Investing in a solar battery system for your home can help you save more money on your electricity bills than just installing solar alone. Rather than exporting your excess solar energy to the grid for a small feed-in tariff (across Australia, the average is around 5 cents per unit), your solar battery will store any excess electricity, allowing you to use it later in the evening when your solar PV system is not generating any electricity. This will greatly decrease the amount of electricity you’re required to buy from the grid at full price (around 25 to 26 cents per unit), resulting in significant savings. 

Installing a battery bank at your home or business lessens the amount of energy you’ll need to buy from the grid. This decreases your reliance on the grid and major energy retailers, giving you more energy independence. 

If your home is on a Time of Use Tariff, installing a solar battery means you can benefit from energy arbitrage. By charging your battery bank during off-peak rates and using your own stored electricity during peak rates, you’ll end up pocketing the difference and saving a lot of money on your electricity bills. Energy arbitrage can be accomplished with or without a solar PV system. 

By installing a home battery and taking pressure off the grid, your home is helping contribute to the longer life of local infrastructure and resources. This lessens the frequency of costly network upgrades, which end up being paid for by all grid users.

While solar PV systems produce electricity steadily and predictably throughout the day when the sun is shining, if there is cloud cover or any climate disruption, solar electricity output for an entire region can fluctuate unpredictably, requiring other generation plants (typically coal and gas) to be brought quickly online to meet demands. 

 This can cause a lot of stress and strain for the grid. The common adoption of home battery storage systems would mitigate the impact of this problem, using the stored electricity of their own batteries rather than the grid to make up for any power shortages. Widespread uptake of batteries could also help manage unintended voltage level fluctuations, helping current grid infrastructure have a longer life.

Installing a battery bank means your home will be able to take advantage of future regulatory changes, which will allow households, small businesses, and community groups to trade rooftop solar-generated electricity between each other. In addition, investing in a battery will allow you to store your excess solar electricity and sell it to neighbours for more than the gazetted feed-in tariff rate, effectively bypassing major energy retailers.