Residential Energy Storage Market With A Smarter Solar And Battery System
AC-coupled storage is a popular way for customers to add energy storage systems to their solar equipment, but it is technically challenging. A Maine-based company Pika Energy decided to try another method, namely a plug-and-play platform approach. The new product in collaboration with Panasonic Eco Solutions North America is easily scalable and has reduced installation time. The system consists of 10- or 15-kilowatt-hour configurations and can be easily combined with solar generation using the same inverter for both. Pika’s REbus nanogrid platform joins different components and is like “USB for clean power”, according to the company’s President Ben Polito. The built-in electronics easily connect the batteries to the REbus system and facilitate the installation to happen in under 60 minutes.
The residential storage market has been driven by existing solar customers who are interested in investing in storage. Companies like Enphase and Sunverge are providing AC-coupled products that connect a self-contained storage-inverter pair with the existing solar-inverter pair, but the drawback is that there are additional conversions needed to store energy and extract it for use. Pika is aiming at those customers for residential storage that prefer to avoid additional conversions…
If you want to know more about this and other topics directly from end users of energy storage technologies join us at one of these annual events: The Energy Storage World Forum (Grid Scale Applications), or The Residential Energy Storage Forum, or one of our Training Courses.
