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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure it would be much more cost-effective to have community storage, rather than individual storage, and it would balance the load a lot if some users used more power during th day than at night.

I think it's called a 'grid'.

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In a manner of speaking, the grid is already the storage mechanism. In summer you sell the excess to the grid; in winter you buy it back. Obviously you pay more to buy than you get for selling but that's the premium for using someone else's infrastructure. You'd spend a load more buying a battery the size of a small house.

Snark aside, there are examples of community-scale energy infrastructure below grid-scale: see "district heating" and "co-gen plants". Sand battery people have been experimenting with neighborhood-scale infrastructure (though industrial heat uses is a better return on that tech right now)

I've also seen flywheels used locally.

It just makes much more sense to have a big battery where the local substation is, than for everyone to install megawatts of battery individually.

Of course then you have the collective action problem, and convincing your neighbors that grid storage is actually a real thing that exists. And that grid storage is not of the wrong political partisanship. The box of what's considered "politically incorrect" is getting fairly large these days:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/10/south-da...

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