You MUST have a battery for your solar panels to be of any use during a grid outage. When I got panels installed in 2020, I paid $24,500. A whole-house battery would have been almost as much again. I skipped the battery because, at the time, I was not particularly concerned about grid reliability.
Remember, it’s also cops (not exactly the same cops, but cops nonetheless) who campaign for encryption backdoors so that civilians can’t hide illegal activities from police surveillance.