Genie and a home with a battery

Plenty of rooftop-solar homes have a battery, and the first question their households ask is whether a Genie competes with it. It does not. A battery and a Genie are answers to different questions, and the rule Genie lives by already settles which comes first.

Different jobs

A home battery stores afternoon power so the home can use it later. It shifts energy in time. Genie does the opposite: it uses surplus in the moment it exists and stores nothing. When the sun stops, Genie's work stops. It does not hold anything back for the evening and has nothing to hold it in.

So the battery's job is to keep the home supplied after dark. Genie's job is to put the surplus that nobody is using, including the battery, to work while the sun is up. The jobs do not overlap, and Genie is not a substitute for storage, nor storage a substitute for Genie.

What surplus means when there is a battery

Surplus is the power the panels make that the home is not using. Under the surplus-only rule, a home that is charging its battery is using power, in the same way that a home running a dishwasher is using power. The battery is part of the home, and the home is served first, always.

That means a battery filling up on a sunny morning is ahead of Genie in the queue. Genie draws only on what remains after the house and its storage have taken what they want. Once the battery is full and the household's draw is covered, whatever the roof is still making is surplus in the plain sense, and that is what Genie is for. Until then Genie waits, exactly as it would if the surplus had gone behind a cloud.

What stays the same

Nothing about Genie's rules changes because a battery is present. Genie still never draws from the grid and never sends power to it. It still steps aside the moment the home needs the power back. It still reports only its own energy use and health, and still makes only outbound connections.

The household still sees energy used, work performed, work sold, and money owed in the app. A battery-equipped home may well leave less surplus for Genie on many days, because the battery is soaking up the margin first, and on those days the app will show a smaller figure. That is not a fault. It is the surplus-only rule doing what it says.

What is not yet published

Genie is being designed for ordinary rooftop-solar homes with no battery required. Which battery systems and home energy setups it can read the energy flow alongside, and how it behaves with each, is a matter of specification, and Genie is in development. Element 31 does not announce details before they are final.

Exact compatibility will be part of the full specifications published before anyone confirms a place, together with the hosting terms and measured results from real homes, including the low ones. Reservations are not yet open. When they open, anyone holding a reservation will be able to read all of that and then either confirm their place on those terms or take an instant refund of the $100 deposit.

For the appliance's own relationship to storage, the short answer is in Is Genie a battery?. For how Genie reads surplus in the first place, see How Genie knows the home has surplus.