Sharing electricity storage at the community level: An empirical analysis of potential business models and barriers

More and more households are installing residential electricity storage systems to increase the self-consumption of electricity they produced. Some governments have accelerated this development through specific financial support schemes to offset the costs, which still remain high. Compared to the use of single-household systems, the sharing of mid-scale electricity storage systems in neighborhoods could reduce the Levelized Costs of Storage (LCOS). However, a model for the shared usage of storage by multiple households has yet to emerge. We investigated eight demonstration projects in Germany and Western Australia with capacities between 100 and 1100 kW h with respect to potential business models and barriers in a cross-case study based on document analyses and expert interviews. We found that models relying on the transmission of electricity from individual rooftop photovoltaics to a shared storage system through the public grid are facing significant regulatory barriers. Removing these policy barriers would enable a more efficient use of electricity storage systems. By contrast, projects relying on a less regulated microgrid managed by the administration or strata entities of multi-household developments already seem promising under the current regulatory framework.