Solar plus storage is a great business model, but not for the reason usually cited

Creating ‘dispatchable solar’ or time-shifting solar output from low value periods to higher value periods may sound sensible, but will leave you with a sub-economic storage investment. You’d be running the battery only one cycle per day with a low captured spread, and that’s a long way from fully optimising the storage asset. Not to mention, you don’t need to co-locate or even co-own the solar to access that opportunity with a storage asset – simpler to just trade those periods through the wholesale market.

So if the revenue advantages aren’t there, why do it? The single biggest reason is on the cost side: Grid connection costs can be paid for once but used twice, with total solar+storage MWs substantially oversized vs grid connection. That really moves the needle on investment returns. There are some nice portfolio and imbalance management benefits too.

We think co-located solar plus storage is investable today, given the revenue that can be captured with Habitat Energy’s optimisation platform. Get in touch for more info.

Dr Ben Irons