A heat wave will last until the end of this week in the San Francisco Bay Area. Temperatures 100F (38C) or so all week. Today is the fourth day out of the last five days with a Virtual Power Plant event. Tesla has created the software so that the utility PGE (Pacific Gas Electric) can tap a few thousand houses with solar power and Power wall batteries.
Ten Virtual Power Plant events with each about two to four hours in length will total to about 30 hours. Participant electricity providers get $2 per kilowatt hour or about $20 per hour. This will total to about $600 in 23 days.
Temperatures will then drop to 80s F. If PGE still needs help with temperatures in the 80s then VPP could total $3000 this year with operations covering less than half of the hot season. A hot summer next year could see an average of $6000 worth of VPP to each household in the program. If it is mainly 90F+ days then the VPP would pay out about half those amounts. PGE is way behind on building and keeping power supplied. It is possible that VPP participants could see $6000 per year from VPP every year to 2030 and beyond. They can also get $500 per year from net metering and $3000 per year electric bill savings.
If this makes $9000 per year would see a payback period of less than four years for the solar and power walls.
If the Solar Panels and Power Wall batteries last 25 years then even at an average of $2500 per year in VPP, net metering and electric bill savings this would be a $150,000 in value over 25 years.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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I’m old enough to remember the public service commercials on TV in the 80s that went something like this: “Please run your appliances early in the morning or late at night, blah blah blah, so we don’t have to build new and expensive power plants”
So here we are, siphoning power off of customer’s battery back systems to prop up the grid. Instead of fighting solar, the brainiacs at the utilities could have come up with the idea of leasing existing customer’s rooftops for solar. An enormous connected grid of hundreds of thousands or millions of PV systems, depending upon the size of the city. Likewise, they could have supported storage at every PV location. With minimum effort on their part, they’d have an enormous power making potential at their finger tips. Opportunity without long term vision lost.
I remember that! But it really hasn’t changed. We still get messages about using less power from 4pm to 9 pm, which just also happens to be peak pricing. In my area, the charge goes from 15 cents to 47 cents. You’d be nuts to run anything that you could offset to a different time of the day, unless you were rich and didn’t give a damn. Really, damn, that 3x the price.
It’s great if you can get $2 per kWh for 25 years and your battery does not lose capacity over the 25 years. And net-metering lasts for 25 years or more.
New batteries just don’t have that issue. People need to stop pushing that fear. There’s been a definitive move to iron phosphate batteries for stationary storage, because why not. The weight isn’t an issue. They’re also damn cheaper. And if there is an issue decades down, people are going to swapping them out like water heaters. Just another household appliance for a 21st house.