They’ll get bailed out and push the cost on the rest of us, business as usual

Do you know how these kits work? The whole point is that they’re plug-and-play. If the feed back into the grid, they are not plug and play and will require coordination with your power company lest you accidentally kill someone because you’re backfeeding into a line they turned off so they could work on it.

The kits have built-in measures to avoid backfeeding, or they would be illegal. Where I live, they’ve been deemed so unsafe, failsafe or not, that you’re just not allowed to use them.

pushing the power back into the grid.

These units do not push electricity into the grid unless their fail-saves are bypassed deliberately or fail catastrophically.

Anyway, no, it’s not that important. You already have a battery at home- your entire home. If you’re overproducing electricity then you can convert it to another medium such as hot or cold air depending on the time of year and save on AC. You can run preload your washer and make it run when production is at peak automatically. Be creative. Most people will not be overproducing electricity with one of these kits.

Additionally, local energy independence is not about being off-grid, it’s about being able to charge and use a radio or the internet in an emergency where the grid is out. A solar panel on the balcony provides that, it makes you independent of the grid even if you’re still using the grid to run your washing machine and the oven in a non-emergency scenario. A battery will only be a boon to you if you expect the grid to go out for days at a time regularly or if your kit is large enough to actually overproduce at any point, which again, most don’t; they supplement.

the battery component is extremely critical for energy independence as the time period people want to minimize grid usage the most should be during the peak hours, which inconveniently is when the sun is down.

I don’t understand what you mean by this. The time people want to minimize their grid usage is during the hours of 16-19 which is peak usage and when electricity is most expensive. These panels will still provide a decent supplement in that time during the summer half of the year.

In summary, I just don’t think a battery is going to add much unless you’re expecting to overproduce regularly which a balcony panel isn’t gonna do.

edit: I should mention that the larger kits do come with battery options, because those could be expected to overproduce, and thus would be useful.

what?

Effectively cutting 30% of electricity going into the household isn’t going to help the environment? It means less transmission losses. It means less grid infrastructure which consists large of copper and steel, which both produce a lot of emissions in their production.

Even if it did nothing for the environment, local energy independence is still such a massive boon to any community that it can’t be overlooked.