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There’s a popular belief that the looming presence of batteries in people’s homes will lead to the widespread defection of those customers from the power grid.
In this view, living the dream means grid-independence where you harvest your own energy, one-finger salute the power companies and, when grid power fails for others in the street, your battery keeps the party going at your house.
While cutting the power cord sounds good in theory, in practice consumers gain many more advantages from staying connected to the grid.
Likewise, rather than fear or obstruct the connection of batteries, energy utilities need to see distributed energy storage as a powerful resource that can add to the stability, sustainability and profitability of the power grid.
The short term motivation for consumers staying connected to the grid is the hip pocket.
Staying connected allows them to use the grid to dynamically resolve any shortfall between the energy they generate on their roof and the energy they need in their home.
The obvious scenario is to smoothly handle the times when your battery runs out of energy capacity overnight. Staying on the grid lets you keep things running until the sun comes up again. If you find that this is happening a lot, then you can consider buying more batteries later.
Another scenario is the handling of periods when the instantaneous energy needs of your house exceed the peak energy output rate that the batteries can supply. If your home is standalone, the house power will fail in these situations. However, when you’re still connected, the grid acts as an enormous on-demand, pay-as-you-go backup battery to meet any of these transient demand peaks that your battery can’t supply.
Without the grid, your only options are to buy an awful lot more batteries just to handle a week of rainy days or to maintain a backup generator on site. Otherwise, you may well suffer the somewhat ironic experience of sitting in the dark, surrounded by a suburb full of people whose lights are still on!
While in the medium term, you may progressively add more batteries to your home as you become familiar with your own energy usage patterns, those “peak power” demand periods still present a very valid reason for staying connected to the grid as an affordable on-demand backup source of energy.
The long term reasons for staying connected are much more interesting because they involve battery-equipped customers becoming part of the solution to the problem of supplying “peak power” back to the grid.
In Australia and globally, alert grid operators recognise that the proliferation of batteries presents them with some enormous technical advantages, which may include paying to use their customers’ batteries to help the grid work better.
Currently, the grid is a tree-like structure where energy emerges from distant generators, then flows through the trunk and along the branches to the ‘leaves’ of each house.
That hierarchical system can run into many problems. While the obvious one is a major power outage, the most common issue in grids is with maintaining grid stability in terms of frequency and voltage, especially at the extreme endpoints of the energy delivery path to customers.
The proliferation of residential solar panel systems (without batteries) actually makes management of grid stability much harder for grid operators.
When residential batteries are added, everything changes. These batteries can then be called upon in aggregate as a distributed ‘virtual generator’, embedded deeply throughout the grid’s customer base. In the future, then, a grid operator can call upon this virtual generator to dynamically and precisely balance frequency and voltage, and to do it exactly where and when that balancing is needed most.
Grid stabilisation of this sort is a service that customers can expect to be paid to provide back to the grid operator when needed.
Overall, then, widespread and integrated battery storage provides three clear benefits for the grid operator:
In a nutshell, batteries attached to Internet-enabled control electronics in homes will create the key technology that enables the truly “smart” grid.
Grid operators need not only depend on the batteries installed by their customers: They can install their own large-scale batteries at power substations and country towns to at first supplement and ultimately replace expensive fossil-fuel powered energy generation.
The end game, if grid operators are smart enough to play it, is that the energy grid winds up much more like the Internet in that it becomes a trading platform on which energy is produced and consumed at lots of places instead of being a top-down network.
We could live in a world where you could build a community micro-grid without ever getting off the macro-grid, allowing useful energy commerce between you and your neighbours, and also between neighbouring micro-grids, while also delivering a more resilient energy future to all consumers.
The bottom line is that this much greater interconnectivity will drive down the price of electricity because consumers will be able to ‘roll their own’ while batteries will shave the demand peaks that currently bedevil our electricity generators.
Once that happens, then we will see consumers choosing electricity over fossil sources such as gas and petrol to meet their energy needs because it is both cheaper and more convenient.
Grid customers are already voting with their wallets and installing battery systems to complement their solar panel installations. Meantime, grid operators need not fear the battery revolution – they can, and they should, welcome it with open arms.
Simon Hackett is chairman of Brisbane-based battery storage manufacturer Redflow. This column is extracted from a keynote presentation Simon Hackett was due to give on February 15, at the Solar Supercharge conference in Brisbane.
This post was published on February 15, 2016 1:06 pm
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Simon, We have been waiting for your battery to come on to the market for some time. I believe it is close to launch now. As an installer I'm quite excited about it.
A point I would like to make about battery sizing, is that anyone can work out how much home storage they need, by recording their meter readings on daily and quarter daily basis, with or with out certain loads running. If they find out their loads are large after sundown and they can't then afford as much storage as they would like, they can always buy more later.
If they use a lot more energy during the day than at night, they can install more PV rather than more batteries.
Bravo--many good points. As a supporter of and shareholder in Redflow, I'm pleased to see the company's chairman pursuing an argument which will enhance the company's relationship with the incumbent retailers.
But as a consumer I have to note that that this approach overlooks one tactic which works in almost every case: install as much production capacity as you can possibly fit on your roof. Solar PV is already dirt cheap. Batteries, as much as we love them, are still relatively expensive.
An efficient way to minimise the total storage you need is to maximise production. At our house in SEQ, for example, we have never in four years had any single 24-hour period in which we generated less than we used. This includes many June days on which it seemed to rain all day long.
That means we've never needed more than a single night's worth of storage--just a few kWh.
People go funny when they think about storage, immediately imagining the worst case. It's like thinking about a Tesla and then wondering how you'd manage the drive to Alice Springs. You've never needed to go there before, but you wonder about it anyway.
What about waste? Some people worry about "wasting" excess electricity production. I suggest that's silly. It's like having full rainwater tanks and then complaining that the additional rain running off your roof is getting wasted.
The emissions embodied in PV panels are still quite significant: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/04/how-sustainable-is-pv-solar-power.html. The waste involved in producing excessive solar panels (see also http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2014/11/141111-solar-panel-manufacturing-sustainability-ranking/) is a lot more problematic for the environment than the rain spilling off your roof.
Mark, interesting that after nuclear royal commission comes out and dumps on nuclear on costs, you and other boosters are out there on forums digging up that old furphy about solar life cycle.
That link goes to an obscure and out of date research, which suggests that solar manufactured in china must be dirty, but nuclear manufactured in china, must be clean! Wow.
As it turns out, most solar manufactures are at least partly powered by .. you'll never guess .... solar!!! Who'd have thought.
The most comprehensive study on life cycle emissions was done by the US Department of Energy, which proved, comprehensively, that your claims are nonsense. http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/s...
Suggest you guys go back to basic and find another furphy. Have you tried star signs?
haha. great call.
Wow indeed Giles, you could sneer for Australia, but there's little or no substance in what you're saying. 'solar manufactured in china must be dirty, but nuclear manufactured in china, must be clean' is an almost unrecognisable distortion of what that article is saying. Your NREL link doesn't work. Moreover, my claim is simply that there is waste (both emissions and otherwise) involved in solar panel production, and that it's a significant issue. The link was merely to illustrate that fact, not necessarily that I endorsed every word in it. However, it's less than a year old, and many of the references not much older, hardly 'out of date'. I could have employed half a dozen other sources to illustrate. I never said anything about life cycle, though I note that if energy is being spilled as advocated originally by Stan above, the payback time will rise accordingly.
As for most solar manufacturers being 'at least partly' powered by solar, got any numbers on how big a part? Is that 24/7?
Stan, I definitely agree that storage is currently not economical, and solar may come down a bit more, but not as much or as fast as storage will in the future.
Thinking logically, I agree that having more solar PV than i need most of the year is less expensive than the extra storage that I would need for 'right-sizing' for net-zero, based on current costs. Yes, I would lose about 200 to 300 kWh a month that I could store, but I can see that it would reduce my storage system size by 10 to 15 kWh. There is still the corner case where about 5% of the time I would need to radically conserve, but waiting a few days to do the laundry is something that I can do.
This generally sounds pretty sensible. However one concern is overselling the benefits of "useful energy commerce between you and your neighbours", given that both demand and especially supply are likely to be quite strongly correlated between neighbours. Insolation conditions will be near identical, so when you've got plenty of energy to sell, so will your neighbour; conversely when you're running short, your neighbour is likely to be in the same boat.
The other point is High Density city areas, where units and apartments abound wont have the Solar space for panels and wont be able to re-engineer their building for batteries.
In affect they wont have a choice but to stay connected to the power grid.
Therefore, it will always be a economic decision, much the same as putting Solar panels on your roof today is!
While Hackett is correct at this point in time, when storage gets to $100/kWh in a few years the situation will change. Storage at $0.10/kWh will make the connection worthless for a number of people, including me.