The answer is yes you can power a residence with just the battery and a charging source (eg solar or wind) alone without a grid connection. Most off grid residential setups, however, will include a backup diesel generator with an auto transfer switch and zinc8 would be no exception to that. In other words just because you are using a zinc8 battery at your residence doesn’t mean you would get to ignore the possibility of running into issues with your charging system and thus, a backup generator would still be required. You won’t see this in a commercial application typically because industry loses money when power outages occur and not having the grid as backup would lower the “availability” (many companies require five 9s which means 99.99999% of the time the utility is up and running and that number may differ depending on what part of the country or world you live in) and you can’t get that with a diesel generator alone....not to mention a diesel generator would have to be massive for most commercial applications as a backup to your battery system rendering such a setup as not feasible - so in commercial applications it would have to be an extremely unique situation not to use the grid as your backup and in most commercial situations you’ll more than likely find that a battery and charger combination are only enough to offset the energy required - not replace. But with zinc8 I’m sure that they will attempt to meet 100% of the energy demand of whatever structure they are powering and over time as energy requirements fluctuate and solar arrays degrade (about.7% per year for mono and polycrystalline silicon), zinc8 will be able to add more power simply by increasing the amount of electrolyte material (up to a certain amount) without having to make room for more physical building space to accommodate the increase in power (which would be an issue for lithium ion since lithium ion would need to add additional batteries,hence, requiring more building space).
But anyhow for residential applications you can get away with just having a battery (like zinc8) and a solar array (for example) without a backup. Usually you try to size a system like this according to historical weather patterns but as you pointed out, despite historical patterns, weather is still unpredictable and do it really just depends how crucial it is to ensure you have power. For example you could size your system very conservatively according to historical weather numbers, but even then, if the weather gets even worse then historical data, now what? Is it ok with you if your residence might run into this unlikely situation and you’ll just deal with not having power till the sun comes out again? Totally up to you. In remote cabin situations most people wouldn’t care but let’s say this is a residence you live in...you’d probably want the piece of mind that you have a back up.
I can try to respond in a different way if that doesn’t answer your question. Let me know if you have any other questions.
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