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Comment by sandermvanvliet | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this, (lack of) storage is the problem. Daytime demand isn’t high enough to deal with PV output leading to cut offs on grid feed-in from consumer PV installations. Given that car batteries aren’t an option yet to power homes this is a problem that will stick around for a bit.

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>Given that car batteries aren’t an option yet to power homes this is a problem that will stick around for a bit

One was posted here not too long ago.. so this may not be far off. But it's a bit of a chicken-egg situation because powering your home with a car battery is not very practical by itself. Investing in both solar and the car at the same time would also be a hefty chunk of change for any individual household

That’s exactly the point. The few car models that do support grid feed-in require an expensive converter to take DC from the car and deliver AC to the home. The hardware to do that is just expensive and currently that doesn’t pay off

Hardly anybody uses car batteries at this point, and not just because of availability. It's a bit of a pain in the ass compared to just buying LFPs. Even at fairly high retail pricing for complete batteries, 30kWh of LFP is $10K. That'll power a typical home for a day. If you just buy cells and BMSs, it's cheaper. That's what most of the off-grid folks do these days.

The thing is that you don’t want just the car battery but you want to use the capability of the car to deliver power back to the grid (or your house at any rate). The rest of the time you want to use the car as a car. The idea behind it is that you don’t need a separate battery pack at home for the times the grid is over-subscribed.

Car batteries (E.g., in Nissan Leaf) are, in fact, an option to power homes. A controller/converter box is under $900.

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