Batteries, and the honest case for them

A home battery earns money in one of two ways. It stores your own surplus generation for use after dark, avoiding electricity you would otherwise buy. Or it charges when power is cheap and discharges when it is expensive, if your utility has time-of-use rates worth arbitraging.

Both are real, and both are small. At a national average of about 17.4cents a kilowatt-hour, a cycle through a typical home battery avoids a couple of dollars of electricity. Multiply by a daily cycle over a decade and the total struggles to reach what the battery and its installation cost, before you account for the capacity it loses as it ages.

Where the sums genuinely change is a state that no longer pays retail for exports. There, electricity you send to the grid is worth a fraction of electricity you keep, so storing it rather than exporting it is worth the full difference. That is why batteries became near-standard on new California installations after the export rules changed, and why they remain optional in states with full net metering.

When Congress terminated the residential credit and put a 2027 cliff on the commercial credit for solar, it explicitly carved energy storage out of that cliff. Battery storage installed at a solar facility keeps its own timeline rather than expiring with the solar credit on 31 December 2027.

For a household buying outright this changes nothing, because the residential credit that would have covered either is gone. It matters under third-party ownership, where the owner is still claiming credits, and it is the one part of the 2025 changes that did not make storage worse. The full picture on what changed.