Does a home battery pay off without solar panels?

A home battery without solar panels can pay off, but more slowly, and sometimes not at all. Without solar power the battery has only one thing to live on: the price gap between cheap and expensive hours. If that gap is large where you live there's money to be had, if it's small the payback takes a long time.

On moving electricity in time, and nothing else. The battery charges when power is cheap and is used when it's expensive, and the difference between those hours is the whole income. With solar panels it also stores the day's surplus for the evening. Without them there's no surplus to store, so the price gap between the hours has to carry all of it.

If that gap is large where you live, it quickly turns into money. If it's small, there's not much to be had, and the battery works uphill from the start.

Two things that have nothing to do with the sun. If you have a capacity tariff, the battery can shave the peaks when the oven and the electric car pull the most at once, and that charge drops whether or not there are solar panels on the roof.

Then the battery can take part in support services that keep the grid stable, which Svenska kraftnät pays for. The more of those things that apply to your house, the less it matters that the solar panels are missing. How much each of them gives varies over time.

It pays off when the price gap between the hours is clear and there's a capacity tariff to shave on top. Then the battery has several sources of income at once, and the missing solar panels weigh light.

It doesn't when the gap between the hours is small and there's no peak to shave. Then the battery lives almost only on the arbitrage, the payback drags out, and a battery isn't automatically worth the money on its own. There's nothing wrong with the battery, it's the arithmetic.

Yes, and that's the whole point of doing the sums on the house rather than on the product. A battery standing alone is one thing. The same battery together with solar panels and a heat pump that draws power at night is something else entirely.

The parts make each other pay off. The solar panels give the battery a surplus to store, the battery gives the solar panels somewhere to go in the evening, and the heat pump gets cheap power to run on. That's why Elvy sells them only together.

A battery wears from being charged and discharged, not from getting old in itself. Its life is measured in cycles, that is, how many times it can be filled and emptied before it loses capacity. A battery that's meant to pay for itself over many years also has to last those years.

If you own the battery, you carry that risk yourself. If it wears out faster than planned, it's your cost, and without solar panels there are fewer sources of income to weigh against it. In a subscription the risk is Elvy's, because we own the equipment and replace it when it needs replacing.

The question of solar panels or not becomes yours to skip. Elvy does the sums on your house, decides what pays off, and puts together the parts that actually belong there. If solar panels are needed for the battery to add up, they're in the proposal, if they're not, they aren't.

You pay a known amount a month, with no upfront cost and no payback time to keep an eye on. The optimisation against the spot price, the power peaks and the support services happens in the background. Whether a battery pays off without solar panels in your particular house is still a real question, but it's our job to work out, not yours.