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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

The contribution of SREC to the income ROI calculation is high. That aside, with load shifting into peak production time and some judicious non battery time shifting (hot water) it's possible to reduce billable kW consumption.

In oz what's happened is the SREC equivalent is now much lower and the unavoidable network and systems costs to the energy supply company went up. It's still worth having, and if you can afford the capex then arbitrage of battery can earn higher marginal return quite aside from extending your non consumption window significantly.

V2G will be huge.

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If you spend $25K on a solar installation, does the value of your home increase by $25K?

This angle isn't mentioned in the article. Overall the profitability of the installation seems shaky and depends on various government interventions that probably won't be around forever.

If we model the solar installation as a conversion of cash into home equity however, the calculus changes. You are buying home equity and getting reduced energy bills in the process. You almost certainly come out ahead, the panels are in a sense free, other than costing you some liquidity.

Googling around a Zillow study says solar installations increase the value of a home by 4% on average.

The article also didn't touch on maintenance costs.

> If you spend $25K on a solar installation, does the value of your home increase by $25K?

I spent $25k to install solar in 2020 (also in DC like OP). The solar company estimated that my home value increased by $14K.

As part of the install, I bundled a "heavy-up" for $5K, which is an upgrade my house needed, but not strictly part of the renewable energy system. So total cash outlay was $30K.

I immediately got back 26% in a federal tax credit: $7.8K

So on balance, my system cost $8K cash, which was paid down by energy savings and SRECs within three years. The SRECs made the biggest impact.

I agree V2G will be huge, but rolling it out will be hard, especially somewhere like the US without major financial incentives (for both the infrastructure and getting people to accept the idea that they might not fully control their rolling castle’s battery). Conceptually though, I think it’s one of the coolest ideas in sustainable tech - distributed prosumer/battery networks. There’s also some cool P2P topologies.

If all it did was be used for e.g. 10% of total car battery capacity for demand management, it would be huge. The sheer volume of batteries.

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