas-byd-enters-australian-home-energy-storage-market-45286

NRG is introducing battery storage in the US.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/blog/post/2013/04/nrg-introducing-solar-with-battery-storage-for-homeowners#readercomments

These are a couple of pretty large companies getting into the business.