The cheapest grid "battery" is minute-by-minute pricing of electricity. Much of a home's energy use can be time-shifted if there was a point to time-shift - and variable pricing provides that point.<p>Your home is a "battery" as you can run the temperature of your hot water heater higher when electricity is cheaper, and let it "coast" when electricity is more expensive. You still have hot water on demand.<p>The same goes for the refrigerator, heating system and the cooling system. This can be made even more effective by increasing the thermal mass of the house, for example, with a pile of rocks. Pretty cheap for a battery, don't you think?<p>And, of course, there's charging your car when electricity is cheaper.<p>At last, we actually have a use for the Internet-of-things - an internet device on your hotwater heater to query the current price of electricity.<p>Pretty darned cheap for a grid battery.
One important aspect of this is battery capacity can be safely placed at the grid edge. Power infringement is built to handle the capacity of the peek days but statically these peeks only occur once in a blue-moon. By adding battery capacity at the edge of the grid significantly less long distance transmission infrastructure is is needed and the grid can be balanced in a much more targeted way.
Who benefits? Pretty much everybody except fossil fuel power plant owners.<p>They create much more reliable power grids and eliminate the need for many natural gas power plants that are expensive to maintain and only run during peak power demand.
Tesla installed batteries in South Australia and they've already proven themselves a few times.<p><a href="https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south-australia-3-blackouts/" rel="nofollow">https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south-australia-...</a><p><a href="https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumbering-coal-units-after-loy-yang-trips-70003/" rel="nofollow">https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumb...</a>
In Europe, and I can only assume that it’s similar to the US, the energy market is actually running a surprisingly complicated auction system. For example, since power generation and consumption have to be balanced at all times, power generation capability that can ramp up and down quickly is more valuable than one with the same nominal power that can only be controlled slowly. As far as I understand, all of this is priced in, with separate auctions for different timescales.<p>What batteries allow you to do is to perform time arbitrage in this market. As with many other forms of arbitrage, this should lower average prices, though some specific current uses could suffer. For example, if this is deployed at scale, electricity might no longer be all that much cheaper at night.
> ...the fight generators and transmission companies have waged to prevent wholesale market access for batteries.<p>just in case somebody still thinks that climate change is a technical problem.
Lovely. Just got my own 6.6kW ground mount grid-tied array installed. During the summer here in NM, this produces roughly 4x more electricity than we need. Currently, it's just dumping into the (local) grid, and probably powering a few neighbor's homes, which is excellent.<p>But this just highlights the bigger more general problem: it makes little sense for us to have our own battery system, and bigger systems need to power storage if solar is to be able to provide overnight supplies.<p>I keep wringing my hands over whether I should have aimed for full off-grid status rather than grid-tied, but if/as the grid gains viably scaled storage, grid-tied becomes more and more clear as the right choice.
In the US how do your solar energy subsidies work?<p>In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference. What this means is that the government ensures you get paid a specific fee for your electricity (the "strike price" decided by auction when the project subsidy was agreed) say £58 per MWh - regardless. If you actually sell electricity for £12 per MWh during a glut the government pays £46 to make up the difference, but if you sell electricity when prices are £95 per MWh during a shortage, the government gets £37 back from that.<p>These CfDs are auctioned, thus providing a signal about whether subsidy is needed. If bids approach the actual market price of electricity then there's no need to have any further rounds of subsidy for this class of power - apparently financial backers are happy to build such generators at the price the market will already pay.<p>This fits nicely with the fact that all the obvious green options are capital dominated. A traditional fossil fuel power plant consumes fuel to make power, which means below some particular price it will shut off to avoid spending more on fuel than it earns from selling electricity. But this is never true for a wind farm, or solar farm, and it's only barely in principle possible for nuclear (Nuclear fuel is expensive, but a little goes a long way). So in fact you will always sell all the power from these sources, and the only question is how much for?
I get why the legacy plant owners are fighting it but why are the state regulators fighting it? Especially Texas where free competition is the norm ;) Ok, that was sprinkled with a pinch of snark.<p>Honestly, if it helps consumers why would states be against it? What are we missing here?