Guide · Equipment

Do you need batteries?

Short answer: often no. It's the question that comes up most, and many ask it back to front — the battery is not the heart of an installation, it's an option. What justifies it or not is the hour at which you consume your electricity.

If you consume mostly during the day

When most of your consumption falls in broad daylight, the electricity from your panels goes straight to your appliances, the second it is produced, with no detour through a battery. No storage losses, no extra hardware to amortise: it's the most profitable scenario. It fits households where life happens during the day and business sites whose activity follows the sun.

When storage becomes useful

The calculation flips the moment your consumption peak arrives once the sun has set: there, storing during the day to release in the evening makes economic sense. A second case is service continuity — keeping certain equipment powered during an outage. In these two situations, the battery stops being a gadget and becomes an item that pays for itself.

What a battery costs, and what a stored kWh is worth

"Often no" is not a cautious posture, it's a conclusion you can put figures on. On the Moroccan market, an LFP battery — the chemistry we recommend for our climate — sits at around 3,000 to 4,000 DH per kWh of installed capacity. A bank of 10 usable kWh therefore comes to roughly 30,000 to 40,000 DH, on top of the panels and the hybrid inverter. That item is only justified if it saves you more than it costs.

And that is exactly where the trade-off is decided. Under Law 82-21, the surplus you send back to the grid is bought from you at 0.18 to 0.21 DH/kWh, whereas you buy that same kWh back at between 0.90 and 1.66 DH/kWh depending on your bracket. A kWh you consume at home — directly during the day, or stored for the evening — is therefore worth four to nine times an exported kWh. A battery only carries value when it shifts your consumption from the day to the evening: on a home that is already daytime, there is almost nothing to shift, and the storage pays out without earning its keep.

How long before it pays for itself

In concrete terms, a well-sized residential installation pays back in 5 to 7 years without storage. Adding a battery stretches that by 1 to 3 years, depending on your profile and the capacity chosen. For genuine night-time consumption, that extra cost is recovered and the battery comes out ahead; for a home that lives by day, it simply adds up with nothing in return. The good news is that the hardware keeps pace: an LFP cell lasts about 6,000 cycles, warrantied 10 years at no less than 70% of its capacity — enough longevity to pay off storage that is correctly sized, never to make a bank oversized "for peace of mind" worthwhile.

What your consumption curve says

The answer is therefore not in a catalogue, it's in your meter reading. We look at the hours when your meter turns the most, and it's that curve that points to — or away from — a battery. Adding storage "just to be safe" ties up tens of thousands of dirhams and returns nothing if your consumption is daytime; the right reflex is to cover most of the bill for the least money invested.