Solar energy companies in California deploy batteries to homes to stablize grid
qz.com
qz.com
This effectively means that the only people that would join are people who would be paid to do so, but then that introduces the question of whether it isn't simply cheaper and more efficient for power companies to just deploy larger scale batteries that they control, rather than pay random people to put them in their own - much more uncontrolled - homes.
Or if the odds of that are rather low, say 1/20 and the income is significant then you might gain benifits 95% of the time for 1/2 the cost of a 100% solution which is often a worthwhile tradeoff.
The only answer I can think of is that people are using these batteries to avoid peak electric prices during the day, while charging it up when electricity is cheap. If that is your plan, and you don't care much about having electricity when the city goes black, you could join the program.
So the user still enjoys - and pays for - the storage component while the utility enjoys and pays for the frequency reg.
In that case, you wouldn't put power back into the grid b/c your connection has been broken. You use the battery for your own power instead.
Why do people join Uber or Airbnb?
Swissgrid then passes on the costs of this stabilization to the consumers.
This stabilization is made by 3 main services: primary, secondary, and tertiary control (the level indicates the response time: instantaneous, 10s, 15 min). Anyone can be a ancillary services operator if they are big enough (5MW of control), and if they respect certain rules (must be audited, etc.).
Then, when there is a need of control, a bid is created and the cheapest operators win the bid, effectively earning money (as a rule of thumb, you can earn ~20kCHF/year if you offer 1 MW of tertiary control power). It's much more for secondary.
This model effectively makes the industries want to stabilize the grid either by consuming more, or consuming less when there is a need of grid stabilization. I would really want to see how much tesla will earn with their site in belgium, because their marginal cost of control must be quite small.
PS: sorry for the english
I do not want some remote agency controlling the discharge of my home battery, except in a miraculous future scenario where we invent batteries that are good for 20,000 deep cycles with <5% degradation over 20+ years.
That future may not be so miraculous since various flow and liquid salt batteries supposedly offer such properties. But you probably won't see them in homes since they only work economically at larger scales.
also, but think the jury is still out on the power walls, there is evidence that Tesla batteries in Model S have much reduced battery degradation than previous experience would suggest. Which is interesting but needs more study
Besides, there's genuine benefit being hooked up to the grid. I'll gladly pay the $10/month interconnection fee just to have that as a backup to my battery.
The bigger problem is cobalt,but from what I understand people are working on various alternatives.
Otherwise it's a losing proposition for the homeowner.
Tesla's powerwall at least allows you to do things like set reserve levels to 15% or 30% to make sure you're not cycling your battery too aggressively, but if you don't meet the required 57 full discharges a year they'll disable features like this automatically. In other words you own it, but you don't control it.
Battery tech is still very immature though, and a significant persistent fire risk if damaged, as is the case with electric vehicles.
Besides, I want my battery to last a long time, not necessarily be sacrificed to the grid.
Even the fastest gas plant presumably needs a few seconds to power up - enough time for the network to react. Additionaly, the maximum power and current it can deliver is generally known.
In contrast, the plan linked here basically proposes to build a giant distributed capacitor bank - with ever-growing capacity.
From what I understand, purpose-built large capacitor banks are used to generate very short pulses of enormously large currents - e.g. to power experimental lasers, railguns or similar.
Maybe my imagination runs wild here, but I see no reason a hacker with appropriate access couldn't do something similar - e.g. command all batteries to unload with the largest possible churrent at once and setup switches in such a way the current from all batteries is directed to a particular location.
I'm don't know what you could do with the resulting pulse but probably nothing good.