When Your Home Becomes a Battery: Energy Storage, Smart Tariffs, Backup Power, and the New Electricity Economy

WHAT IF YOUR HOME COULD BUY ELECTRICITY WHEN IT WAS CHEAP, STORE ENERGY WHEN IT WAS PLENTIFUL, AND USE IT WHEN ELECTRICITY WAS EXPENSIVE?Home batteries are changing what it means to be an electricity customer around the world.Once mainly associated with houses covered in solar panels, battery storage is becoming part of a much bigger change. Smart meters, time-of-use and dynamic electricity rates, rooftop solar, electric vehicles and increasingly intelligent energy systems are allowing ordinary homes to decide not only how much electricity they use-but when they buy it, when they store it and when they avoid buying it altogether.When Your Home Becomes a Battery explains this emerging world without assuming technical knowledge.Discover: - what a home battery actually does - whether you need solar panels to benefit from one - how battery capacity and power ratings work - how electricity can be bought cheaply and stored for later - how solar and batteries work together - what happens during a power cut - how export payments and net-metering rules affect the economics - how to judge whether a battery will really save you money - how smart tariffs, time-of-use rates and automated energy management are changing household electricity - where electric vehicles and vehicle-to-home technology fit into the picture - how to avoid buying a system that is larger, smaller or more complicated than you needUsing the simple STORE framework, the book helps you examine your electricity supply, usage patterns, backup needs, storage requirements and economics before making expensive decisions. An international reference section explains the key differences readers should check in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, Great Britain and Northern Ireland.The home of the future will not simply consume electricity.It will generate it, store it, manage it-and increasingly decide when electricity is worth buying at all.