Small Vermont utility quietly builds fleet of 4k Tesla Powerwalls

electrek.co

16 points·guerby··5 comments

This is an electric utility that will avoid a death spiral of distributed solar -> no incentive to tie in -> go off-grid -> selling less power to fewer customers paying to maintain the lines. Other utilities could take a note for their own long-term planning.

They’re also a Certified B Corp. They are the antithesis of investor owned utilities such as FPL, Duke, etc. The Patagonia of electric utilities if you will. You can survive as a decent business partner with your customers.

GMP web site : https://greenmountainpower.com

Offers : https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/

I wish all utilities were this customer friendly!

So in 2020, they had deployed $20 million of Powerwalls and saved $4 million that year? How can the utility make so much money with them?

Saves on gas peaker plant runtimes (and potentially capacity payments, which generators can receive for being on standby). Instead of firing up an inefficient once through gas turbine (really just a jet engine bolted to the ground), you call on the distributed batteries in aggregate to discharge for a short duration (and, ideally, they charged when power was cheap and low carbon).

Refer to first chart “Levelized Cost of Energy Comparison-Unsubsidized Analysis”, “gas peaking” cost: https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-...

Note the quoted gas peaking cost ($151-$196 per MWh) is assuming a fossil gas cost of $3.45/MMBTU. Current spot prices are double that (Henry Hub).

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/rngwhhdm.htm

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