DocAndersen
The other side of solar and wind power at your house today. The first, hardest and biggest impediment to solar power at anyone’s home is the reality of the legal situation and the laws where you are. The first thing to do is check the laws specific to the production of power. For example, in some US locations, the power company is required by law to pay you for your excess power, but they only have to bay the distribution rate of 5 cents per KWH. That is significantly less than they charge you (15 to 17 cents per KWH). It is, however, the current law in many places. The other side of solar or wind power is as well the reality of batteries.
The reality of the batteries we are talking about is that they have a lifespan of two, three years at most. Crappy batteries will last a year. The issue is that these are batteries that may have to charge quickly and discharge over a long period. Many people I know that have built their solar (or wind) battery storage systems ended up using Marine batteries. Marine batteries buy you the advantage of being able to take charge and discharge process as much as 1000 times. (365 by three well you can do the math). Marine batteries are more expensive than traditional car batteries. However, they are more able to withstand the discharge and charge.
Tesla makes a battery bank, but that sadly has a two-three year lifespan as well. There are lots of considerations overall as I have discussed many times, around the technical reality of a solar installation. Getting your power company to install the required digital power meter can take a while (although in our case, the solar power company screwed up the paperwork. I ended up stepping in and fixing the problems, but we lost six months). The most important thing to remember overall is patenience. Plan what you are going to do before you start to implement it. Decide what is critical for you and move in that direction!
It’s a very complex issue and it seems that those who jump in first end up paying for the research.
To some degree you are correct. Early adopters often get to pay for the cost of getting to the features originally “proposed.” But the advantage now is that early adoption of this technology (solar and wind) was ten years ago now. At this point we are waiting more for the legal changes in government policies not actual technology!