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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.
in locality of where batteries replace toxic carcinogenic exhaust fumes.
Science funded by oil is fascist.
You have a battery and most days you have a trickling, free energy source just bouncing off the top of your head being wasted. A high % of people who would add the greater expense of batteries would no doubt add solar.
It's a no brainer yet they don't consider it somehow?
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.
The PowerWALL is also terrible at towing my boat, walking my dog and satering my plants.
Other shocking news:
I heard that wood burning fireplaces don't actually improve the air quality in homes. Just makes them warmer.
Fire insurance doesn't stop fires - just gives you a chance to get some money back after a fire, so you can buy replacement stuff.
Life insurance - doesn't make you immortal. My friend had insurance and he DIED!
Salt is a terrible beverage!
Liquid Nitrogen is useless at removing terrible, scary, urban blighting BLACK ice.
Truly, all of these things are useless at accomplishing goals they are not intended to accomplish.
I do hear that the PowerWALL is pretty good at storing power for use during blackouts, or smoothing your own power peak demands though. Maybe they could market it for that instead of whatever ad the high on crack writer came up with.
I have to go post a bad review of my new truck - it is useless as a dirigible, no matter how much helium I pump into the cab.
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.
Zero-emissions generation facilities (e.g. solar, hydro, wind) are slow to start up and slow down, making them poorly suited for peak/transient loads. Coal, natural gas, and diesel are far more responsive.
If residential batteries allow for smoothing of the demand side and buffer against unexpected peaking, generation can largely stay with zero-emissions sourcing.
Thatâ(TM)s the idea, at least.
In what way are residential batteries and PV not saving money ?
Electricity demand is highest during the day, and lowest at night.
If Electricity is priced based on demand, the batteries are buying high and selling low, exactly the opposite of what makes sense.
Residential batteries are stupid. It makes far more sense to feed the power back into the grid.
Batteries only make sense where utilities misprice power, through either corruption or incompetence.
Electricity demand is highest during the day, and lowest at night.
That is 100% false. Here is a graph of power usage over the course of the day. The peek is at 8pm to 9pm. It tends to rise slowly over the day but about the time that solar drops out is when you need to be ramping up power production.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
It shifts the emissions needed to charge the battery pack over a 24h day.
Solar can help when the sun is out but energy is pulled down the grid when the cost is low to ensure the battery pack is always ready.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Charging batteries from the grid is insane in the UK unless done purely for power security. Most storage systems are hooked up to microgeneration (almost all PV) and the battery is used to avoid selling power cheaply to the grid then buying it back for much higher prices later. Any effect on emissions is a side effect, albeit one that should reduce them.
Payoff on panels for me is about three years. Admitted lots of sun but no spectacularly good deals on the tariff. Payoff for batteries would be so long they'd be unlikely to ever break even.
Wood furnaces, surprisingly, are carbon-neutral: The carbon they release exactly balances the carbon taken in to grow the trees. In principle anyway - there is still the emissions cost of collecting and transportint the fuel. They are terrible for particulate emissions though - lots of smog.
Umm what? It'd make far more sense to charge up the batteries at night (from the grid) when the price of electricity is lowest and your house needs the lowest amount of energy; and to discharge the batteries during the day when electricity is most expensive and you use the most, and you possibly have solar panels providing most of your energy needs.
Feeding electricity into the grid requires utility infrastructure upgrades (in many cases) in order to handle that; residential batteries may be cheaper in those cases.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Residential batteries don't make sense
They do if they are used right. What we need is a more intelligent electricity grid that can coordinate the residential batteries so that they benefit more than just the owner. To make it fair the owner would have to be compensated of course, but that sounds like a great way to pay for infrastructure.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
As someone who lives in Florida, and thus sees an average of at least two days of outages every year thanks to Hurricane season, I'd dearly love an alternative to generators. Residential batteries make a lot of sense in this area.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Solar without batteries uses the grid. Storage is inefficient; so is transmission. If you generate and someone half a mile away consumes, that's more-efficient than battery storage or than transmitting from the power station 15 miles away.
Because the grid net meters over long time spans, this is more economically-advantageous to the homeowner than using a battery.
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There are 2 big reasons for residential batteries increase emissions. Politics and stupidity, the stupidity I see already in the comments. It will always be economical with people to share generation and storage of electricity. The more people and the further spread out geographically the better. You can form small groups for local management and then larger groups to spread out differences in local demand, weather and generation. Let's call the local groups utilities and the larger group a grid. You can set up solar panes on your roof and buy and sell the electricity to the utility. The utility can then sell or buy from any other utility in the grid. The utility can also have its own local storage to reduce transporting between utilities and also reduce infrastructure locally. Next we need to have the same pricing structure between all players. So when base load nuclear, wind and solar are all producing at their maximums the price can go to zero and when it's a hot cloudy summer afternoon with no wind the price can go to $10/kwh. One bonus of allowing the price to swing like this is that consumers will change their behaviour. Storing electricity is hard, changing behaviour is easy if you have the political will.
I worked on a very large pilot in Oklahoma. We everyone two pricing options and they paid the lower one at the end of the month. The first was the current system of 12 to 20 cents per kwh. The second was peak prices of $0.78 and the lowest price was free. Average savings per month was $50. Savings for the utility would have been double that. The reason for the huge savings to the utility is it would have reduced the utilities peak demand. Over 10% of a utilities infrastructure is used for only hours a year. Eliminate that peak and you save the utility tens of billions of dollars. The pilot was an amazing success. The regulator of the utility then went and fucked the entire thing up so badly that they pretty much killed the idea for all of North America. Oh, and the politicians all patted themselves on the back for preventing an evil utility from making huge profits. If Oklahoma and Gas and Electric had rolled out the concept for everyone in the state their profits under their new regulated prices would have dropped.
The only LED bulbs I've ever had burn out were the cheap ones bought at the dollar store. LED or not, you get what you pay for. Also, there's no mercury in LED bulbs, unlike fluorescent bulbs.
My Philips LED bulbs have been running fine for years without any change in lumens. Yes they're around 10 dollars per bulb, but they're only expensive if you have a huge house which requires a dozen bulbs. And if you have a huge house, you shouldn't be bitching about things like LED bulbs prices.
Oh, sure. Just as carbon-neutral as coal, oil, and natural gas anyway. Not that this is a useful definition of carbon-neutral.
Where the timber is sustainably harvested (putting the energy costs aside) it's probably pretty close to carbon-neutral. If you used renewable power, the whole thing could conceivably wind up being carbon-negative because all the parts too small to be firewood wind up getting composted. This usually involves chipping it, which does take some energy, but you can also build a "hugelkultur" by throwing it down someplace you'd like to build soil, and dumping some clean dirt on top of it. You can then plant into the resulting mound, or just throw something like burlap or hydroseed on top of it in order to hold it down.
Coal and oil (and to a varying extent, natural gas) are highly concentrated and long-period, which is why it's frightening how much of them we use.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For example, our politicians are trying to convince the public that driving a 2500kg electric car is `greener` than driving a small and efficient 800kg gasoline car.
That's because in many cases the EV actually IS the greener option. There is no such thing as an "efficient" internal combustion engine, at least in https://www.quora.com/How-ener...">comparison to electric motors. My Chevy Bolt EV has a fuel economy better than any remotely similar sized vehicle with an ICE you can buy. It's not even close. Furthermore it generates less waste to operate too. I don't have to change ANY fluids aside from wiper fluid for the first 150,000 miles of operation. I've driven mine around 8000 miles since purchase which means I haven't burned approximately 400 gallons of gasoline. Because of the electric option I purchase from the power company my power mostly comes from green sources too (solar, etc) so I don't burn much in the way of fossil fuels at the power station either. Hell I can charge it from the local nuke plant in theory.
They promote solar panels but fail to properly insulate old houses.
So because they haven't solved every problem, they shouldn't bother solving any problem? Insulating old houses well generally is FAR more expensive than installing solar panels on either new or old construction. Of course it's a good idea to insulate better but how do you propose to finance that on old homes on a large scale? That's an important long term project but the bigger problem is the pollution from generation using fossil fuels. We can solve or at least mitigate that problem in a few decades. Insulating every old house doesn't solve the pollution problems AND it will take a lot longer and cost more to accomplish. Solve the problems you can solve today.