Here are two facts about home batteries:
- Using a home battery reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
- Making and installing a home battery increases greenhouse gas emissions.
The good news is the first effect is much larger than the second. Pinning down how much home batteries reduce emissions isn’t easy, but I’m going to take a stab at it. Hopefully, by the time you get to the end of this post, you won’t want to take a stab at me.
How Much Do Home Batteries Cut Emissions?
Based on my analysis of Australia’s largest grid, the National Electricity Market (NEM), a typical home battery will pay off its emissions debt in under 18 months. Over its lifespan, a solar battery with 15kWh of usable capacity will cut emissions by more than 10 times the amount caused by its creation and installation, reducing emissions by more than 16 tonnes over a 15 year lifespan.
That’s just for the typical use case of a home battery charged with solar energy that could have been exported to the grid, where it may have reduced fossil fuel generation had the battery not been in use.
If however, a home battery is only charged with solar energy that otherwise would have gone to waste, the climate benefit is far larger, cutting emissions by somewhere around 28 to 1.
These figures don’t include indirect effects on emissions, which my recent analysis shows can offer even greater climate benefits.
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