News out of the UK today is that global shopping giant Ikea have started selling solar panels and home battery packs – let’s take a deeper look at Ikea solar and investigate whether it’ll come to Australia or not.
Ikea Solar: What, where, why, how much?
According to the Telegraph, Ikea have partnered with solar power company Solarcentury in order to sell PV solar panels and battery storage to their customers. Solarcentury are the UK’s largest solar company, with an annual turnover of £168m ($278m AUD) in 2015-16.
The batteries will be lithium-ion (manufactured using cells from LG Chem) and available in stores by the end of 2017. They’ll be in sizes of 3kWh or 6kWh and costs to retrofit these batteries start from less than £5,000 ($8,268 AUD), according to Solarcentury. The price for a bundle (storage + solar – no word on specifics yet) will be around £7,000 ($11,570 AUD).
Solarcentury’s head of residential solar Susannah Wood was quoted by InterestingEngineering as saying: “Battery storage is set to completely revolutionize the home energy market, with solar homeowners now able to maximize the amount of solar generated electricity that they can store and use in their homes. We believe IKEA and Solarcentury are offering the most competitive package on the market yet.”
Hege Saebjornsen, the sustainability manager for IKEA’s UK & Ireland said: “We know that our customers want to live more sustainably and together with Solarcentury we will help them to get more value from their solar panels and do just that,”
Ikea Solar in Australia
We’ve reached out to Ikea Australia to see if there are any plans for them to offer these solar products down under and will update this post as soon as we hear back from them! It’d be a great boon for energy storage in Australia and we’d love to see what they can offer the market.
