Blue battery makes solar power worth as much as natural gas

With solar power becoming worth less and less during the day, it pays to use it to heat hot water for use in the evening. That's exactly what the Dutch Blue Battery is doing. The system makes worthless solar power worth as much as natural gas again.

The technology is not new, nor is the idea. But the growing attention is, states director Dominic Tegelbeckers of The Blue Battery. "The solution is very old, but the idea of heating water with solar power is becoming mainstream again. Our goal is for this old idea to become widely accepted again."

Innovation

The heat battery was one of the innovations presented at trade show Solar Solutions in the Expo Greater Amsterdam. The principle is simple: save gas and money by converting electricity into hot water and avoid feeding solar power back to the grid. That saves feed-in penalties and prevents grid congestion.

Solar power worth nothing more

Maybe changing circumstances have contributed to solar panels being used again to generate heat (Power to Heat). Now that more than half of all power generated comes from renewable wind and solar power, surplus power is created on sunny days with lots of wind. That causes spikes on the power grid (grid congestion) and falling prices. Sometimes to zero. That congestion is one of the reasons for the government to abolish the salting scheme by 2027. Owners of solar panels will no longer be able to deduct their returned power from their energy bills from then on.

To make matters worse, since last year almost all energy companies have been refund charges for the solar power they feed into the grid. The General Dagblad did some future math and concluded that solar power will literally not be worth a penny from 2027. Pretty premature, according to several experts, but a real threat to the solar sector.

Astonishment

According to Tegelbeckers, the Blue Battery can partially solve these problems. "We need energy storage, we need to encourage self-consumption of solar power and solve grid congestion," he argues. "Water is a very good storage source for your own generated power. I find it amazing that something so obvious hasn't been picked up before."