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Under Current Policies, Residential Batteries Increase Emissions In Most Cases (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 shares a report: Another year, another reason to take the promises of residential home batteries with a grain of salt. This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions -- assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.
Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly. "There may be good reasons to decentralize the grid through ubiquitous installation of small RES [Residential Energy Storage], but cost-effective emissions control is not one of them at the moment," the researchers write.
Even a lithium-ion battery has only 99% charge efficiency, so it makes sense that adding a battery to your photovoltaic (PV) system can increase emissions compared to a PV system with no battery.
Note the following:
This is why it needs to be a revenue-neutral carbon tax. If the tax is 10 cents per kWh and the average person uses 4,000 kWh per year, then everyone would receive a $400 check every year whether they used any electricity that year or not.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Capitalism is not going green until it is profitable.
Then we need to make it profitable.
Two of the biggest reductions in CO2 emissions have come from LED lights and shale gas. Both of these industries were developed by profit seeking capitalists, and have been widely adopted because they actually make economic sense.
Residential batteries don't make sense, are not cost effective, and may not even be helping the environment. Maybe some new battery design may make sense, but then money should be going into battery bR&D, not battery installations.
home batteries are about cutting the COST (i.e. saving money off the home's electric bill)... by storing low off-peak energy (from whatever the fuck the energy generation source is) for use during high-cost peak times.. it has abso-fucking-lutly nothing to do with emissions for most people and most installs (an exception would be an off-the-grid home with solar or solar/wind + battery)
I don't really get solar WITHOUT the batteries.
The people I know in Minnesota with panels literally don't see much payoff for 10-ish years. The utilities are eventually going to get their way and greatly cut their payback rate for grid buyback.
Generating and storing energy for your own use is the only thing that makes sense, but right now the economics of it for the average homeowner don't work well.
>>Two of the biggest reductions in CO2 emissions have come from LED lights and shale gas. Both of these industries were developed by profit seeking capitalists, and have been widely adopted because they actually make economic sense.
Yes, but no on LED lights.
The big driver for pushing the LED light development was EU regulation. Before that there was not much of a market for them, so the development was slow.
But suddenly the companies saw that in few years there would be people who were forced to buy alternatives to traditional light bulbs in the huge market that is EU. So being capitalists they decided that pouring money into the development would be a good idea.
Thus indeed it was private companies that did the development and the development was driven by profit motive. But the reason why the market suddenly existed was (upcoming) regulation.
Then when the development was far enough, it actually started to make sense also in other parts of the world to use LED lights.