why not? Having distributed buffers ought to make the system more resilient in most cases wont it? Not to mention that these home level batteries can be used to smooth out power usage and lower peak loads.
In fact, having an EV car act as this same battery would be an even more efficient use of resources.
I'd prefer for the power coming to my house to just not go out. The grid operator can install batteries in places other than my home. The grid operator can maintain them for me. The grid operator can get cheaper loans than I can for installing them, they're staffed with supposed experts in this stuff, just have them handle it on their premises.
And once again, another point for growing the wealth gap. Poor people who can't afford the thousands of dollars for installing the batteries get shafted by such things instead of us assuming the grid operators will just smooth these prices out for us.
Once again in the end I'd just prefer if there were actors on the grid running massive batteries able to arbitrage the extreme spot prices and sell me electricity at a reasonable rate all the time instead of me having to actively min/max every dang thing every moment in my life.
Personally, I'd rather toss that $10k into my kids' education funds and sign up for a fixed rate electricity plan. Hopefully that'll be better ROI.
Grid-scale batteries have pretty different economics than some batteries in my garage. Their real-estate cost is probably significantly lower than the cost for halfway decent residential. They're buying a much larger order of batteries, so their per-kWh cost is probably a good bit lower. Also, their installation cost per-kWh is also a good bit cheaper. They're probably completely fine buying/selling purely on open spot markets, meanwhile in the end I'm going to need to run my pool pump and I'm going to want to do dishes and laundry and charge my car and all the other things on some reasonable schedule so I'd like some amount of price protection on whatever time-of-use plan I get (a day of $9/kWh electricity prices will surely wipe out whatever gains you might have made). They're probably able to get cheaper loans than me, so it's easier for them to arrange the big capital investment instead of high interest loans or having to invest existing capital.
I'm not arguing the economics of batteries don't make sense in today's power markets. Far from it, I've been toying with getting into it in North Texas. But buying a few kWh of batteries and putting them in my garage probably isn't going to break even and almost certainly isn't going to make me money.
I do have a 35 kWh propane fired generator onsite though, which does provide for outages regardless of where the break in the line is.
Also, this further just makes having stable electricity yet another thing in the wealth gap. Only those wealthy enough to afford the high upfront capital costs, the ongoing maintenance cost, and the space to store it get reliable electricity, fuck everyone else! Or we can just focus on investing in a stable and clean grid and share that cost with everyone, all you need is to just be connected.
But hey if I get a massive battery bank I'll have power for when the end times come. I won't be able to go get groceries anymore and eventually the fiber line and radios around me will go quiet but at least I'll be able to play videogames. For a few hours at least.
Don't get me wrong, I'm an Eagle Scout, be prepared and all that. I've got a big pile of charcoal, a chunk of propane, a camping stove, several day's supply of water and canned/non-perishable foods, some batteries for lanterns, etc. The cars all get topped off when big storms seem possible. If the big outage comes this will be more worthwhile than being able to turn on the TV for a few hours, and cost significantly less than several dozen kWh of batteries. And if the power is out for more than a week or two I'll have far bigger concerns than being able to post on Hacker News.
They can still do so for other reasons, like a short circuit in the wiring.
You could distribute this capacity at each house and feed it back to the grid during peak times. But is TCO of 1000 * 100kWh same price as 100MWh worth of capacity?
If you're going to have the battery anyway(a car) its hard to compete with, but once you need more capacity, I'm not sure it makes sense to distribute it quite as much.
I’ve set this up on my “smart” thermostat to speed up just before rates go up and kick off for a while once they do (and it was a pain to setup, somehow this functionality was not baked in)
And if someone is dumb enough to do high load stuff on their own battery during a blackout, then it's less of a problem for others. Also individual failures will cover less homes.
Incentives and consequences will be different and differently spread.
And on individual level, you can also chose whether you want this or are fine with outage. (I'm against mandating this)
