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Comment by notTooFarGone | Hacker News Reader

If it were just easy to buy a bunch of batteries and profit from this by selling the same energy during evening/night.

But that is only reserved for the big players I guess.

No, it is not at all reserved for big players. You just need to get a dynamic price electricity contract, and a smart-meter in your home and you can do this right now.

In Sweden you can also register your battery to an aggregation service that makes money (and gives you a share) from balancing the grid.

So there is not only a market for buy/sell, you can also be stand-by for charging your battery when grid frequency increases and consumption needs to increase.

I don't sell mine, but I time-shift with a small pile of batteries (about 10kWh) and it's pretty reasonable. I save about usd $30/month. It's basically a big ups that will pay for itself in ten years, and I get backup power.

So in 10 years when you have to buy new batteries, what do you expect the payoff time to reset to?

I don't. The batteries will last longer than 10 years. The 10 year typical advertised lifetime of lifepo4 is to 80% capacity, and I'll just keep on using them.

The actual payoff calculation is a lot messier than that because you have to factor in the NPV of buying batteries vs. just throwing the money in the market, AND you have to be able to forecast that growth vs. growth in power prices. So the honest truth is I have no idea if it's going to be a net good investment vs other options.

Fortunately, I don't have to care, because I bought the batteries for UPS runtime, which I value independent of the time-shifting. The time-shifting is just a way to squeeze money out of an investment I already made. Had I been going for payoff, there are cheaper battery/inverter options out there with a sub-5y payoff.

I know someone who does this in Mew Zealand with power walls.

He is retired and mostly just a hobby.

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