Native American tribe insulates itself from CA blackouts with microgrid utility | Hacker News Reader

Native American tribe insulates itself from CA blackouts with microgrid utility

washingtonpost.com

88 pointsvo2maxer22 comments

When they built it the cost of the battery was the most expensive, followed by the labor, followed by the panels (unless they got ripped off, which happens).

Even with the higher import taxes, the panels themselves are much cheaper than they were 4 years ago. With Lithium battery systems pricing dropping as fast as it is, we can probably expect Li batteries to hit $160 per KWh soon.

All this and a hot market for microgrids could also affect the labor market - or indeed companies that want to offer this to neighborhoods for sub $1MM with 100K residents may soon take off.

We can imagine a future without large companies that operate high voltage transmission lines.

Economies of scale is still a thing. I’d rather a large solar farm handle it’s ecological consequences than spreading the (small but noticeable) damage around everywhere.

Agreed. But if I can built a 5kWh battery at home for $800, that's almost a full day of backup power at normal use for everything. That feels valuable.

However transmission loses are also a thing, and transmission lines don't maintain themselves (as everybody in California is acutely aware now). There's a point where you are remote enough that a grid connection doesn't make sense, and cheap solar has made that category a lot bigger.

Really looking forward to this future as there is several advantages following this approach:

1. Decentralized, therefor more difficult to attack or destroy.

2. Increase in autonomy, which in my opinion is always good (I'll be glad to stop paying those parasites more money just because they decide to increase the prices though they have to pay less for buying power somewhere else).

3. More knowledge about physics will spread - more knowledge is always good in my opinion.

It's so cool to see small to medium scale or "community" scale installations like this becoming a reality!

Interesting that more grocery stores or other "essential" sources of retail aren't starting to use solar / energy storage to stay online and be less grid reliant (especially stores or facilities that require services like refridgeration or climate control - alas pharmacies)?

Walmart has co-generation facilities on the roof but I don’t think it is designed to operate as a micro grid. Refrigeration takes a lot of power. They probably have a generator too.

I know of a couple of hotels that have added backup power. It's not cheap. We just got backup power (diesel) for our server room along with power conditioning because the power is not good. It was easier to go with diesel rather than wind/solar and battery both from an expertise and availability. Opportunity is not evenly distributed.

https://outline.com/VhCJ57

Sweet, thanks!

Given how vulnerable existing power grids are as a "national security" asset I would have thought micro grids would have become a fair bit more widespread more quickly.

The potentially long bow I draw is that it demonstrates how opposed the status quo is to distributed small scale energy despite the benefits to national security and energy security (a buzzword Australian politicians have been happy to use the past few years), which are normally pretty high priorities (lip service at least) for the powers that be.

The problem is that there is no real advantage unless you have enough capacity that you can disconnect for a reasonable length of time (> 1 hour or so). There are very few places set up to be semi-independent like that.

Consequently, a micro-grid is a capital expenditure with no corresponding savings to pay it off so nobody will champion it.

Sort of. Battery storage for micro grids can pay off if there’s a market for frequency response services and energy arbitrage (see: Tesla’s Hornsdale Power Reserve in Australia). If your frequency response market is sane, your energy prices are already low (most of the US), and outages cost you little to nothing, entirely true, no one is paying for micro grids.

Now, if you get rooftop solar (which makes fiscal sense in most states), and you get local storage, you get a 26% federal tax credit towards the battery storage if it’s configured to only charge off of solar (although I believe you can precharge off the utility in emergencies with no impact to your tax benefit, Tesla calls this Storm Watch mode). So depending on the market, you skip the utility and go straight to the end user (as Tesla does with solar and PowerWalls). Again, this is entirely dependent on the local energy market conditions.

I propose that you’ll see micro grids take off as battery prices comes down from EV manufacturing scaling up.

I think you have it pretty much backward. Attaining a power-generation level necessary to be off the regular grid is not that hard. And becoming independent of PG&E would have serious benefits to a city of about any size at this point given the serious economic cost of unreliable power.

The problem is the cost, logistics and legalities of an alternative grid. Every place that is on PG&E power currently would have to gain control of the PG&E power poles and spend the money needed to modernize them. That is a huge cost.

Don’t forget to add this - if you’re operating as a utility you will be regulated as a utility.

I.e., PUCs and other regulators owned by the incumbent utilities will seek to end your existence.

That’s the gist but the surprising thing is that the incumbents and the PUC’s have created a sort of toxic scheme with rate base accounting that is now showing itself in the form of aging and poorly maintained infrastructure.

> Every place that is on PG&E power currently would have to gain control of the PG&E power poles and spend the money needed to modernize them. That is a huge cost.

And, after dealing with all that infrastructure, add a substation capable of disconnecting and reconnecting a town or city to the primary PG&E grid since they need that for consistent power anyway.

Or, they could just stay connected to the PG&E grid like now and spend nothing.

And, as a side benefit, you don't have to deal with the local town politics to try to get this through. Really. I have stories and stories of people who simply tried to bring broadband to their little towns and the fiasco that it always became--partially because of the telcos but often the locals were worse.

Lots of things that make sense don’t happen because there’s no way to centralize the revenue.

It might be cheaper and more efficient to have 100 contractors split a billion dollar market. But one person who controls that market can afford to spend more on lobbying. They also will be unified in their needs and desires. Therefore they will win the culture war.

I do think this can change with computers, federation software can allow those 100 contractors to compete effectively with the one billionaire and offer the savings back to the end consumer. But those platforms are still early in their development.

I wonder if there will soon be a market for battery backed refrigerators. Build a fridge with a 2 kwh battery system at $160 per kwh and it adds only about $400 to the cost. If it uses a DC motor for the compressor then you don't even need an inverter.

IT is time incompetent PgnE monopoly is broken and we have more private players in the fray. At least all bay area cities should have a plan to protect themselves from pg&e's incompetence.

All that does is put the incompetence into smaller business units, spreads it out and magnifies the incompetence, and actually makes it harder to regulate. Happened in the UK.

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