
Court ruling clears way for energy storage on the grid - nathandaly
https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2020/08/02/court-ruling-clears-way-for-energy-storage-on-the-grid-who-benefits/
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WalterBright
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.

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.

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?

And, of course, there's charging your car when electricity is cheaper.

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.

Pretty darned cheap for a grid battery.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> The cheapest grid "battery" is minute-by-minute pricing of electricity.

This works to the extent that it works. But one of the big applications for a
sufficiently cheap grid battery would be to store generation from solar to be
used at night.

A large fraction of the nighttime load is for heat and light, because night is
when it's cold and dark. It can't really be shifted into the daytime.

And another obvious use for a grid battery is to take advantage of that same
demand pricing by buying power when it's cheap and selling when it's not.

~~~
WalterBright
> It can't really be shifted into the daytime.

The heat can be. Heat can be stored in the thermal mass of the house itself,
and thermal mass can be added in the form of rocks.

With the advent of LED lights, the lighting bill isn't that much anymore.

~~~
nicolaslem
This concept was widely deployed in certain regions with "storage heaters":
very heavy (~40 Kg) electric heaters that would accumulate heat during the
night when electricity is cheap and release it throughout the day.

They felt out of fashion because apparently they were hard to use as you
cannot control how the heat is released. Charge them too much and you will
have to open windows the next day wasting energy, charge them too little and
you will have to turn them on during the day when the electricity is
expensive.

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rudolph9
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.

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the-pigeon
Who benefits? Pretty much everybody except fossil fuel power plant owners.

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.

~~~
hinkley
In growing communities I don't know that this is necessarily a problem for the
incumbents.

What stops them from installing batteries in front of a base power plant
instead of building more peaking plants? Wouldn't that be a cheaper way for
them to keep up with growing demand?

You can also use energy storage for peak shaving on long distance lines (which
might be to _our_ detriment, as they may avoid building needed infrastructure,
resulting in brownouts)

~~~
toomuchtodo
You don’t need batteries in front of base generation (which there isn’t much
left of as coal and nuclear phase out), and batteries allow renewables to
generate more revenue per MWh as that power is now considered dispatchable
(Callable on demand) by the grid operator.

Batteries are direct competitors against large amounts of legacy investments
(coal, natural gas, and nuclear). They can charge from any (localish) grid
power source when power is cheap, discharge when power is more expensive
(arbitrage), and are stupid fast (hundreds of milliseconds) at providing
frequency response services thermal generators have previously provided
(single digit minutes, competitively, to get spinning metal up to a higher
speed).

Peak shaving is definitely a use case (Tesla uses it to shave demand charges
at some Superchargers for example), but that’s a consumer (not utility or
investor owned generator) benefit.

TLDR Old grid->new grid is happening rapidly and incumbents are going to get
left behind.

~~~
hinkley
At the risk of repeating myself:

High Tension power lines are not free. Some run at capacity, so batteries
would help.

Battery power in front of base power means fewer peaking plants, which lowers
the relative value of renewables to the entrenched (while only slightly
improving emissions).

Many will be more comfortable with batteries than windmills. I'm not saying
this because I think they should win, I'm trying to prepare you for the sort
of pushback you should anticipate from policy makers.

------
loktarogar
Tesla installed batteries in South Australia and they've already proven
themselves a few times.

[https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south-
australia-...](https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south-
australia-3-blackouts/)

[https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-
lumb...](https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumbering-
coal-units-after-loy-yang-trips-70003/)

------
codeflo
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.

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.

~~~
NortySpock
Yes, this is sort-of the case in the US, with the quirk that we have 3 major
grids: the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and Texas.

Within that are individual utility companies: some are traditional top-down
utilities that own both generation and poles-and-wires, vs some utilities are
competitively bidding generation (and sometimes bidding consumption). Layer on
top of that many interconnected "power market areas".

[https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-
markets](https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets)

~~~
7thaccount
Let me add some detail to your coverage of the interconnects in relation to
the more granular power markets.

For example, ERCOT (Texas) has a 1:1 relationship with its market, but the
rest are different. The Eastern Interconnect has many power markets made up of
many many utilities. PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE, SPP, & MISO are the energy markets
(called ISOs or RTOs) in the Eastern Interconnect. There is also the
government owned TVA and Southern Company which is kinda like a large
vertically integrated utility.

These markets perform some of the most complex MIP models on the planet in
their optimization. FERC Order #841 addresses the incorporation of storage
into these markets.

------
perfunctory
> ...the fight generators and transmission companies have waged to prevent
> wholesale market access for batteries.

just in case somebody still thinks that climate change is a technical problem.

------
PaulDavisThe1st
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.

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.

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.

~~~
nkingsy
battery prices are far too high to be competitive with grid, even at crazy CA
prices. I put in a 1.2kw carport array over my leaf ev so I can trickle charge
it (720w is the minimum charge rate, needs a special charger to go that low).
That also gives me enough juice to easily power my fridge and a large DIY air
filter in the house when fires and outages come around again.

The panels are so cheap, even if I get only 2 charges per week it will pay
itself off in a couple of years.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
For me it's not about "competitive with grid". I'm already (I hope) at net
zero for annual electrical consumption vs. generation.

The question is whether it's best to shunt the excess generation into my own
storage (batteries) or the grid. Although practically speaking it likely makes
no difference (my excess just flows into my neighbors' homes), conceptually
flowing into a grid with and without its storage seems quite different.

~~~
zbrozek
I'm working towards solar+battery mostly because I feel that my electric
energy costs are unreasonably high and I scored a residential battery for
free. Had I not gotten it for free, I would probably have bought one anyway
just to give PG&E the finger.

~~~
PaulDavisThe1st
Depending on the size of your array, the problem with battery storage is that
to actually capture the full output of a moderately sized array would require
an enormous battery bank. So large that almost nobody would have one large
enough. You'll just be throwing away generated power.

By contrast, being grid-tied gives the peak power output somewhere to
go/something to do.

Now, if you live somewhere where your year round electrical needs are roughly
constant, this is less of an issue: just size the array (and the bank)
appropriately for your needs, there won't be much excess power.

However, here in New Mexico, my wife and I use very little electricity for 6
months a year, a bit more for 3 months and quite a lot for the remaining 3
months because we have heat pumps for heating during the (cold) winter.
Consequently, there's a compromise involved in sizing the array, and in my
case, I picked a size that ought to a little too small in the winter and a lot
too big in the summer, with the goal of net-zero for the year overall. That
means that in the summer, I've got oodles of excess electrical power.
Batteries on site would be impractical to store it.

~~~
zbrozek
I will almost certainly remain grid-tied for quite some years to come, so
excess will go elsewhere. But I want to pull in fairly close to zero. Also,
I'm in the Bay Area and my electricity needs will track sun pretty well.
Heating is currently gas and cooling is electricity.

I plan to end up with Mitsubishi ductless units sooner or later, at which
point there will be more opportunity to balance out energy consumption. And
I'm probably 1-2 years from owning an EV, given how our commuter car is
holding together.

------
tialaramex
In the US how do your solar energy subsidies work?

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.

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.

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?

~~~
kolinko
I’m in a process of building 1MW in Poland, and - at least here - it’s not
true that renewables are not commercially viable.

That is, if I finished building today and began trading on an open market, I
would benefit more in the upcoming years (possibly overall), than through
auctions.

The benefit of auctions is that since they guarantee the proce for the next 15
years, it’s way easier to get financing for them.

Our estimates show that we would have way higher returns on the open market,
but the risks would be much higher as well.

~~~
tialaramex
> it’s not true that renewables are not commercially viable.

Ah, I think this is perhaps a language problem. Given you said in Poland I
suppose that it's plausible English is not your first language. Here's what I
wrote:

> In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the
> subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference.

Now, what I intended here is that "where" is a conditional constraint on the
subsequent explanation. I can see what you thought I meant, and it's a valid
reading of the sentence but isn't what I intended. What I was going for is
roughly equivalent in meaning to:

> In the UK, if some particular type of green energy isn't commercially viable
> on its own the subsidy for that type of green energy is implemented as
> Contracts for Difference.

Thus, CfDs are no longer available for some proven plant types, it makes
commercial sense to build these anyway, so no need to subsidise them. But for
others subsidy is still very much necessary. Tidal projects are an example,
you can make power from tidal forces, on the coast and Britain has lots of
coast because it's an island - but right now all projects have a huge up-front
capital investment that can't be justified by low electricity prices so a
large subsidy is necessary if they are to be developed other than as small
research projects.

You're correct that risk reduction means it can make sense to offer (and bid
for) CfDs even when the strike price will be below expected market prices. And
it's anticipated that a future UK government "Pot 1" auction for onshore wind
will work out that way, there's no way new onshore wind needs £40+ per MWh but
that's what you'd get on the open market today, however the risk reduction is
valuable at a lower price.

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haltingproblem
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.

Honestly, if it helps consumers why would states be against it? What are we
missing here?

~~~
M2Ys4U
>I get why the legacy plant owners are fighting it but why are the state
regulators fighting it?

Corruption. Namely, Regulatory Capture.[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture)

