I don't think most consumer solar owners understand how significant their 1:1 energy trade is. They are trading their 1:00 energy for the electric company's 6:00 energy. It's an amazing deal for consumers but not sustainable.
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Yeah but if we had the CEGB back we could just collectively pay for all infrastructure on a use basis, without worrying about investor profits, beyond gilt yields.
Here, over the weekend, there was clear weather over most of the state. As a result, the wholesale electricity price went negative at 7:30 in the morning, and stayed negative until 4:30.
Net metering isn't sustainable. But the system is full of incentives for anyone who can make storage work.
Right, and personally I'd rather not go down a road where we expect energy consumers to buy their own batteries energy storage.
Even with all the smarts and real-time data we have I can't see how that makes more sense than the utility buying its own batteries and installing them in substations.
German here, rooftop solar in combination with a battery bank suitable to use most of your produced energy yourself is the standard that's usually installed here. Power companies have only recently started building battery storage in any sizable capacity themselves.
It works pretty well, and is economically feasible with our electricity pricing. Even when it used to be better than it is nowadays *glances over at Russia*. We pay very little for excess generation that goes into the grid and soon there will be no compensation for new installations.
Our energy markets go to net MWh pricing of 0 or less occasionally, and with more advanced metering devices flexible tariffs are taking off so people are incentiviced to use power in ways that puts less stress on the grid if possible. Buffer batteries at home are pretty space and cost efficient
it would be hard in some cities to establish more centralised battery storage instead of home solutions for pure space and the cost of ground reasons. I see it as similar to cache memory in processors. Home batteries plus Power2Grid capable EVs are the Level 1, Level 2 is battery facilities and
Level 3 is chemically storing energy either in hydrogen or higher processed synthetic hydrocarbons as reserve energy.
At least that's how the German energy landscape is developing. Is it the technically most efficient way, probably not. But it is what works and
Australian states have started experimenting with offering grants + 0%-interest loans to homeowners with solar to install batteries. Grid batteries are popping up more too, but they're not offering any direct specific financial benefit to solar panel owners without batteries, just grid stabilisation
While I love distributed energy resources, I think that granularity of distribution is simply not needed.
And even if we decide batteries-in-homes makes sense, my "perfect world" would be one where the utility just gives them to you in exchange for a discount on your bill.
That's a better solution than I could come up with.
Seems likely the power company would want some level of control over when batteries charge/discharge and whether they discharge into the house as use or into the grid as capacity?
Batteries- in-homes (where space and budget allow – both of which will hopefully only be more inclusive over time) is really nice for the residents, too – no grid is even close to 100% reliable, and distributing the storage means your fridge keeps working when the grid is down.
If youre in a developed country with only moderate weather disasters & underground utilities your electricity can be incredibly reliable. In the past decade I've probably been without electricity for just a few hours. Adding a battery would help for peak prices but add nearly nothing for reliability
I'm from Montreal where electricity was unreliable at best and we would have half a dozen outages in a year. A number of years ago smart meters were installed and since then it dropped to less than one outage a year. This winter I'm in the south but my house has not lost power once.
I'm in the Bay Area in California, which should qualify as developed. And yet, having 2-3 outages a year – sometimes long ones – is not unusual. 🤷 Maybe it will get better, what with the monopoly utility double-dipping on subsidies and ratepayers to fund "improvement projects" (incl. undergrounding)
Anecdotally, it's saved me from several multi-day outages. I know I'm fortunate to have been able to adopt solar+battery early, and the economics and incentives are challenging to figure out (especially where you have Grid Monopolies). But I hope that doesn't stop it from becoming more accessible.
I think this is an extremely underappreciated idea and one that I'm a huge fan of. There's just so many benefits: resilience against power outages (especially helpful for rural locations that are hard to serve) is a good selling point for the consumer. And for the grid operator...
... it lets utilities do more fine-grained control, too! Instead of upgrading a feeder line, they can use batteries to do at-residence load shedding controlled by the local substation. They can use batteries to stabilize grid frequency. They can even gather more detailed, point-of-use data!
While I'm not a huge fan of building new hydro, pumped hydro systems are amazing for shifting power to when we really need it. Similar for district heating/cooling and heat batteries and we really should try to develop more community level energy systems.
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Net metering isn't sustainable. But the system is full of incentives for anyone who can make storage work.
Even with all the smarts and real-time data we have I can't see how that makes more sense than the utility buying its own batteries and installing them in substations.
At least that's how the German energy landscape is developing. Is it the technically most efficient way, probably not. But it is what works and
Although there's not enough money for the programs, which is annoying.
And even if we decide batteries-in-homes makes sense, my "perfect world" would be one where the utility just gives them to you in exchange for a discount on your bill.
Seems likely the power company would want some level of control over when batteries charge/discharge and whether they discharge into the house as use or into the grid as capacity?