
The development of solar + storage - jseliger
http://www.vox.com/2016/2/5/10919082/solar-storage-economics
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prostoalex
Individual solar storage seems like a neat idea, but limited to single-family
houses. Major piece of feedback SolarCity received after the first wave of
Tesla Powerwall installations was how customers hated giving up space in their
garage [http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Lesson-
Learned-F...](http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Lesson-Learned-From-
SolarCitys-First-Home-Energy-Storage-Installs)

So with SolarCity at least, the focus seems to be on community storage, where
the grid of replaceable batteries is shared by neighbors on the same cul-de-
sac/block/street/community/town. Long-term this is also insurance against net
metering going away (which utilities will probably lobby through successfully
at some point). Via community storage neighbors can start selling to
neighbors.

However, someone still needs to maintain the neighborhood storage system,
manage billing for produced/consumed kWh, run the actual wires to/fro storage,
at which point we've re-invented the utility company, just at much smaller
scale.

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Eridrus
I'm not sure what the subsidies story looks like for rooftop solar vs grid
solar, so I'm not sure if that is distorting the distribution atm.

In some places the cost of maintaining a distribution network may be higher
than maintaining a distributed installation/maintenance network (eg Hawaii
seems about right), but I don't see that being the case in urban areas.

So I feel like it's more likely that (well run) utilities will pick up
solar+storage when it becomes cost competitive, and prices should fall,
causing the "savings" obtained from rooftop solar to disappear.

Particularly, if storage tech does fall as this article predicts, I don't see
why it wouldn't just replace peaker plants directly.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> Particularly, if storage tech does fall as this article predicts, I don't
> see why it wouldn't just replace peaker plants directly.

This is the first target market of stationary utility scale storage (MW
class), as current peakers are usually inefficient natural gas combustion
facilities that only run ~100 hours/year (versus an efficient, more expensive
combined cycle generator).

