Being a net producer rather than a consumer does feel good, these days. Even reducing the consumption and increasing the production is worth it "emotionally" let's say.
Can you do a cost comparison of:
Cost of electricity at normal rates for ten years (including a best-guess inflation figure) vs capital cost of solar + batteries + resultant e-juice cost reductions over that ten years? Don't forget that having batteries means you can buy and store e-juice (for use next day) at night for 6.5p per kwh rather than the daily rate of 25p per kwh. (Those are our electricity rates, they vary with the supplier). Take that into account in your calculation, along with the lesser use of grid kwh because of your solar kwh generation and use.
You may also be able to sell excess summer e-juice back to the grid. Rates vary but 15p per kwh is not unheard of. The trick is to find a supplier that allows you to export at the most-use times, as these are the pays-most times. You can even use battery-stored e-juice as an e-commodity, so in theory you could download overnight to fill a battery not yet filled by your daytime solar then sell what you don't use yourself next day for twice what you paid for it.
Make the most, also, of solar by obtaining a means to store more of it when you don't have a normal use for it (typically in summer). Some have large heat-batteries (a very large hot water tank, highly insulated) from which you can extract heat for the house heating or for hot water use on the no or low solar generation days. The heat is retained in these things for weeks. If you suffer from really hot summer days, get some air-source heat pumps for cooling, as they're also a useful (and inexpensive to run) heat source in the really cold times.
If it doesn't involve huge expense to reconfig your heating, consider installing heat pumps for all heating and hot water. Unless you already have Very Big radiators or underfloor heating, this can be expensive, though.
An air source heat pump that just heats or cools air into the house is much less expensive and trivial to install (if you use a skilled and knowledgeable installer). We added two to the already-extant ground source heat pump, purely for cooling on the increasingly red-hot number of British summer days, using e-juice from our solar that would otherwise be exported to the grid for nowt, as we already have an existing FiT so can't sell anymore solar from our new solar panels, retaining the original FiT solar & inverter as a completely separate system to serve the FiT.
Another consideration is the addition of a UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply). If the grid gets weather-beaten for a day or three or the supplier goes defunct overnight, you'll be able to use your batteries and solar to keep going for a while, as long as there's sunlight or a bright cloud cover or your batteries were fullish when the grid disappeared.
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If you have the capital, I feel that such investment is a no-brainer. And its a lot less risky that gambling with stocks & shares. If the economy of Planet Erf is destroyed by Trunt & Muskrat, your solar & battery will be an even better investment. In all events, it can't really fail. And the sun won't mind you exploiting it whereas the workers making the actual value behind stocks & shares will, since your divvies depresses their wages.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
