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Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

If you get one of these batteries with the main goal being backup power for your own home in case the grid goes down, why would you ever join such a program? Presumably, if you tie your battery to the grid, and there's some sort of issue with main backbone generation, the grid would pull from your battery for what it thinks is a temporary issue, after which all power would be gone, and now your backup has been drained.

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.

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Batteries last longer when you don't use their full range, so if the grid can tap the first half it can get more recharge cycles than it owned a smaller battery, second you benifit if the grid goes down and some charge happens to be in the upper half. Making this a win / win.

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.

That's a pretty good point.

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.

It sounds like these companies are providing frequency modulation, and smoothing our the renewable power signals with the batteries.

So the user still enjoys - and pays for - the storage component while the utility enjoys and pays for the frequency reg.

One thought that comes to mind is that household power outages are usually a result of a downed power-line, blown transformer, or similar. Your connection to the grid is lost, but the grid still has plenty of power.

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.

California has a major issue with Solar (duck curve). I think the goal would be to incentivize additional storage, so when the sun goes down and they suddenly need 8 GW, they can lean on the batteries as gas is ramping up to replace the lost power.

You get money for it?

Why do people join Uber or Airbnb?

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