Court ruling clears way for energy storage on the grid
forbes.com
forbes.com
Your home is a "battery" as you can run the temperature of your hot water heater higher when electricity is cheaper, and let it "coast" when electricity is more expensive. You still have hot water on demand.
The same goes for the refrigerator, heating system and the cooling system. This can be made even more effective by increasing the thermal mass of the house, for example, with a pile of rocks. Pretty cheap for a battery, don't you think?
And, of course, there's charging your car when electricity is cheaper.
At last, we actually have a use for the Internet-of-things - an internet device on your hotwater heater to query the current price of electricity.
Pretty darned cheap for a grid battery.
Both need to hold their temperature as long as possible and get up(or down) to temperate at some balance point between speed and efficiency. I want my provider to even it out and set a reasonable price between the variable extremes so I don't have to think about it.
Might.
And probably trivially more, especially when you factor in a software update bricking your fridge and the manufacturer has conveniently disappeared / gone bankrupt / changed hands so many times no one knows who supports it.
You’re assuming an ideal world, which can’t possibly happen.
You're not thinking capitalistically enough.
Call it what it is: exploitation.
Greet and fraud are encouraged, if not idealised.
That’s not capitalism fault though.
Every other form of economic policy has the same problem, so it can’t be those systems in and of themselves that are the sole issue.
The fact that IoT is still a running joke and just a tolerated parasite to lower the sticker price at best is proof that the data is garbage because none of them are making much money off of it. Until they have an actual monetiziation plan for the data it is plain magical thinking.
"People mostly increase demand on their hot water heater in the early morning, evening, and night for showers dishwashers, and laundry on a semi-weekly, weekly, or bi-weekly basis."
"Well I could have told you that without spending six to seven figures on unnecessary expenses on a product line!"
Of course, the actual implementations can (and in many cases have) been a lot worse than that.
This was more of a method of managing peak load, however, still seems applicable.
So whether it's a tank of 80°C water or a tank of 65°C water make no difference to the 38°C water coming out of the thermostatic mixer in your shower.
I don't have the regulations to hand but it's enough to bring it to a high temperature once every few days for some period of time (to kill the bacteria that cause legionnaires disease).
The advantages are a lower rate and a guaranteed 8 hours straight on-time per day.
What do you mean? Fridges generally run at the highest reasonable temperature. Are you proposing adding more thermal mass to them?
That's a very narrow range. You might be able to pre-cool the freezer, and use some of its cold to keep the fridge where it needs to be.
But I suspect you would pay for that in lower efficiency, because the colder you need to go the less efficient the cooling is.
Electricity prices would have to be dramatically lower to make it worth taking your freezer extremely low to store cold.
I suppose you could make a freezer with a special water storage compartment (filled at home to reduce weight), then use that to store cold. But with the extra complexity, and lower efficiency.... just how much lower electrical prices are we talking?
“Receive SMS alerts whenever prices drop below zero, or use our API to program your smart devices.”
The way stuff like this works, is that with a fairly simple set of end-point power controland some pretty simple monitoring, and then some central smart software, you can effect pretty dramatic improvements.
For example, the smart controller allows the fridge temperature to drift (just a little), similarly with central heating, and geyser, and the net effect is that power draw is temporarily reduced during peak times.
Multiply this over your whole year and you have some cost savings.
Multiply it over a whole neighbourhood, and the utility can dramatically reduce their cost of maintenace, and their cost of deployed capital.
(Because of reduced power/thermal swings in their equipment, and reduced peak carrying capacity of the network)
This works to the extent that it works. But one of the big applications for a sufficiently cheap grid battery would be to store generation from solar to be used at night.
A large fraction of the nighttime load is for heat and light, because night is when it's cold and dark. It can't really be shifted into the daytime.
And another obvious use for a grid battery is to take advantage of that same demand pricing by buying power when it's cheap and selling when it's not.
The heat can be. Heat can be stored in the thermal mass of the house itself, and thermal mass can be added in the form of rocks.
With the advent of LED lights, the lighting bill isn't that much anymore.
They felt out of fashion because apparently they were hard to use as you cannot control how the heat is released. Charge them too much and you will have to open windows the next day wasting energy, charge them too little and you will have to turn them on during the day when the electricity is expensive.
I'm quoting from a memory of an article I read about 6 months ago, sorry.
googling for "specific heat high energy storage material" seems to indicate that rock-type materials are used where air heat is required.
So I'm not doubting you, just wondering why an intermediary heat storage medium is preferred in practice. Maybe for some of the same reasons as the sauna.
Far as I get the actual price of electricity varies a lot, so there potentially a lot of arbitrage to exploit. There's a dozen ways to store energy with varying amount of round trip efficiency, capital costs, and operating costs. Some set of technologies will win out in that space.
I suspect one reason these technologies aren't well developed is because historically the cheapest is baseload power produced by coal and nuke plants. Economically the price is actually subsidized. So utilities did not want knuckleheads buying their cheap power at night and selling it during the day.
Have one large industrial factory like an aluminium smelter or steel plant that is redesigned in a way that it can shift its electricity use a little bit? That's probably having an effect larger than a lot of personal users.
I guess there's a political issue here, as industry often pays very little for electricity to begin with. I know at lesat in Germany most large industries are excluded from a lot of fees that normal customers pay. Providing "cheap and reliable electricity" to industry is often almost a political mantra. I guess it would make sense to say at some point: "Dear industry, you can have cheap electricity, you can have reliable electricity, but you can't have both. If you want to have it cheap you have to support the grid by providing flexibility."
It isn't some mustache twirling plot to make the consumer pay more while some abstract industrial fat cat pays more or anything - real economics are at play.
The prevailing obvious alternative to competitive pricing that tries to roll in other expenses would be direct generation by industrial scales running their own fossil fuel turbines or direct thermal alternatives. Which result in worse performance at scale from everyone mid-sized and up rolling their own separate systems and worse pollution control as instead of having four great smokestacks to put scrubbers on and regulate there are now four thousand small ones. Economies of scale have been here for centuries.
Aluminum smelters and steel plants while they may use a lot of power also cannot be just neglected and cut off mid-cycle without wasting a very large batch slag in a way that is very expensive to clean up.
Don't things like water heaters and fridge compressors run many times a day. Is shifting all that to night hours even feasible simply because the appliance is smart?
Even still, wouldn't randomly fuzzed automation times be easier to implement than an fully connected system?
I suspect in this area they would get more flies with honey by letting them use power cheaper when they want to get rid of it. A "free/cheap power" signal essentially that tells any device which wants it to disregard efficiency - any utility is better than nothing.
Power banking batteries are the trivially obvious way to exploit and monetize it while fortunately stabilizing the grid as a side effect but well the infastructure costs are expensive.
Fuzzing would be easier to implement assuming the fuzz period is meaningful on a time scale without causing other problems like "power cycle it if it doesn't come on in twenty five seconds" because the end user/technician rightfully thinks it isn't working and when it rolls 5 second delay next time it gets a faster end boot.
Somebody correct me if im wrong
They create much more reliable power grids and eliminate the need for many natural gas power plants that are expensive to maintain and only run during peak power demand.
What stops them from installing batteries in front of a base power plant instead of building more peaking plants? Wouldn't that be a cheaper way for them to keep up with growing demand?
You can also use energy storage for peak shaving on long distance lines (which might be to our detriment, as they may avoid building needed infrastructure, resulting in brownouts)
Batteries are direct competitors against large amounts of legacy investments (coal, natural gas, and nuclear). They can charge from any (localish) grid power source when power is cheap, discharge when power is more expensive (arbitrage), and are stupid fast (hundreds of milliseconds) at providing frequency response services thermal generators have previously provided (single digit minutes, competitively, to get spinning metal up to a higher speed).
Peak shaving is definitely a use case (Tesla uses it to shave demand charges at some Superchargers for example), but that’s a consumer (not utility or investor owned generator) benefit.
TLDR Old grid->new grid is happening rapidly and incumbents are going to get left behind.
High Tension power lines are not free. Some run at capacity, so batteries would help.
Battery power in front of base power means fewer peaking plants, which lowers the relative value of renewables to the entrenched (while only slightly improving emissions).
Many will be more comfortable with batteries than windmills. I'm not saying this because I think they should win, I'm trying to prepare you for the sort of pushback you should anticipate from policy makers.
Curtailing a coal plant (turning it off due to overcapacity) isn't fast, as the boiling water only slowly cools down (vs a natural gas turbine is typically faster to turn off as it's working on expanding combusted gas through a turbine, rather than hot steam through a turbine).
Recent gas plants are called CCGT, and use both combusted gas and hot steam. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant
As Wiki explains it: combined cycle has a large gas turbine (operating by the Brayton cycle). The turbine's hot exhaust powers a steam power plant (operating by the Rankine cycle). This is a combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) plant. These achieve a best-of-class real (see below) thermal efficiency of around 64% in base-load operation.
Modern natural gas plants are very efficient. (But probably not as efficient as PV solar storing energy in grid scale batteries).
With combined cycle gas turbines you get some ramp up time, but about 1/2 of power outpost is available instantly. Also, as a general rule all energy required to heat up an engine to working temperatures is wasted when you turn them off.
Gas still has a place for seasonal demand far from the equator but even there you can dilute the gas with hydrogen to lower its carbon footprint.
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south-australia-...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumb...
What batteries allow you to do is to perform time arbitrage in this market. As with many other forms of arbitrage, this should lower average prices, though some specific current uses could suffer. For example, if this is deployed at scale, electricity might no longer be all that much cheaper at night.
Within that are individual utility companies: some are traditional top-down utilities that own both generation and poles-and-wires, vs some utilities are competitively bidding generation (and sometimes bidding consumption). Layer on top of that many interconnected "power market areas".
For example, ERCOT (Texas) has a 1:1 relationship with its market, but the rest are different. The Eastern Interconnect has many power markets made up of many many utilities. PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE, SPP, & MISO are the energy markets (called ISOs or RTOs) in the Eastern Interconnect. There is also the government owned TVA and Southern Company which is kinda like a large vertically integrated utility.
These markets perform some of the most complex MIP models on the planet in their optimization. FERC Order #841 addresses the incorporation of storage into these markets.
just in case somebody still thinks that climate change is a technical problem.
But this just highlights the bigger more general problem: it makes little sense for us to have our own battery system, and bigger systems need to power storage if solar is to be able to provide overnight supplies.
I keep wringing my hands over whether I should have aimed for full off-grid status rather than grid-tied, but if/as the grid gains viably scaled storage, grid-tied becomes more and more clear as the right choice.
The panels are so cheap, even if I get only 2 charges per week it will pay itself off in a couple of years.
The question is whether it's best to shunt the excess generation into my own storage (batteries) or the grid. Although practically speaking it likely makes no difference (my excess just flows into my neighbors' homes), conceptually flowing into a grid with and without its storage seems quite different.
By contrast, being grid-tied gives the peak power output somewhere to go/something to do.
Now, if you live somewhere where your year round electrical needs are roughly constant, this is less of an issue: just size the array (and the bank) appropriately for your needs, there won't be much excess power.
However, here in New Mexico, my wife and I use very little electricity for 6 months a year, a bit more for 3 months and quite a lot for the remaining 3 months because we have heat pumps for heating during the (cold) winter. Consequently, there's a compromise involved in sizing the array, and in my case, I picked a size that ought to a little too small in the winter and a lot too big in the summer, with the goal of net-zero for the year overall. That means that in the summer, I've got oodles of excess electrical power. Batteries on site would be impractical to store it.
I plan to end up with Mitsubishi ductless units sooner or later, at which point there will be more opportunity to balance out energy consumption. And I'm probably 1-2 years from owning an EV, given how our commuter car is holding together.
Maybe if they started making Vanadium redox batteries at scale. I actually tried to price one out once, but they don't seem available to consumers.
In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference. What this means is that the government ensures you get paid a specific fee for your electricity (the "strike price" decided by auction when the project subsidy was agreed) say £58 per MWh - regardless. If you actually sell electricity for £12 per MWh during a glut the government pays £46 to make up the difference, but if you sell electricity when prices are £95 per MWh during a shortage, the government gets £37 back from that.
These CfDs are auctioned, thus providing a signal about whether subsidy is needed. If bids approach the actual market price of electricity then there's no need to have any further rounds of subsidy for this class of power - apparently financial backers are happy to build such generators at the price the market will already pay.
This fits nicely with the fact that all the obvious green options are capital dominated. A traditional fossil fuel power plant consumes fuel to make power, which means below some particular price it will shut off to avoid spending more on fuel than it earns from selling electricity. But this is never true for a wind farm, or solar farm, and it's only barely in principle possible for nuclear (Nuclear fuel is expensive, but a little goes a long way). So in fact you will always sell all the power from these sources, and the only question is how much for?
That is, if I finished building today and began trading on an open market, I would benefit more in the upcoming years (possibly overall), than through auctions.
The benefit of auctions is that since they guarantee the proce for the next 15 years, it’s way easier to get financing for them.
Our estimates show that we would have way higher returns on the open market, but the risks would be much higher as well.
Ah, I think this is perhaps a language problem. Given you said in Poland I suppose that it's plausible English is not your first language. Here's what I wrote:
> In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference.
Now, what I intended here is that "where" is a conditional constraint on the subsequent explanation. I can see what you thought I meant, and it's a valid reading of the sentence but isn't what I intended. What I was going for is roughly equivalent in meaning to:
> In the UK, if some particular type of green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy for that type of green energy is implemented as Contracts for Difference.
Thus, CfDs are no longer available for some proven plant types, it makes commercial sense to build these anyway, so no need to subsidise them. But for others subsidy is still very much necessary. Tidal projects are an example, you can make power from tidal forces, on the coast and Britain has lots of coast because it's an island - but right now all projects have a huge up-front capital investment that can't be justified by low electricity prices so a large subsidy is necessary if they are to be developed other than as small research projects.
You're correct that risk reduction means it can make sense to offer (and bid for) CfDs even when the strike price will be below expected market prices. And it's anticipated that a future UK government "Pot 1" auction for onshore wind will work out that way, there's no way new onshore wind needs £40+ per MWh but that's what you'd get on the open market today, however the risk reduction is valuable at a lower price.
Honestly, if it helps consumers why would states be against it? What are we missing here?
Corruption. Namely, Regulatory Capture.[0]