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Companies Are Using California Homes As Batteries To Power the Grid (qz.com)
"Companies like Tesla and SunRun are starting to bid on utility contracts that would allow them to string together dozens or hundreds of systems that act as an enormous reserve to balance the flow of electricity on the grid," reports Quartz. "Doing so would accelerate the grid's transformation from 20th century hub-and-spoke architecture to a transmission network moving electricity among thousands or millions of customers who generate and store their own power." From the report: In theory, networked home-solar-and-battery systems, acting in coordination over a single geographical area, could replace things like natural gas "peaker" plants need to help support the grid on a moment's notice. But it's an open question whether it makes financial sense. Kamath says renewable mandates could keep home solar-storage solutions for the grid going for a while, but the idea will have to prove itself on the market, perhaps by aggregating large areas, if it wants to seriously compete with existing energy assets.
SunRun told investors in 2017 that its pilot programs suggest it could competitively generate $2,000 worth of services by managing electricity flow back to the grid. The company has recently dropped its combative stance with utilities dragging their feet on accepting home solar. Instead, it's pursuing cooperation with the utilities now, in hopes of selling them home-based power. That would allow it grab a chunk of the billions being spent on modernizing the grid. "We don't want to be in a position of building two competing infrastructures," SunRun's Jurich said.
SunRun told investors in 2017 that its pilot programs suggest it could competitively generate $2,000 worth of services by managing electricity flow back to the grid. The company has recently dropped its combative stance with utilities dragging their feet on accepting home solar. Instead, it's pursuing cooperation with the utilities now, in hopes of selling them home-based power. That would allow it grab a chunk of the billions being spent on modernizing the grid. "We don't want to be in a position of building two competing infrastructures," SunRun's Jurich said.
please don't come here.
Won't be a problem.
Perhaps one day. Right now, fully off-grid solar is very expensive. You need to have sufficient generation capacity for the winter when daylight hours are short, which means you are greatly over-capacity in summer. You could set up a system for selling this excess, but then you are back to the need for a distribution network - which remains as much a natural monopoly as before. Plus generating is simply cheaper in bulk, when you have economy of scale. Which do you think is cheaper: Sixty thousand little 100W rooftop wind turbines, or one 6MW monster of a commercial-scale turbine?
When we reach a point where disconnecting from the grid becomes feasible things will get interesting. Neighbors interconnecting, building micro grids with a single connection to the national one, and only wanting to pay one service fee for the whole group.
That is the plan in parts of Europe and that is what some people in Puerto Rico would like to do. That is also why the Puerto Rican Resident Commissioner, Republican heavyweights and representatives of the fossil fuel industry are hard at work drawing up plans for Puerto Rico to become a 'fossil fuel energy hub' for the entire Caribbean. What are you willing to bet that aid payments to rebuild Puerto Rico's energy infrastructure will be conditional on them being spent on fossil fuel power plants backed up by anti renewables legislation and the forced privatisation of Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority? I particularly love this quote by Rob Bishop, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee: "Energy to Puerto Rico ... is going to have to be imported. Natural gas would be a brilliant way to do that.”. In Puerto Rico it's sunny about 65% of daylight hours. This bozo takes one look at that and concludes the only viable way of generating energy in a country that close to the equator which get that much sun is to import natural gas.