Puerto Rico is using residents' home batteries to back up its grid | Hacker News Reader

Puerto Rico is using residents' home batteries to back up its grid

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27 pointsthelastgallon18 comments

South Africa could learn so much from this. But won't.

Ha, came in here just to find this sort of comment.

For international readers: In ZA we have this thing backwards, and during an electricity crisis nearing 20 years soon. Everyone who can afford it (middle class and up) is installing backup inverters & batteries, and solar if they can afford that extra cost. However feeding back into the grid is a net-negative for citizens, as the power utility charges a fee to do so and pays less than the cost of solar output to these producers. Even Cape Town's payback scheme which came in last year as a "great solution" is still at best a break-even for some.

One of the consequences is that many renewable energy producing houses don't feed back in and are also not consumers of grid power. Over time this may leave the main revenue stream of the state power utility to be only that of poor & non-paying municipalities.

Our only refuge from the madness is coming to HN and seeing others actually do this thing right, and wishing for things to be better.

Interesting. I’m in Australia with a modest home battery and my electricity billing is “wholesale” price so shifts every 15 minutes. When there’s grid instability my pay for feeding in can be $30 a kWh! It’s therefore in my interest to be grid connected and ready to export at all times.

Sounds grand. Here we get told that the grid might not handle everyone feeding solar in (BS) and that rich people using aircon is the root cause instead of decades of mismanagement and continuing to use coal far too long.

My solar panels sit idle for most of the day. By 09h30 in the summer my batteries are fully charged, and it's only running my water heater (geyser). I estimate I have about 15kWh of excess that I should be able to export on a daily basis. But I can't, because "reasons".

My father, with a much bigger system and an old school disk-style power meter is exporting close to 30kWh a day "illegally" once he's done charging his batteries and all that.

And now they want to bring in additional fees and charges for selling to the grid, and they want to buy back at ridiculously discounted rates (1-10% of the buy-cost), which immediately makes it a non-starter for most. So even though 50-60% of all installed systems (my estimate) are ready and capable to export, nobody does, because "reasons".

> My father, with a much bigger system and an old school disk-style power meter is exporting close to 30kWh a day "illegally" once he's done charging his batteries and all that.

It's all well and good to save a few cents on electricity, but the real cost is the liability. Fry a lineman and your father may be looking at a multimillion dollar settlement.

All compliant grid tied inverters disconnect from the grid when power is lost. This is a legal requirement in almost all jurisdictions.

Do you have any recommendations for further reading about this problem? Piqued my curiosity.

The wikipedia page is a good ongoing overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_energy_crisis

As for the comment on renewables leaving Eskom without paying customers: https://mybroadband.co.za/news/energy/521167-people-dumping-... (it's more of an opinion piece, but given how much non-payment there is by many low income municipalities, I see this as a potential reality)

I am definitely predicting the people-dumping-eskom scenario. I will totally not be surprised if this happens.

Based on my limited experience and a sample size <5 I can attest to the dramatic quality of life improvement it's made to our household, and it's getting cheaper by the month to buy and install. More and more businesses and new developments are going up with rooftop solar from the start. If you are in the market for a house today, I'm pretty sure that rooftop solar will be one of those things on the "really-nice-to-have" list of things that include a pool, double garage and a built-in braai (bbq). One of these days it's going to move over to the "essential-must-have" list.

10 years from now Eskom is going to excitedly announce "we fixed loadshedding" only for the whole taxpayer base to say "so what"

I agree with you, but I see things going a bit slower so long as most households are renting. Cities also face the challenge that the solar will need to be done by apartment building corporates as a whole.

There is the idea of "renter friendly solar" - either rented solar done in collaboration with the landlord, or varying degrees of portable solution i.e. not connecting to mains to power the entire house but just to a battery that you power a handful of things off of.

Thanks!

That seemed easy. What was required to make the batteries dispatch power in this way? I have rooftop solar and batteries in the UK and I would definitely engage in a similar scheme like this except I wonder how much work the power companies would have to do to make it work.

https://www.energy.gov/lpo/virtual-power-plants

https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/virtual-power-plant/pue...

You need to buy a battery from a vendor who is orchestrating a virtual power plant program, and live in an eligible geography.

Chances are your system is already capable of doing this. If you have a hybrid or grid-tied system that is.

All that's really required is a suitable power meter that links up with a central control authority to orchestrate the whole thing. That's where the complexity lies.

Technically it's easy. The complexity is all with laws and commercial interests.

There are hundreds of thousands of residential batteries in the UK already, and ~0 of them currently can be called on for demand frequency response. That's because 'demand response' is not something you can typically be credited for on your electricity bill. The closest you get is you might have a half-hourly varying pricing scheme encouraging you to discharge your battery when prices are low. The only UK supplier to do that so far (octopus) still uses day-ahead prices though - so you aren't reacting to market conditions, but instead predicted market conditions 24 hours ahead.

I think the fix for the uk is for the regulator to step in and switch half hourly pricing for second by second pricing. Get rid of 'frequency services' (unnecessary with second by second pricing). Then make most/all users of the grid pay those second by second prices (no more 'fixed X per kwh' contracts).

All electricity contracts should be pay-in-advance, and meters should have an option to cap spend per hour/day.

Nobody wants to spend their time micromanaging their electricity usage to such a point. Such a scheme to all users will never pass. Lack of day-ahead means it's impossible to plan anything.

You can still plan based on day-ahead prices. And just take the risk on the difference between day ahead and spot pricing if you like. And if you don't want to take that risk, you can buy contracts for difference between the two from someone else willing to take on the risk. And if you don't want the hassle, you can sign up with an electricity provider willing to do all of the above and not even tell you about the complexity of such stuff.

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