Batteries can be useful for more than just getting through power outages. More and more utilities are offering time of use based pricing. For people on such plans a battery can be useful even if there are never any power outages by letting you store power from off peak times to use during peak times.

Unless it's a really massive swing it'll be a gamble if it will actually break even. A useful battery install for a home is at least several thousand dollars. I'll install $10k worth of batteries and manage to arbitrage $30/mo off my electrical plan, excellent! I'll break even in 28 years, wonderful! Will the batteries still have a meaningful charge after 28 years of use? Who knows! Meanwhile I'll miss out on the opportunity cost of that $10k over that same period.

And once again, another point for growing the wealth gap. Poor people who can't afford the thousands of dollars for installing the batteries get shafted by such things instead of us assuming the grid operators will just smooth these prices out for us.

Once again in the end I'd just prefer if there were actors on the grid running massive batteries able to arbitrage the extreme spot prices and sell me electricity at a reasonable rate all the time instead of me having to actively min/max every dang thing every moment in my life.

Doing some math on that $10k for an example of lost opportunity costs, today you can get a 10yr CD at 5.5% APY. Over a decade that's a hair over $17k, practically guaranteed return. So, to properly break even you're going to need to not just save $10k worth of electricity, you'll need to save something more like $17k. You'll need to arbitrage at least $141.67/mo on average for that entire 10-year period to break even compared to what you could have had just investing that into pretty safe savings.

Personally, I'd rather toss that $10k into my kids' education funds and sign up for a fixed rate electricity plan. Hopefully that'll be better ROI.

Grid-scale batteries have pretty different economics than some batteries in my garage. Their real-estate cost is probably significantly lower than the cost for halfway decent residential. They're buying a much larger order of batteries, so their per-kWh cost is probably a good bit lower. Also, their installation cost per-kWh is also a good bit cheaper. They're probably completely fine buying/selling purely on open spot markets, meanwhile in the end I'm going to need to run my pool pump and I'm going to want to do dishes and laundry and charge my car and all the other things on some reasonable schedule so I'd like some amount of price protection on whatever time-of-use plan I get (a day of $9/kWh electricity prices will surely wipe out whatever gains you might have made). They're probably able to get cheaper loans than me, so it's easier for them to arrange the big capital investment instead of high interest loans or having to invest existing capital.

I'm not arguing the economics of batteries don't make sense in today's power markets. Far from it, I've been toying with getting into it in North Texas. But buying a few kWh of batteries and putting them in my garage probably isn't going to break even and almost certainly isn't going to make me money.

Further thinking about what you'll actually get, it looks like a decent average price per kWh of installed home battery backup is about $1,000/kWh. So if we got $10k of batteries installed, you're looking at 10kWh of energy you can store.

Let's say you're in California, which has a pretty decent swing in energy prices available to the home consumer. You'll see prices swing between $0.27 to $0.65/kWh. You've got a 10kWh battery pack, so you can arbitrage something like $0.38/kWh * 10 kWh = $3.8/day, assuming you get a full charge cycle and ignoring efficiency for simplicity's sake. $114/mo. So assuming you didn't have any loans and you're ignoring opportunity costs on that $10k, your break-even is in ~88 months or ~7.3 years.

After a decade of ~$114/mo, you'll have offset $13,680, assuming you always used a full charge and you experienced no other maintenance costs and bought it cash on hand and that energy prices didn't change and had a perfectly efficient inverter to charge and discharge the batteries and the batteries still had 100% charge capacity the whole time. The 10-year CD, which you could just forget about for a decade, stands at $17,310.

And this is for one of the few markets in the US that really offers that big of a time of use plan other than "free nights and weekends***" (with pages and pages of fine print and other fees) For instance, I just looked at a time of use plan available to me here in North Texas. 9AM-4PM I'm billed at $0.068 for the generation, $0.050029/kWh plus a flat $4.23/mo for delivery. Outside of that window I only pay the delivery cost. But that means I'm only really able to arbitrage $0.68/day with a 10kWh setup. That's 490 months or a hair over forty years to break even.

The more batteries available for that arbitrage, the less effective it is. As a grid user, I'd rather the grid own and operate those batteries. Certainly some of my outages are due to line issues between me and the substation, but I think more of them are due to line issues between the substation and its upstream. Having storage at the substation could potentially help all the customers and centralize the maintenance and safety burdens. They could do some energy cost arbitrage (although I live in the PNW and we generally don't have time of use cost distinctions, because hydro doesn't care)

I do have a 35 kWh propane fired generator onsite though, which does provide for outages regardless of where the break in the line is.

Do you have any reasons besides that?

Sure. Having large batteries is an additional fire risk in my home for once again something I'd generally never need. If these batteries are in my home but managed by the grid operator I'd probably have to allow their people into my home to service them which I'd rather not have to do if it's something I'd generally never use.

Also, this further just makes having stable electricity yet another thing in the wealth gap. Only those wealthy enough to afford the high upfront capital costs, the ongoing maintenance cost, and the space to store it get reliable electricity, fuck everyone else! Or we can just focus on investing in a stable and clean grid and share that cost with everyone, all you need is to just be connected.

But hey if I get a massive battery bank I'll have power for when the end times come. I won't be able to go get groceries anymore and eventually the fiber line and radios around me will go quiet but at least I'll be able to play videogames. For a few hours at least.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an Eagle Scout, be prepared and all that. I've got a big pile of charcoal, a chunk of propane, a camping stove, several day's supply of water and canned/non-perishable foods, some batteries for lanterns, etc. The cars all get topped off when big storms seem possible. If the big outage comes this will be more worthwhile than being able to turn on the TV for a few hours, and cost significantly less than several dozen kWh of batteries. And if the power is out for more than a week or two I'll have far bigger concerns than being able to post on Hacker News.

You're not wrong about the fire risk, but just to note, house batteries nowadays are almost always LiFePO4 -- which don't catch fire the same way LiPo batteries like to do.

They can still do so for other reasons, like a short circuit in the wiring.

Fully understood and agreed. That's why I bothered saving that for the second comment, because it's not necessarily that high of a fire risk but it is still a little bit of one. Having that much energy stored in that small of a package will always have some kind of risk of "what happens when that stored energy gets released in an uncontrolled and rapid manner?"

And that said, I do have lots of other somewhat beefy batteries around the house. They do a lot of useful things for me such as power my tools including my lawn mower, string trimmer, hedge trimmer, saws, etc. There is a massive one in the car parked in the garage. In these cases it is a useful trade off of that slight risk as I'm actually getting something normally useful out of it.