Sometimes things only become obvious in the past tense. In the heat of the moment we get wrapped up in ourselves and our own internal dialogue and this can mean we miss the truth within our own rhetoric. Is that important? Well in many cases believing your own hype has been shown to be a bad thing. A recent example might be PPI mis-selling. Or CDO’s (or other complex instruments) leading to the global banking crisis. Anytime we can convince ourselves that the successful result was down to our own genius leads to a reinforced self-delusion… Well documented elsewhere of course I’m not going to bore you with amateur psychology (not like I have in all my previous blogs anyhow).

This time I want to talk about what might happen in the future if we get things wrong. So put yourself 20 years into the future. The world is covered in synchronised batteries and solar panels. The phone rings…. “Have you been mis-sold storage?” If we’re not careful, and we don’t make the right choices at a government, regulatory and even company level we could well open the industry up to claims of miss selling. And this always results in excessive regulation.

This very week I was at a pitching event for companies seeking investment. One of our fellow storage companies were claiming to save users 20% of the energy they consume by using storage.

Lets be crystal clear that storage will increase your energy consumption. But it will allow you to use greener energy, and use cheap energy when its available on the system.

Lets be crystal clear that selling people boxes at a price they can never hope to recoup isn’t a business model, it’s a scam or scandal, or at best exploitation.

Lets be crystal clear that without half hourly tariffs for end users, without simple reliable ways to access DUoS, TNUoS and BSUoS (system and network charges) the savings created by storage are really a part of the solar subsidy scheme.

If storage is to become more than a lifestyle statement then we need to stop playing games with the way we present the economics of storage. And start talking about how we make things work. If you want to do that feel free to drop me an email or pick up the phone.