ᐅ Experiences with Caterva Solar Battery Storage Systems

It sounds like with you, self-generated photovoltaic electricity is completely lost if you don’t use it yourself immediately. That’s obviously not the case—it is fed into the grid and compensated. When you need it later, you buy it back. Selling at 12.3 cents and buying back at 28 cents may not seem like a great deal at first glance—let’s call it storage loss—but it comes without investment costs. How many kWh you need to withdraw from a battery to make up for this difference of about 15 cents per kWh is something everyone can calculate for themselves. Whether the investment pays off within the system’s lifespan... probably not.

The inefficiency of these storage systems is just being wrapped in new packaging to make the obvious a bit harder to recognize. The fact that energy companies are behind it doesn’t say anything at all. These are the same people who call their new product “electricity flat rate,” while in reality it’s a bundled tariff that has existed forever—and an expensive one at that. The same ones who offer photovoltaic systems for installation that are priced about 30–50% above current market rates, making payback practically impossible.

Anyone calculating with an average of 33¢/kWh (assuming a regular electricity price increase of 3%) will find any photovoltaic system to be profitable.

For €33,000, which is the cost of the battery storage alone (without photovoltaic), I could obtain 156,000 kWh (7,800 kWh/year).

In fact, with Caterva, the amount of electricity generated by the photovoltaic system is available as free power, regardless of the time of year or day.
A storage system increases the self-consumption rate of a photovoltaic system to about 70%.
However, as already mentioned, the storage is used to provide ancillary services (PRL).
PRL is the most expensive service, averaging about 168,000 EUR/MW annually since 2001 (see Regelleistung.net),
and from these revenues, the remaining 30%, the 20-year maintenance contract, and the annual community premium are paid. You don’t have to calculate with 33 cents; at a consumption of 5,000 kWh/year, a net price of 24 cents is enough to achieve a good return.
If anyone has questions beyond basic knowledge, I’m happy to help at any time.
Rudi.H

Hello everyone, one positive aspect of the Caterva project worth mentioning is that, like us, you can always charge your electric car and electric scooter from home. Although there are still many options to charge cheaply at the moment, this trend will soon change.

Regards, Artur

Dennis86 schrieb:
Hello everyone,

I am seriously considering purchasing a Caterva Sonne (21 kW battery storage) for my new single-family house, which also provides grid services through Caterva.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find any results using the search function, so I would like to know if anyone here has experience with this or has received any advice?

Thank you for your feedback.

Hello Dennis,

have you bought the battery yet? I am also thinking about Caterva or the C3DC home power system.

Herbie

You probably mean E3/DC, right? We are going to get an E3/DC Blackline with 10.56 kWh.