Homes with more solar than they can store

The challenge

More than four million Australian homes have rooftop solar. Almost all of them generate their surplus in the middle of the day and want it back after dark.

A home battery answers the shape of a single day and stops there. It carries a household through the evening peak, and it is empty by morning. What it does not cover is the run of overcast days, the storm that takes the street’s supply out, or the household that wants to rely on its own generation rather than top up from the grid each night.

How LAVO answers it

The residential LAVO System pairs a lithium-ion buffer with solid-state hydrogen storage, so the two timescales are handled by the parts suited to them.

The battery takes the fast, short-duration demand — the kettle, the car charger, the evening. Hydrogen holds the longer reserve, stored as a solid at low pressure, which is what allows a household store to hold well beyond what a battery of comparable footprint can.

Stored that way, energy does not drain while it waits. A surplus generated on a bright day is still there several days later.

Wider application in the sector

A single home is where this starts and not where it stops.

The same system scales through the way housing is actually built and operated: new developments designed around their own generation, shared systems for apartment buildings and terraces where each dwelling cannot host its own, community storage at the end of a constrained feeder, and aggregation across many homes so that what looks like a household store also behaves as a resource the network can lean on.

Length of storage is what changes the ambition. Covering an evening makes a home cheaper to run; covering several still, overcast days is what lets a household — or a whole street — treat its own generation as its actual supply.