Comment by jtrn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtrn | Hacker News Reader

Terrible article.

First, the 110 MW is wrong. It’s 53 MW of home batteries. Not that its the most important detail in this situation.

What is important in this context: Vermont already depends heavily on imported electricity and hydropower. The EIA says 73% of Vermont’s electricity is imported. Can we please acknowledge the stupidity of thinking you can replace generation with storage?

I could not find confirmation of how much battery capacity is actually available, but some simple math, based on an average load of 621 MW for Vermont, results in home batteries currently covering 14 minutes per day of power, meaning about 1% of daily needs.

I also found the real source of electricity used in Vermont: Hydro-Québec’s 28 large reservoirs contain about 176 million MWh of stored energy. This means the entirety of the stored energy at home is literally one million times less than what actual power plants can provide.

So, yeah, don’t turn off those power plants just yet, thinking you have “replaced them with home battery storage.”

And this is from someone who loves the idea of home battery storage and actually has my own small setup. Something being aspirational does not mean one should just spew misleading stuff like this.

> Can we please acknowledge the stupidity of thinking you can replace generation with storage?

Electricity consumption is not constant, just like generation isn't constant with some sources. You can certainly replace a number of peaker plants, e.g. gas turbines, with storage and reduce costs by a lot.

Yeah, peak shaving is a real thing, and it's actually a no-brainer, I think. I just got a bit annoyed and carried away because the article did not make clear how large a challenge it is to actually disconnect from the grid and stop relying on power plants.

The reason is that I have been dabbling with off-grid gear for fun. Nothing major, just a solar power station and a couple of solar panels. And here in Norway, you really get respect for how hard it is to get energy during the winter when there's no wind and no sun. Even if I had 100 kWh of battery storage and 20 kW of rated solar panel capacity, I would be dead in the water, at least for the entirety of December and January. The only viable solution for going full off-grid in Norway is a backup generator. You could get by with wind, maybe if you live in a predictable windy area and you have a large battery bank.

Since it's so cold and darker during the winter, I have always dreamed of someone making a really good Stirling engine for generating electricity. But there are way too few people living as far north as us, so there's really no demand. You don't have to go further south than Germany, and solar is fully viable on its own, even during the winter. And the entirety of the United States, with the exception of Alaska, is completely self-sustainable per household with just solar. But off-gridding one's own home is suffering the March of Nines problem, whereby it's exponentially more expensive to be grid-independent 99.99% of the time, and so forth.

I'm rambling now. Suffice it to say that I stand by the fact that the article is misleading, though the goal of off-gridding and getting as much solar and in-house storage as possible is something I wholeheartedly agree with. I don't like it when people don't communicate how large a challenge it is.

Wispr Flow is a dangerous tool It seems..... it makes it way too easy to write a lot of text.

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