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A comment on How should net metering affect your electric bill?. Parent comment

Re:How should net metering affect your electric bill? by danans on Thursday February 03, 2022 @06:26PM (#30200525)
> This typically manifests itself to retail customers the form of free Nest thermostats, time of use programs, and subsidized appliance efficiency upgrades (or rebates).

> If they could redirect this money to small generators like yourself and have the same impact, they would drop their demand management programs in a heartbeat

The catch is that the power from small solar generators isn't as valuable as demand management loads, because solar generators aren't controllable - the grid has to just absorb the power they put out regardless of whether it needs it.

Now, if every solar installation had its own battery system that could provide power back to the grid on demand, that would be an equivalent service. And in fact in many places (Vermont [1], parts of California[2]) there are programs starting or in development to do exactly that: buy energy back from residential batteries.

1. https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/home-energy-...

2. https://ebce.org/resilient-home/

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Re:How should net metering affect your electric bill? by dzhiurgis on Thursday February 03, 2022 @11:01PM (#30202710)
At some point if not already batteries are cheaper than grid upgrades
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Re:How should net metering affect your electric bill? by danans on Friday February 04, 2022 @12:42AM (#30203299)
Having recently installed a battery, I'd say they are definitely not cheaper. There is no way that residential battery storage can match the cost per kWh of utility scale storage.
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Re:How should net metering affect your electric bill? by dzhiurgis on Friday February 04, 2022 @03:28AM (#30204234)
$10k or so per house vs digging up endless amount of streets?
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Re:How should net metering affect your electric bill? by danans on Friday February 04, 2022 @10:55AM (#30208406)
At much less per house you can build massive utility scale storage, like pumped hydro.

However, these are complementary technologies, serving different time and scale of energy storage and duration. Home batteries aren't realistically going to solve storage on the weeks to season timeframe. They function on the order of hours to a couple days, and during local distribution outages.

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Re:How should net metering affect your electric bill? by dzhiurgis on Saturday February 05, 2022 @06:11AM (#30220035)
Batteries normalise the peaks.

Building grid scale storage still means grid itself needs to be updated for the increasing loads and spikes.

And I'm talking here smart batteries - controlled by grid owner. How it's not default (including solar, cars and other high load devices) it's a bit of a puzzler. Sure it's like 5 minutes of inconvenience for the owner, but saves trillions of dollars.

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