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Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

But the number of power walls is not fixed, and going from 125MW to 12,500MW is only going to happen there are proper incentives from the grid.

And as it is, utilities in the CAISO are generally too fossilized and change averse to view behind the meter aggregation as something that they can benefit from, and they will likely instead fight it. Smarter utilities would see the opportunity and approach regulators with rules changes that profit everybody. Instead, we will need legislators to impost such schemes on regulators and utilities, as there is zero innovation among leadership of utilities, and regulators have zero capability for this too.

(Perhaps I exaggerate, SMUD is tiny but they may have the vision for at least part of this. Vermont's Green Mountain Power has the leadership that we need in California, though.)

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Regulated market participants went from zero to 3000MW/12000MWh of capacity in only 2 years. That's 100x faster than powerwall installations. I don't see how you can conclude from these facts that CAISO or the CPUC are stuck in the mud.

Central installations are perfect for the current incentives: they use the same amount of T&D, for which utilities can always charge their profit margin, as long as they can convince regulators that the expenditure is justified.

Behind the meter storage is a fundamentally different beast, because it has the potential to drastically reduce T&D costs, which are the vast majority of bills (at least mine under PG&E).

Christopher Clack has some great economic modeling of the grid at a very fine level, showing that deploying a bunch of storage and solar at the grid edge right now will greatly reduce costs and enable far more utility scale installs in the future, because the local storage and solar reduces the need for T&D peaks.

This sort of cost optimization is not incentivized but anyone in the current setup, and is impossible to achieve without direct regulation to change incentives for utilities.

I don't disagree with any particulars of your analysis except one omission: powerwalls compete with electric cars for relatively scarce high-tech batteries. It is globally optimal for the time being for those batteries to all be used to electrify transportation, while utility power can be enhanced with large, fixed installations using whatever kind of battery they can get. Lead-acid or anything else, it doesn't really matter. But nobody is selling turn-key residential power packs using anything but lithium-ion batteries.

I thought a lot of these were recycled from vehicles when their energy density doesn’t meet the needs of a vehicle anymore but make sense in a house since the house doesn’t move?

Note this same argument is used against EVs. Saying the batteries should be used for hybrids instead.

In both cases, the fundamental mistake is to think of these as costs, when they are investments with rapid paybacks and so the obvious answer (and the reality) is massive expansion of battery manufacturing capacity.

The hybrid thing is true though. With the same number of batteries you can cut carbon emissions from cars by either 50% with hybrids or 2% with electrics. It makes perfect sense as the thing to do now with the capacity we actually have.

No it doesn't.

The thing to do now, is increase our battery capacity.

Not all parts of the energy grid are as “clean” as a gas cars’ ICE unfortunately. You’re better off driving an ICE in those regions than charging an EV. Globally we’re better off creating a sustainable carbon-free grid in regions with poor grid generation first.

In California, where this applies, the grid is very clean, so yes the dirties/most polluting part of the system is probably the cars.

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