There was a New York Times article previously about Green Mountain Power, but this article has some more examples: ... ... ... ...
There was a New York Times article previously about Green Mountain Power, but this article has some more examples:
Green Mountain Power customers [...], for a discount on their bills, agree to plug their batteries (most of which are leased to own) and appliances into the utility’s network and let the company control the devices so that they use less power at critical moments. (If customers need to override the company’s commands, they can.) This means that Castonguay (or, really, his algorithms) can program storage batteries to be charged a hundred per cent before a storm hits. Or, if it’s going to be a hot day, he can preheat water heaters in many homes in the morning, so that in the afternoon, as the temperature rises, more power will be available to run air-conditioners. He can also precool some big buildings in the morning. “Then, if you think about it, the building itself is the battery,” he said, in the sense that it stores chilled air for later in the day. “We have about fifty megawatts” of this distributed power, Castonguay told me. “At the scale of Vermont, that’s a lot.”
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Green Mountain Power’s former C.E.O., Mary Powell, left three years ago and soon took over Sunrun, which supplies rooftop solar panels and storage batteries for hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, and serves as a third-party power aggregator for several utilities. “We’re sitting on more than 1.1 gigawatt-hours of installed storage capacities just with our customers now,” she told me recently, much of it in California, where the company is based.
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Green Mountain Power wants all its customers to have a battery because it spent fifty-five million dollars on storm recovery this year, up from an average of less than ten million from 2015 to 2022. “Our three worst storms were this year,” Castonguay said.
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[Swell Energy] built a V.P.P. in Oahu capable of supplying more than ten per cent of the island’s power—Khan said that Hawaiian Electric asks Swell to dispatch power from household batteries when the grid needs it, which is about ten times a month. As a result, those customers now get a payment from Swell. “We will lease you a battery and solar panels, for, say, two hundred bucks a month.” Khan said. “And now we can pay you maybe fifty dollars a month for the ability to dispatch your power. It’s bringing down the cost of ownership, which is good for well-off people, but decisive for people who really care about the difference between a hundred and fifty and two hundred dollars a month.”
Utilities are now building their own big battery farms out near their big solar or wind installations, which is helpful—studies show that there aren’t enough rooftops in the U.S. to hold the solar panels needed to run a fossil-free power system. But power generators and batteries situated closer to the point of consumption are uniquely useful, Khan said. “One thing is transmission losses. If you can generate and store where you consume, you avoid the five- to ten-per-cent generation losses that come with running power down a long line. And, if you’re trying to cope with load growth on a particular circuit, where, say, a lot of new housing is going on, a compelling way to do that is to have batteries around on that circuit.”
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In mid-August, the Oregonian reported, a three-day heat wave broke “daily, monthly, and decades-long records.” But it didn’t break the P.G.E. grid, in part because the company has a long-standing commitment to its own virtual power plant, with about two hundred megawatts’ worth of solar panels, batteries, and thermostats in customer’s houses that it can call on. P.G.E.’s software went to work precooling houses in the morning so that it could turn thermostats three degrees lower during the afternoon peak, and introducing the staggered charging of electric cars so that they could wait till the wee hours to refill their batteries, once the strain was off the system. All this is voluntary—customers sign up to participate, and if they need to override the thermostat they can. “But about twenty per cent of our customers are bought in,” John Farmer, the utility’s spokesperson, said. “We saw at least ninety-megawatt reductions in peak usage three days in a row.”
Archive link if needed. TIL that Ben Franklin invented the word "battery." The more I learn about that guy the more unbelievable a human being he seems. Decentralized "virtual power plants" are a...
Archive link if needed. TIL that Ben Franklin invented the word "battery." The more I learn about that guy the more unbelievable a human being he seems.
Decentralized "virtual power plants" are a really cool system, both technologically and in terms of cost/efficiency. I feel like every day I wake up and say, "Wow, I'm really glad the federal government passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 with all its environmental benefits." <Cough> election next year <cough>.
With that said, making energy cheaper encourages people to use more of it, which correspondingly requires more generating capacity. There are limits to how much electricity any particular household can use, but if a family is conservative with their AC use for cost reasons but then the cost goes down, they will almost certainly use it more. This is cool as a "quality of life" thing but doesn't address, by itself, the problem of overall energy demand, which inherently leads to emissions (and infrastructure costs), even for renewables.
I wonder if there is some way for utility companies or the government to charge/tax more for extraneous electricity use than essential use. For example, specifying a modest but appropriately generous limit to "normal/cheap electricity" to cover basics like lighting, cooking, basic appliance use, conservative/sufficient AC use, etc. And then gradually (linearly? quadratically?) increase the cost of a given unit of electricity after that baseline of "comfortable necessities" is reached; for anything that is more of a luxury. This would provide more incentive to inhabit smaller and better insulated homes which require less electricity for temperature regulation, and to use energy-efficient appliances, but would not disallow it if that's a priority for some people. It would also specifically target wealthier households who use much more electricity.
When I lived in Texas, we had a system like that, except in the opposite direction: the power company gave us a credit on our bill if we used more than a certain amount of electricity. (Texas is...
When I lived in Texas, we had a system like that, except in the opposite direction: the power company gave us a credit on our bill if we used more than a certain amount of electricity. (Texas is kind of bonkers.) So yes, the machinery for something like that is in place, at least in some areas.
Making energy cheaper does encourage people to use it more, but I think there's basically no limit on how much energy can be usefully generated. If we can make power cheap and abundant enough, maybe capturing carbon out of the air will start to make economic sense. In the long term, that's the only way we're going to reverse (not just halt) climate change.
Huh. That is a weird system. I guess I see the incentive for the power company to do that if they have a high margin to begin with, but it seems kind of... counter-productive to the grid's...
Huh. That is a weird system. I guess I see the incentive for the power company to do that if they have a high margin to begin with, but it seems kind of... counter-productive to the grid's stability?
I was mostly thinking about mining-related externalities. Any sort of physical production mechanism has environmental impacts, even if it's not emitting GHGs like fossil fuels. While I see the value of carbon capture in long-term climate change reversal, it doesn't do anything about the destruction of ecosystems from mining materials needed to continually produce new batteries, nor address pollution of soil/groundwater.
Reading about Benjamin Franklin is quite interesting and recommended. He did all sorts of things. A very early social influencer, too :) The inventor of the battery was Alessandro Volta and...
Reading about Benjamin Franklin is quite interesting and recommended. He did all sorts of things. A very early social influencer, too :)
The inventor of the battery was Alessandro Volta and there’s an interesting museum about him in Italy. (The volt is named after him.)
There was a New York Times article previously about Green Mountain Power, but this article has some more examples:
...
...
...
...
Archive link if needed. TIL that Ben Franklin invented the word "battery." The more I learn about that guy the more unbelievable a human being he seems.
Decentralized "virtual power plants" are a really cool system, both technologically and in terms of cost/efficiency. I feel like every day I wake up and say, "Wow, I'm really glad the federal government passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 with all its environmental benefits." <Cough> election next year <cough>.
With that said, making energy cheaper encourages people to use more of it, which correspondingly requires more generating capacity. There are limits to how much electricity any particular household can use, but if a family is conservative with their AC use for cost reasons but then the cost goes down, they will almost certainly use it more. This is cool as a "quality of life" thing but doesn't address, by itself, the problem of overall energy demand, which inherently leads to emissions (and infrastructure costs), even for renewables.
I wonder if there is some way for utility companies or the government to charge/tax more for extraneous electricity use than essential use. For example, specifying a modest but appropriately generous limit to "normal/cheap electricity" to cover basics like lighting, cooking, basic appliance use, conservative/sufficient AC use, etc. And then gradually (linearly? quadratically?) increase the cost of a given unit of electricity after that baseline of "comfortable necessities" is reached; for anything that is more of a luxury. This would provide more incentive to inhabit smaller and better insulated homes which require less electricity for temperature regulation, and to use energy-efficient appliances, but would not disallow it if that's a priority for some people. It would also specifically target wealthier households who use much more electricity.
When I lived in Texas, we had a system like that, except in the opposite direction: the power company gave us a credit on our bill if we used more than a certain amount of electricity. (Texas is kind of bonkers.) So yes, the machinery for something like that is in place, at least in some areas.
Making energy cheaper does encourage people to use it more, but I think there's basically no limit on how much energy can be usefully generated. If we can make power cheap and abundant enough, maybe capturing carbon out of the air will start to make economic sense. In the long term, that's the only way we're going to reverse (not just halt) climate change.
Huh. That is a weird system. I guess I see the incentive for the power company to do that if they have a high margin to begin with, but it seems kind of... counter-productive to the grid's stability?
I was mostly thinking about mining-related externalities. Any sort of physical production mechanism has environmental impacts, even if it's not emitting GHGs like fossil fuels. While I see the value of carbon capture in long-term climate change reversal, it doesn't do anything about the destruction of ecosystems from mining materials needed to continually produce new batteries, nor address pollution of soil/groundwater.
Reading about Benjamin Franklin is quite interesting and recommended. He did all sorts of things. A very early social influencer, too :)
The inventor of the battery was Alessandro Volta and there’s an interesting museum about him in Italy. (The volt is named after him.)