California Residents Increasingly Pairing Battery Storage with Solar Installations

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California residents are more and more pairing battery storage with photo voltaic installations, in response to the most recent preliminary information in our Monthly Electric Power Industry Report.

The share of recent residential photo voltaic photovoltaic methods paired with batteries has elevated since we started amassing information in October 2023. In April 2024, greater than 50% of residential photo voltaic photovoltaic installations had been paired with battery storage, in contrast with simply over 20% in October 2023.

Knowledge supply: U.S. Vitality Info Administration, Month-to-month Electrical Energy Trade Report, Form EIA-861M (previously EIA-826). Observe: Round 99.5% of the entire small-scale residential put in capability in California is net metereda technique for compensating behind-the-meter sources. Small-scale methods are lower than one megawatt of put in capability. Knowledge from October 2023 to April 2024 are estimated preliminary information.

The shift towards extra battery storage at photo voltaic installations eligible for net metering got here after modifications to California’s compensation construction. Web metering compensates prospects for the distributed technology output that’s returned to the grid by crediting their electrical energy payments.

In April 2023, California revised how family mills with put in rooftop photo voltaic are compensated by way of internet metering. The brand new construction, often called a internet billing tariff (NBT), provides a variable compensation price. The variable price incentivizes pairing photo voltaic capability installations with battery storage as a result of batteries allow prospects to ship electrical energy to the grid throughout hours when demand is comparatively excessive, sometimes within the night when photo voltaic mills produce much less.

Photo voltaic paired with battery installations makes up about 9% of all put in residential internet metering capability in California, with over 40,000 new installations added between October 2023 and April 2024. These installations accounted for 232 megawatts (MW) of recent battery storage capability within the state.

California solar plus battery storage EIA chart 3 — **Knowledge supply:** U.S. Vitality Info Administration, *Month-to-month Electrical Energy Trade Report*, Form EIA-861M (previously EIA-826)

The rising quantity of battery storage comes after California residents put in a report quantity of photo voltaic capability eligible for compensation from electrical energy utilities within the third quarter of 2023.

California Solar PV Net Metering Capacity Growth — **Knowledge supply:** U.S. Vitality Info Administration, *Month-to-month Electrical Energy Trade Report*, Form EIA-861M (previously EIA-826). **Observe:** Round 99.5% of the entire small-scale residential put in capability in California is net metered. Small-scale methods are lower than one megawatt of put in capability. Knowledge from March 2023 to March 2024 are estimated preliminary information. Q1=the primary quarter of the 12 months; NBT=internet billing tariff (new compensation price); NEM=internet vitality metering (previous compensation price)

California residential photo voltaic capability eligible for internet metering elevated by 22% within the third quarter of 2023 in contrast with the identical interval of 2022 as prospects put in capability earlier than the compensation construction modified. The speed of progress slowed within the fourth quarter, after the modifications went into impact, however internet metering-related capability continued to extend. California now has greater than 12,000 MW of put in photo voltaic capability in residential internet metering methods smaller than 1 MW.

Beneath the brand new NBT construction, the reimbursement price varies all through the day relying on when the photo voltaic electrical energy is generated. This price is, on common, lower than the sooner compensation construction often called internet vitality metering 2.0 (NEM 2.0), which credited mills at a flat retail electrical energy price.

Capability installations elevated initially after the California Public Utility Commission introduced a grandfathering scheme for NEM 2.0 prospects for 20 years, which led to an interconnection software backlog in the course of the first quarter of 2023, in response to an evaluation of the impacts of the brand new coverage by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In California, residential models account for greater than 70% of the web metering put in capability and roughly one-third of complete photo voltaic capability within the state. Our information present that in the course of the third quarter of 2023, 83,376 new residential internet metering photovoltaic methods had been put in, in contrast with 70,152 methods linked beneath the previous NEM 2.0 rule throughout the identical interval in 2022. Nonetheless, we can not differentiate the methods that requested to be grandfathered to NEM 2.0. The primary quarter of 2024 noticed an extra 46,631 methods put in. Since January 2022, a median of 21,000 photo voltaic methods had been added each month.

We gather the capability of distributed sources which can be internet metered and non-net metered after which publish that information by utility and state in our detailed data files.

Principal contributors: Alex Gorski, Katherine Antonio. Initially printed on Today in Energy.

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