Solar battery installation in Aiken, SC

Local storage case

Why storage does or does not fit in Aiken

Storage in Aiken answers two different questions depending on your meter. On a Dominion Energy South Carolina address, exported power earns roughly 2.8 to 4.1 cents against a retail rate near 14.4 cents, so a battery that holds afternoon production for evening use is capturing several times what exporting it would have paid. That is a self-consumption argument, and it stands on arithmetic rather than on fear of outages.

On an Aiken Electric Cooperative address the reasoning is similar but the numbers are the cooperative’s own, set under its distributed-generation rider rather than by statute. We read the current schedule before advising, because the gap between the retail rate and the export credit is precisely what a battery monetises, and quoting storage against the wrong gap produces a confident number that is wrong.

The resilience case is real but should be sized honestly. Summer thunderstorm outages happen here, and rural cooperative circuits further out from town can take longer to restore than in-town circuits. We size for essentials across a couple of days, refrigeration, lighting, internet, well pumps where relevant, rather than for running central air through a multi-day event, which is a far larger and more expensive system than most people picture when they ask for whole-house backup.

Written for Aiken specifically. Your own roof, bill and meter still decide the answer, which is what the free assessment settles.

The maths changed

Storing a kilowatt-hour now beats exporting one

Until the end of 2025, Dominion Energy South Carolina credited exported solar close to one-for-one. Sending surplus power to the grid was almost as good as using it, so a battery in Aiken was mostly about riding out storm-season outages.

That ended on December 31, 2025. Under Solar Choice, exports credit at roughly 2.8–4.1¢ per kWh on a time-of-use basis, with a rider of about $14 a month and a November true-up at avoided cost. You still buy power at about 14.4¢ per kWh. The gap between those two numbers is the entire case for storage.

A battery closes that gap. Instead of exporting afternoon surplus for a few cents and buying evening power back at full retail, you store the surplus and spend it yourself. For a household that is out during the day and home in the evening, this is the difference between a system that barely moves the bill and one that does what you expected.

We are not going to promise you a figure for that, because it depends on your usage shape and your rate. What we will do at the assessment is model your actual load profile against your actual rate and show you whether storage earns its cost at your address.

See the full rate picture on Aiken solar incentives, and how self-consumption drives payback on Aiken solar cost.