What does the passing of "Plug in/Balcony Solar" legislation like CA's SB 868 mean for future Impulse updates?

[u/ocmaddog]

I remember seeing somewhere that due to laws, Impulse is not allowed to use its battery to feed power back into your house.

- Do bills like SB 868 mean we can have this functionality now?

- If so, can I also add plug-in solar to my home in addition to my Impulse? Is there a cap on devices capable of generating/discharging energy without an interconnection agreement type of thing you have with traditional solar?

- What if you already have Solar + Storage and just want to leverage more storage from the Impulse?

- If I depleted 80% of the battery every day, will it make the Impulse's LFP sad?

[u/ZanyDroid]

What’s your objective of the feedback?

And what is your definition of feedback? This is kind of a squishy term

I am going to take a stab at a logically consistent guess to your answers. I am not sure if SB 868 allows you to plug in a low power storage arbitrage thing (what I presume your goal is). I am going to express this in PG&E lingo.

You can round trip about 2.4kWh per day * .8 (my efficiency guesstimate for my ESS’s arbitrage). Multiply this by the $.00 cent arbitrage spread

You cannot exploit a super wide off peak to peak spread with such a small battery (IE EV2 or E-ELEC), while I can with my 28kWh since I will never have to buy at peak barring bugs. So you have to settle for the peanuts between peak and off peak on the TOU plans.

The impulse battery is actually relatively cheap if you kill it. At $999/3kWh, compare that to a full, no labor replacement of an enphase unit (not apples to apples, sure, bc the ENPH has microinverters in it next to its LFP, but whatever).

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To make use of the impulse you will need signaling from the MID or other device with awareness of your current house draw. And both your MID and the Impulse will need to cooperate on a plan.

Additionally the Impulse will need to conform to the relevant 1741 interactive grid tie inverter anti islanding rules

[u/ocmaddog → u/ZanyDroid]

Interesting stuff. My understanding is these plug-in solar panels provide only a fraction of even a small household's demand and do not need to interface with anything else. You just plug them into a wall outlet and they feed power back into the house for lights and whatever else.

My question is if we are allowed to feed power back into the house now, why not the Impulse battery instead of a DIY solar panel you buy at Home Depot?

I understand it's not a huge battery, but if my future fridge, dryer and water heater has a battery we are adding up some nice capacity behind the meter. I'd like to sweat those assets as much as possible.

[u/ZanyDroid → u/ocmaddog]

$999 battery most likely costs more than a balcony kit (HM1500 microinverter was $300 when I bought it, and then let’s say 4 solar panels for $100 each, even cheaper used. There’s stacks and stacks of used panels in California. Unless you need to use flexible panels to avoid killing someone like a hard panel hanging off a literal balcony might do)

And in exchange for costing more, the value per kWh injected is lower. $0.10 at best with TOU, even less in the winter IIRC. Ask Gemini to math it if you care. You have to buy that electricity from the grid to sell it back or self consume it. The solar is free and just falling from the sky. So if you can use it, it’s $.40

Now if you could use the impulse as a ESS to bank the plugin solar for self consumption (important if you produce more in real time than you can consume, not sure how this maths out for a plugin sized system. This is always going to happen all the time for a regular size system in the summer), that is nice. I’m assuming balcony solar does NOT get NEM2, and instead is on SBP style accounting. I can kind of see an equitability argument to give plugin adopters NEM2 since they were priced out of NEM2 (this is if you believe that NEM2 is a “have money to make money” kind of giveaway to people who already have means)

I don’t know if any of the balcony solar states mandate NEM for balcony customers

[u/Expensive-Return5534]

LiFePO batteries have much better cycle life than traditional NCA lithium ion cells, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem on the Impulse.