Court ruling clears way for energy storage on the grid

https://www.forbes.com/sites/edhirs/2020/08/02/court-ruling-clears-way-for-energy-storage-on-the-grid-who-benefits/

by nathandaly • 6 years ago

89 86 6 years ago

the-pigeon• 6 years ago

Who benefits? Pretty much everybody except fossil fuel power plant owners.

They create much more reliable power grids and eliminate the need for many natural gas power plants that are expensive to maintain and only run during peak power demand.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

In growing communities I don't know that this is necessarily a problem for the incumbents.

What stops them from installing batteries in front of a base power plant instead of building more peaking plants? Wouldn't that be a cheaper way for them to keep up with growing demand?

You can also use energy storage for peak shaving on long distance lines (which might be to our detriment, as they may avoid building needed infrastructure, resulting in brownouts)

toomuchtodo2• 6 years ago

You don’t need batteries in front of base generation (which there isn’t much left of as coal and nuclear phase out), and batteries allow renewables to generate more revenue per MWh as that power is now considered dispatchable (Callable on demand) by the grid operator.

Batteries are direct competitors against large amounts of legacy investments (coal, natural gas, and nuclear). They can charge from any (localish) grid power source when power is cheap, discharge when power is more expensive (arbitrage), and are stupid fast (hundreds of milliseconds) at providing frequency response services thermal generators have previously provided (single digit minutes, competitively, to get spinning metal up to a higher speed).

Peak shaving is definitely a use case (Tesla uses it to shave demand charges at some Superchargers for example), but that’s a consumer (not utility or investor owned generator) benefit.

TLDR Old grid->new grid is happening rapidly and incumbents are going to get left behind.

NortySpock2• 6 years ago

Right, I like the "battery in front of a coal plant" option too. However, renewables (especially solar and wind) have the nice quirk that they require no fuel and thus no fuel cost. So solar for example is charging a battery in the middle of the day when the sun is high and solar dominates the grid anyway (solar being over capacity at noon, rates are cheap at that hour because solar is just pouring power onto the grid at zero marginal cost). Coal at that time would be just burning fuel to charge a battery, only slightly better than keeping the plant running below-cost for the sake of keeping it on through the rate dip to keep the lights on for the 5pm load shift to the suburbs (you know, back in pre-COVID days when we had a commute)

Curtailing a coal plant (turning it off due to overcapacity) isn't fast, as the boiling water only slowly cools down (vs a natural gas turbine is typically faster to turn off as it's working on expanding combusted gas through a turbine, rather than hot steam through a turbine).

codeflo• 6 years ago

In Europe, and I can only assume that it’s similar to the US, the energy market is actually running a surprisingly complicated auction system. For example, since power generation and consumption have to be balanced at all times, power generation capability that can ramp up and down quickly is more valuable than one with the same nominal power that can only be controlled slowly. As far as I understand, all of this is priced in, with separate auctions for different timescales.

What batteries allow you to do is to perform time arbitrage in this market. As with many other forms of arbitrage, this should lower average prices, though some specific current uses could suffer. For example, if this is deployed at scale, electricity might no longer be all that much cheaper at night.

NortySpock2• 6 years ago

Yes, this is sort-of the case in the US, with the quirk that we have 3 major grids: the Eastern Interconnect, the Western Interconnect, and Texas.

Within that are individual utility companies: some are traditional top-down utilities that own both generation and poles-and-wires, vs some utilities are competitively bidding generation (and sometimes bidding consumption). Layer on top of that many interconnected "power market areas".

https://www.epa.gov/greenpower/us-electricity-grid-markets

7thaccount• 6 years ago

Let me add some detail to your coverage of the interconnects in relation to the more granular power markets.

For example, ERCOT (Texas) has a 1:1 relationship with its market, but the rest are different. The Eastern Interconnect has many power markets made up of many many utilities. PJM, NYISO, ISO-NE, SPP, & MISO are the energy markets (called ISOs or RTOs) in the Eastern Interconnect. There is also the government owned TVA and Southern Company which is kinda like a large vertically integrated utility.

These markets perform some of the most complex MIP models on the planet in their optimization. FERC Order #841 addresses the incorporation of storage into these markets.

loktarogar• 6 years ago

Tesla installed batteries in South Australia and they've already proven themselves a few times.

https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-south-australia-...

https://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumb...

rudolph9• 6 years ago

One important aspect of this is battery capacity can be safely placed at the grid edge. Power infringement is built to handle the capacity of the peek days but statically these peeks only occur once in a blue-moon. By adding battery capacity at the edge of the grid significantly less long distance transmission infrastructure is is needed and the grid can be balanced in a much more targeted way.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 6 years ago

Lovely. Just got my own 6.6kW ground mount grid-tied array installed. During the summer here in NM, this produces roughly 4x more electricity than we need. Currently, it's just dumping into the (local) grid, and probably powering a few neighbor's homes, which is excellent.

But this just highlights the bigger more general problem: it makes little sense for us to have our own battery system, and bigger systems need to power storage if solar is to be able to provide overnight supplies.

I keep wringing my hands over whether I should have aimed for full off-grid status rather than grid-tied, but if/as the grid gains viably scaled storage, grid-tied becomes more and more clear as the right choice.

nkingsy• 6 years ago

battery prices are far too high to be competitive with grid, even at crazy CA prices. I put in a 1.2kw carport array over my leaf ev so I can trickle charge it (720w is the minimum charge rate, needs a special charger to go that low). That also gives me enough juice to easily power my fridge and a large DIY air filter in the house when fires and outages come around again.

The panels are so cheap, even if I get only 2 charges per week it will pay itself off in a couple of years.

PaulDavisThe1st3• 6 years ago

For me it's not about "competitive with grid". I'm already (I hope) at net zero for annual electrical consumption vs. generation.

The question is whether it's best to shunt the excess generation into my own storage (batteries) or the grid. Although practically speaking it likely makes no difference (my excess just flows into my neighbors' homes), conceptually flowing into a grid with and without its storage seems quite different.

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

The cheapest grid "battery" is minute-by-minute pricing of electricity. Much of a home's energy use can be time-shifted if there was a point to time-shift - and variable pricing provides that point.

Your home is a "battery" as you can run the temperature of your hot water heater higher when electricity is cheaper, and let it "coast" when electricity is more expensive. You still have hot water on demand.

The same goes for the refrigerator, heating system and the cooling system. This can be made even more effective by increasing the thermal mass of the house, for example, with a pile of rocks. Pretty cheap for a battery, don't you think?

And, of course, there's charging your car when electricity is cheaper.

At last, we actually have a use for the Internet-of-things - an internet device on your hotwater heater to query the current price of electricity.

Pretty darned cheap for a grid battery.

shuntress2• 6 years ago

I'm not here for micromanaging my water heater or refrigerator.

Both need to hold their temperature as long as possible and get up(or down) to temperate at some balance point between speed and efficiency. I want my provider to even it out and set a reasonable price between the variable extremes so I don't have to think about it.

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

You don't have to think about it. Just get an IoT refrigerator.

cheerlessbog• 6 years ago

When you shower are you aware whether the water was heated an hour ago or a day ago?

Faaak• 6 years ago

The majority of electric water heaters in France and Swiss households are controlled by the utility company (Enedis in France, SIG, RECOM, etc. in Switzerland). The signal comes as a simple PLC and thus turns on the relay which turns the heater on.

The advantages are a lower rate and a guaranteed 8 hours straight on-time per day.

viraptor• 6 years ago

The same goes for the refrigerator

What do you mean? Fridges generally run at the highest reasonable temperature. Are you proposing adding more thermal mass to them?

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

There's a range of suitable temperatures for your refrigerator. When electricity is cheap, it cools to the low bound, when expensive, it only cools it to the upper bound. Of course, increasing the thermal mass of the refrigerator will improve this.

AnthonyMouse2• 6 years ago

The cheapest grid "battery" is minute-by-minute pricing of electricity.

This works to the extent that it works. But one of the big applications for a sufficiently cheap grid battery would be to store generation from solar to be used at night.

A large fraction of the nighttime load is for heat and light, because night is when it's cold and dark. It can't really be shifted into the daytime.

And another obvious use for a grid battery is to take advantage of that same demand pricing by buying power when it's cheap and selling when it's not.

WalterBright7• 6 years ago

It can't really be shifted into the daytime.

The heat can be. Heat can be stored in the thermal mass of the house itself, and thermal mass can be added in the form of rocks.

With the advent of LED lights, the lighting bill isn't that much anymore.

grandinj4• 6 years ago

You heat up a big block of concrete during the day. Insulated of course. Then at night you run water through it, and pipe that (now hot) water to radiator around your house. Already being deployed in Germany.

Gibbon12• 6 years ago

And another obvious use for a grid battery is to take advantage of that same demand pricing by buying power when it's cheap and selling when it's not.

Far as I get the actual price of electricity varies a lot, so there potentially a lot of arbitrage to exploit. There's a dozen ways to store energy with varying amount of round trip efficiency, capital costs, and operating costs. Some set of technologies will win out in that space.

I suspect one reason these technologies aren't well developed is because historically the cheapest is baseload power produced by coal and nuke plants. Economically the price is actually subsidized. So utilities did not want knuckleheads buying their cheap power at night and selling it during the day.

hannob• 6 years ago

This is all nice and well, though I'd like to add the thought that this is much easier to do on industry scale.

Have one large industrial factory like an aluminium smelter or steel plant that is redesigned in a way that it can shift its electricity use a little bit? That's probably having an effect larger than a lot of personal users.

I guess there's a political issue here, as industry often pays very little for electricity to begin with. I know at lesat in Germany most large industries are excluded from a lot of fees that normal customers pay. Providing "cheap and reliable electricity" to industry is often almost a political mantra. I guess it would make sense to say at some point: "Dear industry, you can have cheap electricity, you can have reliable electricity, but you can't have both. If you want to have it cheap you have to support the grid by providing flexibility."

bboreham3• 6 years ago

This exists already. https://www.ecotricity.co.uk/business-energy/virtual-power-p...

makomk2• 6 years ago

Providing cheap and reliable electricity to industry is basically a prerequisite to having industry in the first place, which is why it's so politically important in countries which still care about that. Aluminium smelters, being particularly sensitive to electricity cost, are somewhat willing to choose their location and reduce their power usage briefly if it gives them really, really cheap power, but I think even those still need to be running most of the time.

Nasrudith3• 6 years ago

From what I heard there are reasons for both. Industrial electrical users are required to engage in their own impedience matching, demand regularion and other such contractual issues in addition to the ammount of other expenses for say 100MW to N consumer homes being greater than one connection to a widget factory.

It isn't some mustache twirling plot to make the consumer pay more while some abstract industrial fat cat pays more or anything - real economics are at play.

The prevailing obvious alternative to competitive pricing that tries to roll in other expenses would be direct generation by industrial scales running their own fossil fuel turbines or direct thermal alternatives. Which result in worse performance at scale from everyone mid-sized and up rolling their own separate systems and worse pollution control as instead of having four great smokestacks to put scrubbers on and regulate there are now four thousand small ones. Economies of scale have been here for centuries.

Aluminum smelters and steel plants while they may use a lot of power also cannot be just neglected and cut off mid-cycle without wasting a very large batch slag in a way that is very expensive to clean up.

jayd162• 6 years ago

Is this a real problem/solution? Wouldn't the current usage pattern of a city block be normalized across all residents such that there's no gain to be made here? Is the current minute to minute power usage fluctuating that much?

Don't things like water heaters and fridge compressors run many times a day. Is shifting all that to night hours even feasible simply because the appliance is smart?

andylynch• 6 years ago

It is. Most people’s air con will switch on at similar times. People mostly shower first time in the morning, or in the evening, cook around the same time. Amusingly and semi-notoriously, the Uk national grid monitors for ‘tv pickups’ like halftime in the football or the cliffhanger in the latest Eastenders - they can spike hundreds to thousands of megawatts. There are special power stations to handle to peak while others spin up, otherwise the frequency drop would cause grid failures.

StreamBright• 6 years ago

I would also add that heat insulation is grossly underrated. With modern heat insulation solutions like wood or hemp concrete, mineral wool one can decrease the heating / cooling need by 60-80%. This can be combined with solar panels. In practice, this means we have ~10 USD heating / cooling cost per month for a medium size house in Central Europe. Initial cost is not trivial though. Same goes for other usage of electricity, for example lighting. Using LED lights reduce the energy need by a large percentage. The best energy optimisation is to reduce the amount of energy needed to be produced. Once you have that it becomes easier even with current technology to have a battery that can buffer your electricity,

Cocktail• 6 years ago

Regarding the water heater. Actually the more you heat something the more it also cools down. Unless you have beyond excellent insulation the coasting method will not do good for long. The heater will release more heat the more it possesses and so it would be best to instead increase thermal mass than temparature.

Somebody correct me if im wrong

haltingproblem• 6 years ago

I get why the legacy plant owners are fighting it but why are the state regulators fighting it? Especially Texas where free competition is the norm ;) Ok, that was sprinkled with a pinch of snark.

Honestly, if it helps consumers why would states be against it? What are we missing here?

M2Ys4U• 6 years ago

I get why the legacy plant owners are fighting it but why are the state regulators fighting it?

Corruption. Namely, Regulatory Capture.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

tialaramex3• 6 years ago

In the US how do your solar energy subsidies work?

In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference. What this means is that the government ensures you get paid a specific fee for your electricity (the "strike price" decided by auction when the project subsidy was agreed) say £58 per MWh - regardless. If you actually sell electricity for £12 per MWh during a glut the government pays £46 to make up the difference, but if you sell electricity when prices are £95 per MWh during a shortage, the government gets £37 back from that.

These CfDs are auctioned, thus providing a signal about whether subsidy is needed. If bids approach the actual market price of electricity then there's no need to have any further rounds of subsidy for this class of power - apparently financial backers are happy to build such generators at the price the market will already pay.

This fits nicely with the fact that all the obvious green options are capital dominated. A traditional fossil fuel power plant consumes fuel to make power, which means below some particular price it will shut off to avoid spending more on fuel than it earns from selling electricity. But this is never true for a wind farm, or solar farm, and it's only barely in principle possible for nuclear (Nuclear fuel is expensive, but a little goes a long way). So in fact you will always sell all the power from these sources, and the only question is how much for?

kolinko• 6 years ago

I’m in a process of building 1MW in Poland, and - at least here - it’s not true that renewables are not commercially viable.

That is, if I finished building today and began trading on an open market, I would benefit more in the upcoming years (possibly overall), than through auctions.

The benefit of auctions is that since they guarantee the proce for the next 15 years, it’s way easier to get financing for them.

Our estimates show that we would have way higher returns on the open market, but the risks would be much higher as well.

ZeroGravitas2• 6 years ago

Which basically means the government is taking on that risk and (potential) profit.

tialaramex3• 6 years ago

it’s not true that renewables are not commercially viable.

Ah, I think this is perhaps a language problem. Given you said in Poland I suppose that it's plausible English is not your first language. Here's what I wrote:

In the UK where green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy is implemented as Contracts for Difference.

Now, what I intended here is that "where" is a conditional constraint on the subsequent explanation. I can see what you thought I meant, and it's a valid reading of the sentence but isn't what I intended. What I was going for is roughly equivalent in meaning to:

In the UK, if some particular type of green energy isn't commercially viable on its own the subsidy for that type of green energy is implemented as Contracts for Difference.

Thus, CfDs are no longer available for some proven plant types, it makes commercial sense to build these anyway, so no need to subsidise them. But for others subsidy is still very much necessary. Tidal projects are an example, you can make power from tidal forces, on the coast and Britain has lots of coast because it's an island - but right now all projects have a huge up-front capital investment that can't be justified by low electricity prices so a large subsidy is necessary if they are to be developed other than as small research projects.

You're correct that risk reduction means it can make sense to offer (and bid for) CfDs even when the strike price will be below expected market prices. And it's anticipated that a future UK government "Pot 1" auction for onshore wind will work out that way, there's no way new onshore wind needs £40+ per MWh but that's what you'd get on the open market today, however the risk reduction is valuable at a lower price.

perfunctory• 6 years ago

...the fight generators and transmission companies have waged to prevent wholesale market access for batteries.

just in case somebody still thinks that climate change is a technical problem.

Court ruling clears way for energy storage on the grid

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