I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.
It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property, or are only for the homeowner's benefit. The utility company has the right to use that power however they want at any time including the "right to use all the energy in the battery". The homeowner also has to allow contractors, subcontractors, or third-parties onto their property. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
Homeowners must also agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. They have to agree to the “Customer Privacy” terms, which will only be shown to them "upon installation of the Equipment".
The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which, if they were doing their job in the first place, should be extremely rare occurrences), but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.
The utility also requires homeowners to agree to terms that state the utility will not be liable for any damage to persons or property caused by use of/replacement of/repair of/or the utility's failure to repair the utility's equipment and software. The homeowner also "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
This would be a bad deal even if the utility were paying a monthly fee to homeowners. The fact that they've conned customers into paying the utility for using them, their internet, and assuming all liability/responsibility for the utility company's hardware is insane.
xoa 2 hours ago [-]
>I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.
I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of
Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.
There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.
>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)
This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.
>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*
In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.
autoexec 47 minutes ago [-]
> First, the batteries took the place of a generator,
The generator would have been yours, and only used for your needs. It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
> Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead.
They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to. The good news is that in the event where a cable is cut/down and they lose the ability to siphon power from your battery you will be sure to get the benefit of whatever power it has stored. It's also nice that they compensate you for the power that they draw, but again, all of that energy is already theirs by right.
The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about.
It's honestly not a bad idea conceptually. It seems like it can have real benefits, but the terms are exploitative. At a minimum they should be obligated to prioritize your power needs above others when it comes to energy stored in the battery on your premises, and they should be obligated to compensate you for power taken, as well as for providing them storage, access, security and bandwidth for their equipment, and they should also assume responsibility for any damage/harm their equipment causes to your property and anyone one on your property as long as it wasn't caused by tampering or improper use. Ideally, you'd also be able to opt out of all personal data collection (not related directly to the use/monitoring of their hardware), and any loss/theft/damage would be covered by their insurance (provided their equipment was reasonably secured), otherwise they'd have to pay you enough to get additional insurance coverage of your own.
I'm glad it worked out for you when you had it, but unless the terms were very different from what they are today you were absolutely cheated and being taken advantage of, even if you didn't feel that way.
pessimizer 59 minutes ago [-]
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too.
We should be doing this as a society (or as a state or as a utility company) instead of relying on individual do-gooders to pay for it. 70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free. Thanks for sharing your experience.
xoa 1 minutes ago [-]
>We should be doing this as a society (or as a state or as a utility company) instead of relying on individual do-gooders to pay for it.
Sure, but we aren't yet, at least not remotely to the extent required. And we all individually have benefited from the externalized pollution that fossil fuels have been responsible for, this isn't just some nebulous other thing right? It's not unreasonable imo that yeah, we individually should try to pay for that damage we ourselves "profited" from, even while simultaneously trying to vote and organize towards broader solutions. But feeding money into getting off fossil fuel is both directly personally helpful and broadly helpful.
>70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
I don't agree with you, and it's my money, my buildings and my call to make. I've gotten a plenty solid direct benefit in ROI over the last 8-9 years for the $3k it cost me one time only vs the $15k a couple of PowerWall 2s would have been upfront and then the rate shifting and minimal solar I was in a position for at the time, or alternatively the cost of a new generator and then all the fuel and ongoing maintenance required. The $12k in savings thanks to the utility is money I could put into other investments that have had their own ROI since then. I do think the math now for me and a lot of others is different in 2026 then 2017, there are lots and lots of competitive battery and solar and inverter solutions now at radically reduced prices and that seems to just be accelerating, with sodium based systems and other tech coming. But that wouldn't have offset a real chunk of 9 years of carbon equiv release by me. The batteries got far more usage as part of a system for society then just me, and I still did ok even if it didn't perfectly maximize the individual dollar savings.
>They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
If you BYOB you do get that choice, though obviously if you let them take less they pay less. But it's not money for nothing, just a weighing of risk/benefit.
>That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free.
The battery cost per kWh has fallen enough and I think they've gotten comfortable enough with the landscape shift that I can see that making sense now, not early adopter territory anymore. The utility is also in a position to realize benefits like having a bit more leeway in how they dispatch linemen for repairs, if they know someone is covered for 20 hours and it's currently 15 below zero with whiteout conditions that'll clear in 2 hours maybe it's worth something to be able to not have that be an emergency (or instead to direct emergency efforts to someone else who isn't covered).
>Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm glad it's come up on HN. It's one of the few real rays of hope I find in all this, that despite failure of collective action it's just getting so good that the economics and politics are tilting anyway. Won't be fast enough to avoid a lot of bad effects, but it can always get worse so the faster the better.
MithrilTuxedo 3 hours ago [-]
>It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property
It is as if. The article says it's a lease agreement, and provides this link.
>the homeowner "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
What are you quoting?
wlesieutre 2 hours ago [-]
It's a 10 year lease agreement. You pay them, and when the 10 years is up you have to return the batteries. At no point does the customer own the batteries.
It's like leasing a car, except with a car lease you have the option to pay extra to buy it out at the end and take ownership; with this lease agreement you don't.
autoexec 2 hours ago [-]
This is like leasing a car except that the dealership can show up with other customers to take "your" car for test drives or just to drive it around for any other reason whenever they want to, for however long they want to, and they won't pay you back for any of the gas they use. Basically turning your personal garage into their distributed showroom.
beezle 2 hours ago [-]
IIRC pre-covid when the program was quite new, customer could buy the batteries outright. Later on they added the lease option.
One of the issues with these is the limited storage capacity. While it is nice for short outages, there are sometimes multi-day events in the winter. I think the longest was in the late 90s from an ice storm and was over a week. If you have solar, less of an issue but not everyone does (though solar does have surprisingly good install base in Vermont).
I've not checked to see if GMP limits the install locations but do recall some states/munis trying to limit them to outside the home due to fire risk.
Why aren't they installing larger batteries at substations instead? That seems like the economically optimal middle ground.
adrianN 1 hours ago [-]
If home owners are paying then it might be less efficient for the overall economy but better for the utility company. It is often easier to find a million people willing to spend a thousand dollars than finding one person willing to spend a billion.
Avicebron 1 hours ago [-]
It's more economically optimal to convince wealthy Vermonters to house the batteries by branding it as subsidized resilience than it is to buy and maintain substations?
jeffbee 55 minutes ago [-]
They already have substations, I assume? You can buy grid-scale batteries in a rolling container and just park them.
Avicebron 48 minutes ago [-]
Right, but people are spending for resilience anyway in places like Vermont, it's a way to harvest that money.
2 hours ago [-]
krschultz 1 hours ago [-]
I tried to signup for this program but the building code gets in the way. You need 3' from both edges of the battery to a window or door. I don't have a wall with 8-9' between windows. The alternative is to build a fire proof room in your house which takes up a lot of space. Ultimately it was not worth it even with all the financial incentives. The rules might seem innocuous but they're a dealbreaker. It's far easier to get a propane or diesel generator installed.
loeg 46 minutes ago [-]
Which is kind of wild, because generators powered by combusting fuels are also giant fire hazards (and produce noxious CO and other gases), of course.
whartung 4 hours ago [-]
We have this in CA. I have Tesla batteries and they promote wanting me to enroll my batteries into a larger grid so their capacity can be used during higher load events.
I thought it was a novel idea when I heard about it.
> Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day
Only on peak demand days, of which there are only a handful every year.
I have Enphase batteries enrolled in an equivalent program, so I've tracked how much I make. Definitely not enough to make much of a dent in the payoff time for the batteries. But a nice perk nonetheless.
senectus1 3 hours ago [-]
there is something really wrong with the economics of this.
it shouldnt be celebrated.
medler 3 hours ago [-]
It seems like an unreservedly good thing if people with home batteries can help prevent brownouts and reduce prices for everyone else. Also, I believe the $150/day figure was during a rare heatwave event when prices had surged to 100x their typical value ($5/kWh). It’s like any other investment where you outlay cash upfront and hope to make it back over time, whether via reduced costs for your own electricity usage or selling it back to the grid when doing so is profitable.
imglorp 3 hours ago [-]
Makes sense to me. Peaker plants are typically expensive (even at idle) and polluting.
During peak need, renting some capacity from subscribers already on your grid means you don't need to build another peaker plant.
beering 3 hours ago [-]
What is wrong with this?
AuthAuth 2 hours ago [-]
Its an inefficient use of capital.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
Whose capital?
AuthAuth 2 hours ago [-]
The people buying the batteries and the government's capital. It only benefits the private util companies.
The better option is for the government/utility company to build out the required storage for a fraction of the cost.
thelastgallon 33 minutes ago [-]
People are buying the batteries with their OWN capital, not Govts capital.
You say Govt capital which only benefits private utlities and ALSO say govt/utility should to build out the storage. Not sure what you are trying to say. You sound pretty confused.
eru 46 minutes ago [-]
> The people buying the batteries and the government's capital.
The former should be allowed to make their own decisions. I agree that the latter should probably be kept out of this: government is usually not very good at making these decisions. But alas, in many places they play a huge role in the electricity supply and distribution.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> better option is for the government/utility company to build out the required storage for a fraction of the cost
Ex ante, sure. Right now, the existing batteries are a sunk cost the utility didn’t have to pay capital costs for. The right answer is to do both.
coryrc 1 hours ago [-]
And when the power lines fall down in rural areas, how will people heat and power their homes? I guess they could buy some batteries, but then they'd sit idle most of the time. Maybe they could find some other profitable use and share the capital cost?
senectus1 3 hours ago [-]
holy shit, yeah. you dont see a problem with earning "over $5 per kWh" ?!?!
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
Be more explicit. What is wrong with this? It's not all the time, it's only in times of extreme need.
Variable pricing like this enables all sorts of cost saving technologies that bring down the cost of the grid and generating power for everyone, by spending a lot for a very short time, instead of building tons of extra large assets that sit mostly idle.
If somebody is providing a service that operates on the whole sale market, they deserve to get paid like all the other generators that are helping to keep the grid running in these times of need.
thelastgallon 29 minutes ago [-]
Peaker gas plants make this much money all the time. But you see no problem when its fossil fuel generation. But its a problem when people get paid?
Not only do peaker plants make the most bucks/KWH, but they increase prices for all generation because of how auctions operate.
senectus1 3 hours ago [-]
for single individuals to earn as much as (i assume US$) 150 a day means that the grid is horrendously unbalanced.
hell if I emptied my 30kw into the grid in my state/country at the most expensive time I'd earn AU$21.00
to earn US$150 means either HUGE battery capacity (and transmission capacity) or utterly rediculous power pricing... both mean really lousy power supply and grid design.
I'm all for indipendance but the reality is we live in communities and count on the collective to rise us all up together.
that sort of profit is a clear warning sign of a broken community.
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
It depends a lot on the market, but before there were lots of batteries this was extremely typical in the Australian grid. You probably just weren't exposed to it as a consumer! Massive price fluctuations were the impetus for one of the first large scale grid batteries in Australia, and the batteries worked really well to solve it. It doesn't happen often, and nobody is getting paid $150 every day for their home battery. It's just for the extreme events.
As more and more batteries are deployed the price swings will decrease.
It's not a "broken community" it's just end consumers being able to help out in times of great grid need and getting compensated fairly for it.
Dylan16807 31 minutes ago [-]
It's more efficient for the grid to be very unbalanced every once in a while, rather than building so much it never happens.
And it's not a sign of a broken community. Those batteries aren't making all that much money on a per-year basis. And the earlier batteries into the system are going to make the most money. The more batteries that get built the smaller the profits will be and the better the entire grid will be.
ericd 2 hours ago [-]
California rate payers are being forced to essentially pay for fire insurance for CA residents who live in tinderbox areas, by way of PG&E rates, and burying lines that serve widely dispersed populations. That's the big difference. The vast majority of US residents have much lower utility rates.
thelastgallon 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, only the billionaires have the right to make money. Think of the horror of any person making money by producing/storing energy!
I wonder what the cycling does to battery lifetime?
loeg 1 hours ago [-]
It is actually a pretty great way to address marginal demand spikes without overbuilding generation capacity. With the fringe bonus of local protection from short outages.
BatchJob 1 hours ago [-]
I think there's suppose to be a feel good in here, but it feels like another race to the bottom. Power companies dont invest their profits they take them and then when the grid becomes unreliable put it on the customers with interesting excuses and eco-fashionable handouts to help the pill go down.
snickerbockers 1 hours ago [-]
>The US now has over 40GW of virtual power plant capacity, according to internal analysis by Wood Mackenzie. It's still relatively small compared to the roughly 600GW of natural gas and 200GW of coal, but a total of 160GW of capacity could be unlocked by 2030, according to a 2025 US Department of Energy report – equal to some 20% of the country's expected peak energy demand.
>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.
Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
loeg 1 hours ago [-]
> Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
VPPs displace more expensive generation capacity at the margin. Because your marginal loads are for relatively short durations. It's actually quite smart, especially if you can get end consumers to subsidize it.
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
What do you mean? These numbers provide great guidance so that people can understand the size of the battery discharge, and what they could replace.
Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
snickerbockers 41 minutes ago [-]
Power isn't a particularly helpful metric here, energy is. Power doesn't tell you anything about how long the batteries will last, it only tells you how quickly they can drain. Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.
>Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Hey don't tell me that, tell the BBC. They're the ones who wrote an entire article about "replacing power plants with home batteries".
epistasis 20 minutes ago [-]
I don't think the BBC is confused here at all. Batteries do indeed replace power plants. They are already actively replacing gas peaker plants all over. In California, batteries they are dramatically reducing regular, non-peaker, gas turbine generation, by outcompeting them on the grid.
> Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.
These specific batteries, on the other ends of residential lines, indeed do push power back on the grid in aggregate enough to replace coal power plants. There's nothing special about a point generator on the grid versus the aggregate action of thousands of batteries on the other side of the distribution stations. In fact that's what's so amazing about batteries versus large thermal generators: thermal generators are large because if they get super inefficient when they're not large. Nobody is installing a small coal generator at their home to run daily, and even small diesel generators are hugely inefficient. But batteries are so useful that even accounting for the extra expense of large numbers of custom installs, they reduce grid demand enough to make a ton of financial.
And power is indeed the most important metric when it comes to the grid. It's how everything is run, how individual grid assets are dispatched, because power needs to be balanced at every moment. Somebody could throw an asset on the grid that only dispatched for 15 minutes (or whatever the minimum bid time is), and it would still be described primarily by power. Capacity decisions may be made in kW-month or whatever unit, but you can run a grid on a pure energy market without any capacity market at all, as ERCOT shows.
medler 26 minutes ago [-]
They literally did replace power plants with these batteries though. From the article: “ GMP similarly used to rely on oil, diesel and natural gas peaker plants to meet peak demand. Now the company's virtual power plant has effectively replaced them, says McClure. "We've been slowly able to decommission those as they've become end-of-life," she says.”
Dylan16807 23 minutes ago [-]
I agree with how power is a bad way to measure batteries a lot of the time (though if you assume they last 4 hours you shouldn't be too far off).
But I don't think the residential line limits are too bad. A house that's sending out power takes its load off the grid and can also power multiple other houses without any lines being overloaded. And if an area has a high enough battery:house ratio, the full megawatt capacity of powering those houses but flowing the other way is a ton of power. (If the equipment can handle power flowing both ways.)
murkt 1 hours ago [-]
Batteries compete with peaker power plants, though.
lizknope 3 hours ago [-]
What is average length of outage? If it is a few hours then the battery seems like a good idea. If it is days then the battery will probably run out.
> around 50% of the houses in its programme with home batteries also have solar panels
I'm assuming most of these outages are from snow storms. Do these people have to go up on the roof and clear the solar panels?
krschultz 1 hours ago [-]
In my experience as a VT homeowner we have relatively frequent short outages. It's pretty rural and the weather is brutal. I think the grid doesn't have as much redundancy as denser areas. We had one 3 day outage 2 years ago in the middle of winter which got quite dangerous, but otherwise I haven't had anything more than a few hours.
Also we have propane heat - but I need electricity for the blower and control board. So the electric consumption is pretty minimal, but it is critical.
Synaesthesia 2 hours ago [-]
If you're in a power outage with solar and a battery you are so much better off than without that.
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
Assuming they set up the house to island, which depends a lot on the install. Otherwise live power from a house in an outage is a big risk to those working on solving the outage.
Easily solved, if addressed!
beezle 1 hours ago [-]
Most are hours but there are enough that are a day or more that it is a valid consideration. As to when, honestly I think there are more not snow related. Long stretches of wet (or floods) and high winds not a good mix.
roughly 5 hours ago [-]
I love this. It’s basically an edge cache for power, with an enormous amount of side benefits - smooths out solar power, smooths out the duck curve, and allows the grid to size closer to the average load and absorb the spikes at the edge, instead of cascading into the core.
There was an article earlier about the distribution challenges that come from large workload fluxes, too - tl;dr is the transmission lines get less efficient under higher load, so smoothing out the demand curve to the end user also raises the efficiency of the entire grid.
And as someone points out below - the proliferation of EVs also helps this, because they can act as a “deep” reservoir so the local residential batteries can be much smaller - more buffers than something expected to run the house for more than a couple hours, so that makes the whole setup even cheaper, depending on when and where the EVs are getting charged.
patmorgan23 4 hours ago [-]
Yep, flatten the peak means you can spread the cost of the transmission grid over more electrons, lower the cost per unit of energy.
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
And with the way that grid costs are coming to dominate electricity costs, these sorts of peak shaving technologies will be huge cost savers in the future.
bentt 9 hours ago [-]
I live in Vermont. This is the first I've heard of this. But I like it!
raddan 4 hours ago [-]
I live just over the border in Massachusetts and we have something similar, called ConnectedSolutions. It is essentially the same kind of program except that the benefit is a 0% loan on the battery purchase. I have a 15kW battery that allows me to power the entire house overnight without drawing from the grid. When the power company wants to draw from my battery, they send me a notification through my battery’s app. I can opt out some fixed number of times, too. And, just as when my solar runs net negative, the power company pays me (in bill credits) whenever the virtual power plant draws power.
ragnot 1 hours ago [-]
Just found out about this. Any big draw backs to enrolling in it?
sowbug 7 hours ago [-]
It would be nice to change the headline to "Vermont is replacing power plants with home batteries." Shorter and potentially saves a click.
kmoser 1 hours ago [-]
Except they're not replacing power plants at all, they're adding batteries to the grid to store and distribute power. After all, something has to charge the batteries.
harshaw 1 hours ago [-]
I couldn't read the article because of paywall issues. I have a Tesla powerwall that I pay $50 / month to lease from green mountain power. I have piece of mind for power in a rural area - the power company get peaker benefits. Seems like a great deal. I wish we had this in Massachusetts. Mad river valley area.
Base power is doing something similar in Texas. AFAICT, they take a loss on the equipment, charge the batteries when electricity prices are cheap, then sell power out of the batteries when prices are high and keep the difference. The homeowner enjoys only most likely having backup power.
I mean, the electricity still has to be generated. That still costs money. This whole thing only works as long as there is someone willing to buy at the high prices and off peak demand stays low enough to keep prices cheap. Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.
pastel8739 2 hours ago [-]
> Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.
What do you mean? The opportunity for energy arbitrage will go away if energy prices are constant. Right now they aren’t, and I don’t really see how they would become constant based on the physics of producing and consuming energy.
jmbwell 42 minutes ago [-]
Okay, well, that’s clever for now. The real arbitrage base is pulling is getting in while there’s capital to be raised for it and money to be extracted from the market, before competitors emerge and the incumbents respond and everyone realizes the play all along was to build an enormous battery plant without the expenses of land and compliance and negotiating with producers and carriers. They’re in the buying low phase now.
They’ll sell high when PE buys the company and pulls a Broadcom on all the existing customers, who will abandon the equipment after ten years go back to installing Tri-fuel generators while Centerpoint deals B2B with serious battery plant operators instead of B2C with annoying consumers
Customers running batteries they don’t own to store energy they can’t use for a company that won’t share profits is not the future.
Vermont’s project might be more viable, they’re a little better able to see beyond a spreadsheet up there. California will regulate it into unsustainable price territory. In the meantime finbros in Texas will make a killing having Claude build badass dashboards to show how much they make off bored suburbanites stuck on a grid built and operated as cheaply as possible to take as much money as they can before the useless state government is run out on a rail or finally eats the last bite of its own ass
Since you ask
frunklooper 46 minutes ago [-]
Vermont is stuck in the 19th century
AndrewKemendo 4 hours ago [-]
Vermont continues to be a leader in anarchism and distribution of power (pun intended).
Distributed power storage/generation has been a thing for a century and it’s finally economical enough to be mainstream.
This was the whole pitch of the solarcity/tesla solar tiles + power wall a decade or more ago.
jmyeet 3 hours ago [-]
This is something I've been thinking about a lot.
The way an electricity utility works, you need power plants (or to buy power from someone with power plants), transmission lines and some form of last mile delivery. You have substations and other infrastructure too. That infrastructure has ongoing maintenance costs but also capex to build it in the first place.
So your per kWh price is the sum of the electricity cost, the maintenance cost and the amortized capex plus some profit.
Utilities are heavy regulated but only the electricity cost tends to be highly regulated. Any maintenance or capex costs can be passed on directly to the consumer. Private equity has realized this. Data centers have realized this where they can negotiate a lower electricity rate and the build out for multi-gigawatt transmission and power generation can be passed on to consumers. This has gotten creative enough that people in unrelated states end up paying more because of upgrades required for shared infrastructure for interstate utility compacts.
The obvious endpoint for all this is for users to eventually opt out. Disconnect from the grid and use totally renewable energy plus batteries. Generally in any urban environment you can't avoid the monthly connection cost even if you use no power. The city will declare your house unlivable. I can see this changing in the coming years with soaring prices that basically go to share buybacks and bonuses for private utilities.
But what if the connection to the grid drops significantly shifting maintenance costs to the rest?
I think the future is going to move away from large connected grids towards self-sufficiency and smaller localized grids, ideally municipally owned. But you can't gradually move from a large grid to smaller grids like this because of the problems of who pays for the grid in between.
thelastgallon 9 hours ago [-]
Or they could use EVs. Require cars to have V2X (Vehicle to Grid, Vehicle to Load) feature. EV batteries are humongous.
_carbyau_ 2 hours ago [-]
Nah, people want to wake up in the morning and know they can drive somewhere.
Requiring it is crazy.
kalleboo 25 minutes ago [-]
In a hypothetical future where every single car participated, you probably wouldn't need to dedicate more than a few % capacity to still make an absolutely massive VPP
thelastgallon 32 minutes ago [-]
28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles.
Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!
0cf8612b2e1e 7 hours ago [-]
As a consumer, would you want the extra usage on your battery? Those extra cycles have to cause some additional degradation to the system, but I do not know how much.
nicoburns 4 hours ago [-]
> As a consumer, would you want the extra usage on your battery?
I feel like this is likely going to be a non-issue in practice. Because these batteries are rated to last at least 10 years either way. And by that time, the cost of replacement will be dramatically cheaper.
bluefirebrand 2 hours ago [-]
> Because these batteries are rated to last at least 10 years either way
They are rated to last at least 10 years (under X usage conditions)
They won't last nearly that long under Y usage conditions if Y is substantially larger than X
_aavaa_ 6 hours ago [-]
How much would I get paid?
0cf8612b2e1e 5 hours ago [-]
Net metering rates are pretty poor, so I would guess not much outside of extreme grid instability. Although, you then might want to selfishly hoard the juice for yourself.
eunoia 5 hours ago [-]
It would not be selfish to run your home off the car battery during peak rates and therefore cutting peak demand on the grid. Everyone wins.
jethronethro 8 hours ago [-]
Do any of the EVs sold in the US support Vehicle to Grid?
happyopossum 4 hours ago [-]
Many do - teslas, ford lightnings, Kia ev9, all the GM Ultium stuff (Silverado etc, hummer ev, Cadillacs), and a bunch of others.
tzs 3 hours ago [-]
Isn’t Tesla V2G just for Cybertruck?
danans 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, but last I checked the bidi chargers were proprietary - tied to vehicle manufacturer - which is a huge disincentive. I don't want my home's battery connector locked into a vehicle brand/manufacturer.
WarmWash 4 hours ago [-]
Lightnings do (well before they were discontinued)
But given they are NMC chemistry, you probably wouldn't want to cycle them a lot for the grid (or just your home).
everybodyknows 3 hours ago [-]
You wouldn't have to, to nevertheless provide great benefit to the grid. Look up "TOU billing".
oori 3 hours ago [-]
Many do (assuming bidirectional charger), but it’s only 3.6kW max, in most cases
bethekidyouwant 4 hours ago [-]
The down votes are because you use the word require. They’re never going to require it it would be opt in.
medler 3 hours ago [-]
I think they mean to use EV batteries would require the EV to be designed for V2G capability, which is currently rare
alexnewman 4 hours ago [-]
Note I have a Tesla powerwall at home. They installed it inside before I bought the house. I always wonder what happens when these things catch fire
margalabargala 4 hours ago [-]
> I always wonder what happens when these things catch fire
If you're hoping someone will chime in to tell you they have magic firefighting foam inside them or something, I regret to inform you that what happens if it catches fire is exactly what one might naively expect from large lithium batteries.
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
Yep. I'd never have a large battery like that in my house. Outside, a safe distance away, maybe.
fhdkweig 3 hours ago [-]
Newer LiFePo4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries don't have the fire issues that the previous Lithium Ion generation did. They are a bit more expensive and heavier, but they are superior in every other way (safety, lifespan, max charge cycles).
Synaesthesia 1 hours ago [-]
They're actually cheaper than NMC and are the dominant chemistry.
bradfa 3 hours ago [-]
Unless you plan to physically assault it with weapons, it’s extremely unlikely to catch fire.
medler 3 hours ago [-]
Which version do you have? I believe they switched to LFP for V3, which should pose significantly less fire risk than the NMC chemistry they were using for V2 and before
UltraSane 4 hours ago [-]
I've seen a program funded by a utility that integrated batteries with air conditioners.
jdkee 2 hours ago [-]
Batteries only store power, not produce it. Headline reads as misleading.
epistasis 1 hours ago [-]
The headline says that the batteries are powering the homes, which is absolutely and technically correct use of "powering".
Maybe you saw "generating"? It may interest you to know that batteries output is counted among "generation" by the EIA and nearly all grid documents I know about, and is also technically correct.
Natural gas is merely stored solar energy too, if it the ideas of batteries "generating" anything rubs you the wrong way.
sublinear 2 hours ago [-]
That's a lot of spin. I didn't expect that from the BBC.
If they can claim "extreme weather" is why rural areas are finally getting their shit together, I can claim the decline of BBC is a sign of the times.
4 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 03:43:11 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property, or are only for the homeowner's benefit. The utility company has the right to use that power however they want at any time including the "right to use all the energy in the battery". The homeowner also has to allow contractors, subcontractors, or third-parties onto their property. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
Homeowners must also agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. They have to agree to the “Customer Privacy” terms, which will only be shown to them "upon installation of the Equipment".
The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which, if they were doing their job in the first place, should be extremely rare occurrences), but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.
The utility also requires homeowners to agree to terms that state the utility will not be liable for any damage to persons or property caused by use of/replacement of/repair of/or the utility's failure to repair the utility's equipment and software. The homeowner also "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
This would be a bad deal even if the utility were paying a monthly fee to homeowners. The fact that they've conned customers into paying the utility for using them, their internet, and assuming all liability/responsibility for the utility company's hardware is insane.
I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of
Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.
There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.
>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)
This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.
>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*
In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.
The generator would have been yours, and only used for your needs. It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
> Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead.
They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to. The good news is that in the event where a cable is cut/down and they lose the ability to siphon power from your battery you will be sure to get the benefit of whatever power it has stored. It's also nice that they compensate you for the power that they draw, but again, all of that energy is already theirs by right.
The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about.
It's honestly not a bad idea conceptually. It seems like it can have real benefits, but the terms are exploitative. At a minimum they should be obligated to prioritize your power needs above others when it comes to energy stored in the battery on your premises, and they should be obligated to compensate you for power taken, as well as for providing them storage, access, security and bandwidth for their equipment, and they should also assume responsibility for any damage/harm their equipment causes to your property and anyone one on your property as long as it wasn't caused by tampering or improper use. Ideally, you'd also be able to opt out of all personal data collection (not related directly to the use/monitoring of their hardware), and any loss/theft/damage would be covered by their insurance (provided their equipment was reasonably secured), otherwise they'd have to pay you enough to get additional insurance coverage of your own.
I'm glad it worked out for you when you had it, but unless the terms were very different from what they are today you were absolutely cheated and being taken advantage of, even if you didn't feel that way.
We should be doing this as a society (or as a state or as a utility company) instead of relying on individual do-gooders to pay for it. 70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Sure, but we aren't yet, at least not remotely to the extent required. And we all individually have benefited from the externalized pollution that fossil fuels have been responsible for, this isn't just some nebulous other thing right? It's not unreasonable imo that yeah, we individually should try to pay for that damage we ourselves "profited" from, even while simultaneously trying to vote and organize towards broader solutions. But feeding money into getting off fossil fuel is both directly personally helpful and broadly helpful.
>70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
I don't agree with you, and it's my money, my buildings and my call to make. I've gotten a plenty solid direct benefit in ROI over the last 8-9 years for the $3k it cost me one time only vs the $15k a couple of PowerWall 2s would have been upfront and then the rate shifting and minimal solar I was in a position for at the time, or alternatively the cost of a new generator and then all the fuel and ongoing maintenance required. The $12k in savings thanks to the utility is money I could put into other investments that have had their own ROI since then. I do think the math now for me and a lot of others is different in 2026 then 2017, there are lots and lots of competitive battery and solar and inverter solutions now at radically reduced prices and that seems to just be accelerating, with sodium based systems and other tech coming. But that wouldn't have offset a real chunk of 9 years of carbon equiv release by me. The batteries got far more usage as part of a system for society then just me, and I still did ok even if it didn't perfectly maximize the individual dollar savings.
>They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
If you BYOB you do get that choice, though obviously if you let them take less they pay less. But it's not money for nothing, just a weighing of risk/benefit.
>That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free.
The battery cost per kWh has fallen enough and I think they've gotten comfortable enough with the landscape shift that I can see that making sense now, not early adopter territory anymore. The utility is also in a position to realize benefits like having a bit more leeway in how they dispatch linemen for repairs, if they know someone is covered for 20 hours and it's currently 15 below zero with whiteout conditions that'll clear in 2 hours maybe it's worth something to be able to not have that be an emergency (or instead to direct emergency efforts to someone else who isn't covered).
>Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm glad it's come up on HN. It's one of the few real rays of hope I find in all this, that despite failure of collective action it's just getting so good that the economics and politics are tilting anyway. Won't be fast enough to avoid a lot of bad effects, but it can always get worse so the faster the better.
It is as if. The article says it's a lease agreement, and provides this link.
https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/home-energy-...
>the homeowner "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
What are you quoting?
It's like leasing a car, except with a car lease you have the option to pay extra to buy it out at the end and take ownership; with this lease agreement you don't.
One of the issues with these is the limited storage capacity. While it is nice for short outages, there are sometimes multi-day events in the winter. I think the longest was in the late 90s from an ice storm and was over a week. If you have solar, less of an issue but not everyone does (though solar does have surprisingly good install base in Vermont).
I've not checked to see if GMP limits the install locations but do recall some states/munis trying to limit them to outside the home due to fire risk.
I thought it was a novel idea when I heard about it.
Only on peak demand days, of which there are only a handful every year.
I have Enphase batteries enrolled in an equivalent program, so I've tracked how much I make. Definitely not enough to make much of a dent in the payoff time for the batteries. But a nice perk nonetheless.
it shouldnt be celebrated.
During peak need, renting some capacity from subscribers already on your grid means you don't need to build another peaker plant.
The better option is for the government/utility company to build out the required storage for a fraction of the cost.
You say Govt capital which only benefits private utlities and ALSO say govt/utility should to build out the storage. Not sure what you are trying to say. You sound pretty confused.
The former should be allowed to make their own decisions. I agree that the latter should probably be kept out of this: government is usually not very good at making these decisions. But alas, in many places they play a huge role in the electricity supply and distribution.
Ex ante, sure. Right now, the existing batteries are a sunk cost the utility didn’t have to pay capital costs for. The right answer is to do both.
Variable pricing like this enables all sorts of cost saving technologies that bring down the cost of the grid and generating power for everyone, by spending a lot for a very short time, instead of building tons of extra large assets that sit mostly idle.
If somebody is providing a service that operates on the whole sale market, they deserve to get paid like all the other generators that are helping to keep the grid running in these times of need.
Not only do peaker plants make the most bucks/KWH, but they increase prices for all generation because of how auctions operate.
hell if I emptied my 30kw into the grid in my state/country at the most expensive time I'd earn AU$21.00
to earn US$150 means either HUGE battery capacity (and transmission capacity) or utterly rediculous power pricing... both mean really lousy power supply and grid design. I'm all for indipendance but the reality is we live in communities and count on the collective to rise us all up together.
that sort of profit is a clear warning sign of a broken community.
As more and more batteries are deployed the price swings will decrease.
It's not a "broken community" it's just end consumers being able to help out in times of great grid need and getting compensated fairly for it.
And it's not a sign of a broken community. Those batteries aren't making all that much money on a per-year basis. And the earlier batteries into the system are going to make the most money. The more batteries that get built the smaller the profits will be and the better the entire grid will be.
>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.
Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
VPPs displace more expensive generation capacity at the margin. Because your marginal loads are for relatively short durations. It's actually quite smart, especially if you can get end consumers to subsidize it.
Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
>Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Hey don't tell me that, tell the BBC. They're the ones who wrote an entire article about "replacing power plants with home batteries".
> Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.
These specific batteries, on the other ends of residential lines, indeed do push power back on the grid in aggregate enough to replace coal power plants. There's nothing special about a point generator on the grid versus the aggregate action of thousands of batteries on the other side of the distribution stations. In fact that's what's so amazing about batteries versus large thermal generators: thermal generators are large because if they get super inefficient when they're not large. Nobody is installing a small coal generator at their home to run daily, and even small diesel generators are hugely inefficient. But batteries are so useful that even accounting for the extra expense of large numbers of custom installs, they reduce grid demand enough to make a ton of financial.
And power is indeed the most important metric when it comes to the grid. It's how everything is run, how individual grid assets are dispatched, because power needs to be balanced at every moment. Somebody could throw an asset on the grid that only dispatched for 15 minutes (or whatever the minimum bid time is), and it would still be described primarily by power. Capacity decisions may be made in kW-month or whatever unit, but you can run a grid on a pure energy market without any capacity market at all, as ERCOT shows.
But I don't think the residential line limits are too bad. A house that's sending out power takes its load off the grid and can also power multiple other houses without any lines being overloaded. And if an area has a high enough battery:house ratio, the full megawatt capacity of powering those houses but flowing the other way is a ton of power. (If the equipment can handle power flowing both ways.)
> around 50% of the houses in its programme with home batteries also have solar panels
I'm assuming most of these outages are from snow storms. Do these people have to go up on the roof and clear the solar panels?
Also we have propane heat - but I need electricity for the blower and control board. So the electric consumption is pretty minimal, but it is critical.
Easily solved, if addressed!
There was an article earlier about the distribution challenges that come from large workload fluxes, too - tl;dr is the transmission lines get less efficient under higher load, so smoothing out the demand curve to the end user also raises the efficiency of the entire grid.
And as someone points out below - the proliferation of EVs also helps this, because they can act as a “deep” reservoir so the local residential batteries can be much smaller - more buffers than something expected to run the house for more than a couple hours, so that makes the whole setup even cheaper, depending on when and where the EVs are getting charged.
I mean, the electricity still has to be generated. That still costs money. This whole thing only works as long as there is someone willing to buy at the high prices and off peak demand stays low enough to keep prices cheap. Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.
What do you mean? The opportunity for energy arbitrage will go away if energy prices are constant. Right now they aren’t, and I don’t really see how they would become constant based on the physics of producing and consuming energy.
They’ll sell high when PE buys the company and pulls a Broadcom on all the existing customers, who will abandon the equipment after ten years go back to installing Tri-fuel generators while Centerpoint deals B2B with serious battery plant operators instead of B2C with annoying consumers
Customers running batteries they don’t own to store energy they can’t use for a company that won’t share profits is not the future.
Vermont’s project might be more viable, they’re a little better able to see beyond a spreadsheet up there. California will regulate it into unsustainable price territory. In the meantime finbros in Texas will make a killing having Claude build badass dashboards to show how much they make off bored suburbanites stuck on a grid built and operated as cheaply as possible to take as much money as they can before the useless state government is run out on a rail or finally eats the last bite of its own ass
Since you ask
Distributed power storage/generation has been a thing for a century and it’s finally economical enough to be mainstream.
This was the whole pitch of the solarcity/tesla solar tiles + power wall a decade or more ago.
The way an electricity utility works, you need power plants (or to buy power from someone with power plants), transmission lines and some form of last mile delivery. You have substations and other infrastructure too. That infrastructure has ongoing maintenance costs but also capex to build it in the first place.
So your per kWh price is the sum of the electricity cost, the maintenance cost and the amortized capex plus some profit.
Utilities are heavy regulated but only the electricity cost tends to be highly regulated. Any maintenance or capex costs can be passed on directly to the consumer. Private equity has realized this. Data centers have realized this where they can negotiate a lower electricity rate and the build out for multi-gigawatt transmission and power generation can be passed on to consumers. This has gotten creative enough that people in unrelated states end up paying more because of upgrades required for shared infrastructure for interstate utility compacts.
The obvious endpoint for all this is for users to eventually opt out. Disconnect from the grid and use totally renewable energy plus batteries. Generally in any urban environment you can't avoid the monthly connection cost even if you use no power. The city will declare your house unlivable. I can see this changing in the coming years with soaring prices that basically go to share buybacks and bonuses for private utilities.
But what if the connection to the grid drops significantly shifting maintenance costs to the rest?
I think the future is going to move away from large connected grids towards self-sufficiency and smaller localized grids, ideally municipally owned. But you can't gradually move from a large grid to smaller grids like this because of the problems of who pays for the grid in between.
Requiring it is crazy.
Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!
I feel like this is likely going to be a non-issue in practice. Because these batteries are rated to last at least 10 years either way. And by that time, the cost of replacement will be dramatically cheaper.
They are rated to last at least 10 years (under X usage conditions)
They won't last nearly that long under Y usage conditions if Y is substantially larger than X
But given they are NMC chemistry, you probably wouldn't want to cycle them a lot for the grid (or just your home).
If you're hoping someone will chime in to tell you they have magic firefighting foam inside them or something, I regret to inform you that what happens if it catches fire is exactly what one might naively expect from large lithium batteries.
Maybe you saw "generating"? It may interest you to know that batteries output is counted among "generation" by the EIA and nearly all grid documents I know about, and is also technically correct.
Natural gas is merely stored solar energy too, if it the ideas of batteries "generating" anything rubs you the wrong way.
If they can claim "extreme weather" is why rural areas are finally getting their shit together, I can claim the decline of BBC is a sign of the times.