This seems to be the most important bit, but Ars skip over it:
Or, a GMP customer can buy a Powerwall outright for $6,500 and share access with GMP, receiving a $31.76 monthly credit, which a GMP press release says "represents the value of leveraging the battery to help lower peak energy costs."
So this utility (which is generally progressive compared with their peers) is acknowledging that people having energy storage in their home is a benefit to the utility, and are even prepared to put a price on that.
There's a parallel battle going on with rooftop solar, with some utilities paying money for the value they recieve from this which is above the consumer cost of electricity in many cases, and other utilities trying to shut down users by imposing fees to cover the costs they claim they are incurring.
More likely they just want to be seen as hip and serving their customers as a single unit isn't going to going to let you run your house fully during an outage and buying multiple units to support a power user typical wattage need and who else besides those types are buying into this?
It might be good for time shifting expensive electrical rates but where in America is that going to happen?
I don't think they see value in home storage of power, first off the amount stored is way way WAY too minuscule if you look at it from a grid perspective. If you wanted efficient, safe, and reliable, battery storage the utility or an independent would be better off setting up a dedicated facility for it. Even if just a series of boxes at the front of a subdivision/apartment complex the manageability goes up a lot.
tl;dr utility company just riding the cool wave as it really doesn't benefit their consumers. far better options than relying on small storage spread across private homes
It happens all over the place. The problem with electricity is that the marginal cost of adding capacity to the grid is very expensive, and you only hit peak capacity a few days a year.
For a decade or more New York has paid commercial and industrial customers something like $50M to shut down capacity on demand in exchange for lower electric rates.
Doing that delays or avoids $500M investments in power plants. Time shifting and solar build on this idea.
If you live in the boonies where power interruption is routine, partial power preservation means your fridge, well pump and heat continue to work. You don't need to worry about frozen pipes in the winter when your on vacation or lost groceries after a thunderstorm in the summer.
>More likely they just want to be seen as hip and serving their customers as a single unit isn't going to going to let you run your house fully during an outage and buying multiple units to support a power user typical wattage need and who else besides those types are buying into this?
Holy run-on, Batman!
Anyway, it's almost a 100% certainty that a utility company won't throw massive amounts of cash into a capital project just to "be seen as hip"...particularly when they're operating in a state that doesn't have a de-regulated consumer energy market (such as Vermont, in this case).
That's the beauty of this. The utility has no capital expenditure - the people paying for the battery are doing that for them. The utility pays the rebate out of their operating costs, and there's likely a clause in the agreement that the rebate amount is subject to change.
> It might be good for time shifting expensive electrical rates but where in America is that going to happen?
This happens every day, all across America, it just doesn't get made visible to consumers. That's why the utility is asking to be allowed to interact with this battery, it's just a subtle variation on the smart grid demand management stuff that's been going on for the last decade or so, that allows utilities to avoid paying peak rates for electricity generation.
(This is also why solar is worth so much in places where the peak load for air-con roughly matches the solar profile)
>I don't think they see value in home storage of power, first off the amount stored is way way WAY too minuscule if you look at it from a grid perspective.
A 7kWh battery can hold quite a few hours worth of household usage in state like Vermont where people don't use much air conditioning.
The value to the utility is due to peak shaving, the cost of the marginal energy at peak loads is much more than the average wholesale price.
> More likely they just want to be seen as hip and serving their customers as a single unit isn't going to going to let you run your house fully during an outage and buying multiple units to support a power user typical wattage need and who else besides those types are buying into this?
Tesla's site says "Each Powerwall has a 7 kWh energy storage capacity, sufficient to power most homes during the evening using electricity generated by solar panels during the day."
As long as you're not turning on every light in the house, I'd imagine it could handle a couple hours of outage, particularly in Vermont where the need for A/C is limited. Might not want to run an electric stove, but it'd certainly power a few lights, phone chargers, and a gas furnace.
As long as those lights are LEDs, you could turn them all on. As you said, you're only powering light loads like lights, chargers, and the ignition and blower on a gas furnace.
I completely agree. I've been reading about smart grids a lot lately, and one of the missing pieces to a 100% renewable energy supply is storage. It makes a lot of sense to distribute storage across the grid alongside renewable generation from wind and solar.
I believe the article author confuses the pricing.
As presented I'm guessing the price quoted by GMP includes the inverter, while the price given by Tesla does not.
There is lot of potential out there for retrofitting used Car battery to wall mounts. That is the approach, I would be more interested. Has Tesla reused any of its roadster batteries that have gone stale in wall mounts? Does Tesla as a company has a plan for having old roadster batteries along with Model S etc. to convert into home batteries in the future ?
80% of the power-wall business is expected to be industrial installations, not home installations. Big installations like that are a much better home for "tired" batteries - a homeowner cares about their 7kWh, a business with a 500 kWh install might not mind if 1/3 of it was used batteries with 1/2 max capacity.
And yes, Tesla's been talking about that for more than a decade.
Recently I heard that BMW (I think) has a project to use old car batteries for energy storage... but the problem is they basically don't have any used LiIon batteries. This recycling approach will only get interesting in 5-10 years.
Or, a GMP customer can buy a Powerwall outright for $6,500 and share access with GMP, receiving a $31.76 monthly credit, which a GMP press release says "represents the value of leveraging the battery to help lower peak energy costs."
So this utility (which is generally progressive compared with their peers) is acknowledging that people having energy storage in their home is a benefit to the utility, and are even prepared to put a price on that.
There's a parallel battle going on with rooftop solar, with some utilities paying money for the value they recieve from this which is above the consumer cost of electricity in many cases, and other utilities trying to shut down users by imposing fees to cover the costs they claim they are incurring.