[NH.Solar]

I try to never post anything unless I feel the it might have merit as information, or add something positive to someone else's topic. If one of the postings should generate a contact, great! but I don't need the use this forum as advertising as I have more the business I can handle from direct referrals. My intent is to share my knowledge and hopefully help someone out in some way, that's all
The main point intended with this post was that the coming bi-directional EVs do seem to have great promise ,and especially when looked at as a long time outage backup solution. Both Ford's charging station and the EnergyHub will allow some daily power levelling by storing energy during the day and giving it back at night, but that use has to be considered carefully for any time a battery is cycled it gives up a bit of life. From what I understand from the limited info on the Ford station it will only pull from the truck when the grid is down, thus the truck battery life will be minimally effected. The EnergyHub system was designed for the daily storage and direct home consumption of solar power first, as a long outage home backup system second, and as an EV charging station third. The bi-directional capabilities were not in the forefront when the Solaredge engineers designed the EH. An EnergyHub system must have its own dedicated battery(s) and currently uses either a 10 kWh or 16kWh LG Li-ion battery. These are LGs answer to the Tesla Powerwall battery and they are required both to activate the systems battery management systems and to provide daily self consumption and/or backup power for the home. The EH system with the LG battery is autonomous and totally independent of the EV batteries, During normal day to day use the sun and the stored power of a 10 kWh power is all it takes to power and backup my small home, but a larger home with higher power needs might need a pair of 16 kWh batteries. Right now if the power has been out for any prolonged length of time I will need to fire up my 7 kW roll-around generator and use that to power my home and recharge the LG. It should only take about 3 hours to do this and then the generator can again be shutoff until it may again needed the next day. Just guessing on this scenario though as my longest outage to date was only a day. With the new Lightning however I shouldn't need to fire up the generator for at least 5-6 days, and then only during one of the catastrophic events listed. Hopefully I'll never need to tap into the Lightning's battery, but I find it really reassuring to know that if I ever need to, it is easily possible.
When new clients are considering solar for their homes the initial conversations are naturally mostly financially biased. The payback period to justify the net cost of a solar array generally runs somewhere between 8 to 11 years depending on the installation details and the utility rate. It's not a bad ROI but not overly impressive either, but remember that the solar array is going to be producing power far beyond the payback period. It might be more accurate to figure the ROI on the 30+ years that the array will be producing strongly rather than on the 8-11 year utility savings justification.
There is a secondary financial reasoning however that I personally value more the the ROI, the moving of an expense (your monthly utility bill) over to the purchase of an asset (the net cost of the solar array) that adds equity value to the home.