Home Battery Revenue Stacking Calculator
Quantifying Stacked Value Streams
Battery vendors increasingly tout “revenue stacking,” the practice of combining multiple value streams to justify residential storage projects. Yet homeowners rarely see all the components summarized in one place. This calculator follows the familiar AgentCalc format to capture arbitrage savings, demand response stipends, frequency regulation payouts, resilience benefits, incentives, and the inevitable costs of degradation reserves and service contracts. By presenting everything in a single table and using MathML to document the arithmetic, the tool helps homeowners, installers, and financiers talk the same language when evaluating storage economics.
The total annual value is the sum of all positive revenue streams minus the set-asides for degradation and service. Expressed formally, , where represents each revenue source, is the degradation reserve, and is the service or monitoring cost. Outage value receives special treatment: the form multiplies expected hours of interruption by the user-specified dollar value per hour, reflecting either avoided spoilage or productivity losses. This mirrors the approach used in reliability engineering where loss-of-load value quantifies resilience.
To translate net annual value into a simple payback period, the calculator divides the installed cost by the annual surplus whenever that surplus is positive. The MathML representation is . If the net value is zero or negative, the payback row displays an em dash to signal that stacked revenues do not recover capital under the current assumptions.
Scenario Guidance for Homeowners
Real-world programs pay vastly different amounts. Some utilities offer $1,000 upfront enrollment bonuses but meager annual stipends, while others like California’s virtual power plant pilots can exceed $1,500 per year. To ground the inputs, the table below summarizes three illustrative cases built from the same base assumptions supplied in the form.
| Scenario | Total revenue (USD) | Net annual value (USD) | Simple payback (years) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base case | — | — | — |
| High incentive program | — | — | — |
| Outage-focused value | — | — | — |
The high incentive scenario layers an additional $800 in credits on top of the base case to mimic aggressive market-entry programs. The outage-focused case doubles the outage hours and value per hour to reflect rural customers who lose significant revenue whenever the grid fails. By comparing these outputs, homeowners can discuss with installers which programs to enroll in first, how often to cycle the battery, and whether to invest in additional resilience upgrades such as critical-load panels or smart home automation.
This narrative approach matches AgentCalc’s other storage calculators: concise forms for data entry, immediate numerical feedback, and generous context so that readers understand the “why” behind the numbers. Because no new CSS was introduced, the calculator inherits typography, spacing, and accessibility characteristics from `_main.css`, ensuring a cohesive user experience across the energy storage section.
For deeper planning, pair this tool with the home battery backup duration calculator to size outage coverage, explore duty cycles in the remote seismometer solar battery duty-cycle planner, or compare financing structures using the solar battery payback calculator.