From ESS News
A rural setup that begs for storage
I live on a wooded hillside in California’s Napa Valley wine region, above the morning fog that settles in the valley below. It’s rural and beautiful but also a CAL FIRE-designated Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.
Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) serves the area, which practically means two things: electricity is expensive and power outages are relatively common (seven in 2025 alone). Moreover, Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) events can occur; this is when the utility preemptively turns off power to reduce ignition risk during high-fire-danger weather, and these can last for 2-3 days.
For the past several years, my backup for such situations was a portable gas generator that I wheeled out from the garage and connected to the house via a manual transfer switch. It powered the fridge, water pump, and a few lights. It also dominated everything else: loud enough that it made sleeping difficult even with the windows closed and exhaust filling the air as long as it ran. Positioning the unit far enough from the house to be somewhat tolerable required a heavy cable to handle the voltage drop.
During the back-to-back multi-day PSPS events a few years ago, the generator burned through several expensive tanks of gasoline along with more time at the gas station than I ever wanted to spend. After the second event, I started looking seriously at storage.
The rate environment was the second motivator. I installed a 6.7 kW AC Enphase solar array (21 IQ8MC microinverters) at the end of 2025, primarily to help counteract a monthly bill that had become uncomfortable. Solar alone helps during daytime production, but on PG&E’s Net Billing Tariff (NEM 3.0) — the residential successor to NEM 2.0 — the credit for exporting a kWh is a small fraction of the cost of importing one. On my own bills, the import side runs around 32¢/kWh blended and the export credit averages around 4¢/kWh, for a round-trip penalty of roughly 28¢ on every solar kWh that gets exported and bought back later.
Other solar owners had warned me about this exact situation — “you’ll need a battery” — which, as it turns out, is the only practical way to capture most of that spread.
Installation of the PV system that ties into the E10
What the E10 actually is
The Anker Solix E10 is a modular battery storage system designed for whole- or partial-home backup. My configuration is one A17E1 inverter module (“Power Module”) on top of two B6000 battery modules (6,144 Wh each, 12,288 Wh of nameplate capacity), tied to an AX170 Power Dock that handles the automatic transfer switch (ATS), backup distribution, and integration with the existing solar.
The Power Dock supports two solar integration patterns. For installations where the E10 is the primary solar inverter, the E10 accepts DC input directly from a PV array. For retrofits like mine, where solar was already in place using its own AC microinverters, the AC output of the existing solar lands on dedicated AC-PV input terminals (Circuits 7 and 8) in the Power Dock, with the integration configured during the commissioning step in the Anker app.
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