I'm not OP, but the timing context of this post is important:
Today, California has issued a FlexAlert, and Powerwalls in PG&E and SCE will start discharging at 6pm to help reduce load on the grid. It's not a daily action, but it's emergency support when the grid needs it the most.
And the time window when it happens is important: Powerwalls are contributing to to reduce load when the grid needs it the most. It's not meant to support the entire grid, just directly attack the problem at the time where every Watt and Watt-hour counts.
You don't need to own Powerwall to benefit from this, just like how you don't own the peaker plants that typically spark up at these times. You benefit because there's a big chance that there won't be rolling blackouts in California this afternoon—distributed assets like this can be dispatched.
Has anyone done the math to determine whether the added wear-and-tear on the battery is negated by the payout?
I wouldn’t want to go from a 7-10 year battery replacement cycle to a 3-5 year battery replacement cycle out of pocket just because “I’m Doin’ My Part for the Grid(TM)”.
During the trial its $2/kwh. A powerwall costs ~$10.5k for a single unit with a capacity of 13.5KWh. You'd need to do 5MWh to pay for the powerwall, and that would be ~370 cycles.
The pack should be good for over 1k cycles. This is definitely a beneficial thing for the owner at these prices.
At $2/kWh you’re making as much as $16-$20 per cycle so it is almost certainly worth it to the battery owner to use your battery for this vs. load shifting, etc.
Although it was a much more extreme event, no fewer than 246 people died because of the Texas outage in 2021. It’s not just the economy that can suffer if there is a grid outage.
These stationary battery should not require anywhere close to a 7-10 year cycle. The chemitry should be above 80% for much longer and te battery should stay usable for decades.
For Australia, it was not worth it, except to get a few thousand off the purchase price (then quit VPP as soon as humanly possible).
My experience was their algorithm is terrible and it gets into a charge+discharge cycle for no reason for hours at a time, costing $0.40 to charge and earning $0.10 to discharge, plus wear, for no benefit to the grid.
Important to have some perspective on scale, though. All powerwalls acting together can source 125MW, max. Yesterday, grid-scale batteries in California discharged a peak 2751MW. The powerwall tricks are cool, but I’m not sure it solves a problem the ISO actually faces.
But the number of power walls is not fixed, and going from 125MW to 12,500MW is only going to happen there are proper incentives from the grid.
And as it is, utilities in the CAISO are generally too fossilized and change averse to view behind the meter aggregation as something that they can benefit from, and they will likely instead fight it. Smarter utilities would see the opportunity and approach regulators with rules changes that profit everybody. Instead, we will need legislators to impost such schemes on regulators and utilities, as there is zero innovation among leadership of utilities, and regulators have zero capability for this too.
(Perhaps I exaggerate, SMUD is tiny but they may have the vision for at least part of this. Vermont's Green Mountain Power has the leadership that we need in California, though.)
Seems like having an available 5% bonus on peak (!) usage is a huge deal, actually. Buffering shortfalls have an exponential frequency curve. I wouldn't be surprised if 5% extra generation would have been enough to cover, what, 60-90% of all brownout/failure conditions on the grid over the past few decades.
Also, too, it's a brand new technology just being rolled out, and building more capacity at the limits of factory bandwidth. You're acting like the number of powerwall users are all we're ever going have, which seems silly.
I'm surprised it is so low. Our pack discharges at at least 10kw (max averaged by hour over the last two weeks; didn't look up specs). That means we're over 1/12,500th of the state wide pilot's footprint.
Apparently, (as of 2021) Tesla has only sold about 200,000 powerwalls globally, so I guess that sort of checks out.
Annoyingly, our batteries are set to minimize our bill, but didn't get the memo about the special rates today (they are not powerwalls). They stopped selling back to the grid just before 6pm, and are almost half full as I write this.
More annoyingly, every morning they aggressively charge themselves during the precommute CO2-intensive demand spike, since power is cheap then (due to a policy setting, they normally only charge from solar)
I wish I could forbid them from charging before 10am or that PG&E would fix their rates.
Right now I'm a net generator, even with our 100 deg days, but I am not 100% off grid. The Panels charge the Powerwall during the day, the Powerwall is drained overnight.
The batteries currently do not survive the night. Even though the house cools down, it retains enough heat that the AC still kicks on, thus draining the battery. Note my AC is 78 all day/night. We got a thing from the power company "do these things on this day and get power credits by lowering your usage", and, of course, we already do all that...no credits for us!
So typically during transition at dawn, I pull in grid power.
But I'm still a net generator, they get more than I take.
The concern was simply if I enroll in this, then the batteries kick in and drain even before the evening, and I go to grid power sooner.
But, thinking about it, "I don't care". It's an offset. They're draining because they need the load NOW, and I can provide it. Later, when things settle down, I'll pull it back.
I think this works out, simply as a "be a good citizen", use my battery to prevent someone in Fresno's AC browning out late in the heat of the afternoon.
Maybe I'm just being whimsical, but I'm still thinking about it.
Also thinking about bolting on another battery, I already have two.
If you have excess generation during the day, why don't you cool your house to 72 in the late afternoon and then back to 78 when the sun starts setting? It would probably delay you batteries having to power your AC for about 4 hours.
This. Energy can take many forms. You don't have to store all in a battery.
Another idea: assuming you have an electric water heater, when your battery has been fully charged and you still have excess generation, use the excess to heat your water heater up to a very high temperature like 80 degrees C. You'll then be using very little hot water in the evening for showers and dishwashers, etc, and the water heater basically won't need to turn on at all.
We do this here in Sonora, CA. Our PV array supplies more than our A/C uses. We turn the A/C on around 10am, cool to 70°, turn off at 3pm. House insulation has limited indoor temperature to 76° on recent 101° days.
If you live in one of the 26 states that have time-of-use rates (mine is 21¢ peak and 1¢ overnight), you can enroll in that, import your schedule in the powerwall app, and it will automatically deliver the bonus power to your house during the peak, allowing you to export even more solar to the grid during high demand.
It looks like it’s cooler outside at night these days (below 70ºF between 9pm and 7am). I’d recommend that you air out your whole house with a big draft when that’s the case: fresh air, less CO2 indoors, but also a big saving on cooling. That’s what my grandmother did all summer in Provence, and she never needed AC. If you power-cool in the afternoon to use your house as a thermal battery, you might only need to do it in the morning, but it’s always very enjoyable.
People have mentioned roof insulation. It’s a good idea, although if you have solar panels, you might want to cool the outside of the roof under the panels to improve their efficiency. I’ve seen technology using water evaporation; maybe that one is less popular these days. There should be a way to do it by heating the water for your shower.
The most effective idea is a lot low-tech though: outside blinds. Covering your glass windows from the outside is what prevents most of the heat from getting in. Even better if you can have slated blinds that block the sun but let the air through. Anywhere traditionally warm in summer (i.e. built before AC), I’ve seen houses with wooden blinds that you can shut all day, while you keep the windows open.
One thing to keep in mind, is that during periods of high demand they run the most inefficient, most polluting power sources, like diesel generators or natural gas peaker plants which are generally less efficient. So by dumping power on the grid when it's most needed you're reducing CO2 output more than if you just kept it for yourself. You then use it back when demand is low (early morning/late night) and efficient power sources are running.
This. There's an entire industry around getting companies to use their industrial generators at peak energy consumption times (and also do things like turn down their thermostats). The power bill for a huge electric user is absolutely massive if they're hitting hard at peak peak times. Like several percent of their annual energy cost can come from a few hours of use.
What does your attic insulation look like? Blown in cellulose to roughly R-60 made an instant difference and was the best ROI home improvement I've ever done.
Blow in, not spray on, insulation is the easiest, cheapest, bang for your buck home improvement I ever made. It took 3 hours and ~$1000 of insulation from Home Depot.
The house maintains its temperature so much better. Outside noise is reduced. My bills are smaller. And I can keep my AC at 72 now - or whatever temperature I feel like really.
You get paid for the power your battery provides to the grid. Power is generally cheaper at night as there is less demand (at least the spot price is cheaper, not sure how your utility passes that savings on to you). It seems like it's totally possible that it's better for you economically to allow your battery to power the grid during the day. You'll have less charge in your battery for the night, but hopefully you can get power at a cheaper price.
I wonder if a whole house fan would help avoid using the AC through the night. Of course, the next obvious question about is it worth the installation cost...
We have a whole house window fan that was probably manufactured in the 50’s (“Homart Cooler”). It is excellent for upper Midwest summer nights. Our house is old enough to make ducted AC a nonstarter, so the ability to cool the interior of the house over night is very helpful.
I have a whole house fan, and it's awesome. Cools the house down really quickly at night. I mostly did fine in the Pacific Northwest without any A/C until a couple years ago. A whole house fan is worse than useless, though, when you have wildfire smoke and it isn't getting below 75 outside at night. I finally had to cave and buy an air conditioner.
Air King makes one (9166F) that can be put in a window and will cool the air pretty quickly. I've barely ran the AC this year since I've started pulling in cold air at night and closing the windows in the morning.
As another comment points out, with wildfires it's kind of useless when the air quality outside is bad.
They live in Fresno where it is quite hot even at night during this time of year. It isnt going to be below 80F for more than a couple hours during the night (early tomorrow morning).
The only thing that really concerns me about all of this is if I’m bearing the capital expense of the batteries and equipment that is being worn out by cooperative use. Can we socialize those costs?
Quick math shows a long range Model 3 has about six times as much battery capacity as a Powerwall. I’m willing to bet more people have Model 3’s than Powerwalls. And I’m willing to bet 16% of your car’s battery capacity will impact you far less than 100% of your Powerwall.
F-150 Lightning called it right: EV’s should ship with grid-tie inverting.
The CAISO shows that their current power generation capacity is about 53000 MW.
A Tesla model 3 has 60kWh of capacity. A million of those would allow generating 60000 MW for an hour if they would be discharged from full to empty during the span of that hour.
In practice, they wouldn't be able to be discharged that quickly and there would be losses due to going from DC to AC, but it's interesting to think that the total deployed battery capacity of EVs could have a significant impact on the need for peaker plants in the upcoming years.
The back of the envelope math is beautiful here. EV production is really ramping up now. Tesla expects to put out around 2 million cars per year by the end of the year. If we round the kwh of their batteries down a little to 50kwh, we get some nice round number to work with. 2 million cars is 2 x1000 x 1000 times 50 kwh is 100 gwh. So Tesla alone is adding 100gwh of battery per year (well a bit more but you get my point). Other manufacturers are also producing cars. and we'll soon hit 20 million EVS per year. Or about 1 twh / year of battery production.
Those batteries have long lives in the car and then typically a second life in storage solutions. Some cars now come with vehicle to grid technology and when they are plugged in, they could be used to provide power to the home, or the grid.
So we have a fleet of car batteries that is currently growing by the hundreds of gwh per year and soon twh per year that can be plugged into the grid. Even just using a tiny amount of that represents an enormous amount of power.
That's a huge buffer to dump excess power in during the day (from e.g. solar panels) and withdraw from during peak hours. The current Tesla virtual power plant is tiny in comparison. If you then consider that batteries have a fixed number of cycle times (around 1500 or so), you basically get to pwh scale in terms of amounts of energy that flow through that buffer every year. A lot of that power is cheap renewable power. Just with car batteries. Other storage solutions are available. The world currently produces a bit over 25 pwh per year currently.
I've been wondering why Tesla doesn't just do this. IIRC from the public Model 3 and Y teardowns, the cars already have the hardware to do this, so it's just a question of a software update and policy. Would love to know why it isn't in production yet; it seems like a no-brainer so there must be something impeding it.
People don't seem to understand that the battery chemistries optimized for cars is not the same battery chemistries optimized for grid storage though. You'll reduce the lifetime of your car substantially by cycling it every night.
You are downvoted but you are right. A Tesla model 3 battery is not designed to balance the electricity grid. Maybe it can be done in the future by using different chemistry, with some downsides, but the current cars would get destroyed by the many cycles.
Any usage will reduce a battery’s lifespan, but this isn’t a donation. The point of enrolling in a sharing program is you get compensated for letting the utility company use your resources. It should much more than offset the extra degradation.
Degradation of lithium batteries is also not constant. It depends on several factors such as C rate, heat, and voltage. All of these factors would be far less during load sharing than just driving your car.
And keep in mind most people wouldn’t want to share their entire batteries. They would want to save most for themselves. If they only offered 10% of their capacity for load sharing, then the shared usage would be far less than a full cycle.
Interesting how in California you get to set your reserve.
Here in Massachusetts, when VPP has an event, it drains my Powerwalls down to 20% no matter what my reserve is set to. And Tesla's "Storm Watch" feature isn't triggered by the typical summer thunderstorm that causes power outages here in the north east. The result is that during the heat waves 2 weeks ago (8 out of 14 days were over 90 degrees F), we had several severe t-storms that caused power outages right after VPP had drained our Powerwalls to 20%. Thankfully all of them were short duration for us (an hour tops), although half our town was out of power for 12 hours after one storm.
It’s not only optional, you get paid good money for providing the service. But once you opt-in you are under contract to provide the power when they come knocking.
Would it be worth it to have several power walls? Have a couple connected to Storm Watch and one for yourself in case things get hairier? Are there scaling efficiencies?
They pay $2/kWh. A powerwall can export 7 kW with a capacity it 12.5 kWh so you can make $25 in a little under 2 hours if you let them drain your power wall.
Prices infrequently get to $2000/MWh so I expect most years the powerwalls would not be called upon at this price level.
It is weak that they only pay for energy delivered instead of being available to deliver as reserve, but I am sure that will come once the technical details are ironed out.
The downside of this type of tech is that it adds a dependency on the internet for reserve power.
> It is weak that they only pay for energy delivered instead of being available to deliver as reserve, but I am sure that will come once the technical details are ironed out.
I think the bigger problem is that residential users can't really guarantee supply, so it doesn't work for the utility to contact for that.
PG&E running similar trial with SolarEdge and LG https://pge-battery-pilot.com/ . They sent me a bunch of emails starting at March inviting to join the trial.
"California needs energy now more than ever, and as a SolarEdge system owner with a battery, you can help.
By participating in PG&E’s Battery Storage Pilot, you can receive between $462 and $1848 and help keep the grid clean and reliable."
I would like such a thing to be open access and not involve Tesla at all. I should be able to profitably sell to the grid as a random person if there's need.
This attempts to obtain the benefits without the costs and ongoing effort that commands value. California grid operators aren’t going to deal with system sizes this small (5-25kw) individually, hence the orchestrator (Tesla). You could build an orchestrator (I highly encourage such an endeavor for competitive reasons), but a standard alone is insufficient and of minimal value. Same reason you don’t get paid much to shed load (token amounts), Google via Nest does.
With that said, you can operate autonomously on the grid with solar and batteries (and the inverters will sync and follow grid voltage and frequency), and can even use export restrictions so you never send power back to the grid (curtailing) if desired; but energy marketplace participation is much more than that. Enphase and SolarEdge (inverter and energy system manufacturers) are positioned as competitors to Tesla for VPPs, but haven’t made the effort (that I’m aware of).
There are some pilot projects that have individual prosumers but they all operate at the distribution grid level. There's a concept coming called "DSO" or "Distribution System Operator" where the distribution grid is run more like a typical transmission network. The distribution grid operator could then procure services from DERs, microgrids, etc. [1] has a good overview
It absolutely can be, in Australia we have several players involved and from what I understand, integration is dictated by the network operator. Eg, provided the battery used supports VPP, you can join under a number of different providers offering different contracts. See here [1] for a comparison table.
Agree but we need to start somewhere and the government is setting these prices and making the policy so unless there’s regulatory capture I see no reason it wouldn’t be expanded once the model has been proved out.
From Google: "a beginner cyclist may average around 75–100 watts in a 1-hour workout. A fit participant will average more than 100 watts, and pro cyclists can reach 400 watts per hour."
So 1KWh would be the output of a pro cyclist going hard for 2.5 hours, or a decently fit person biking for maybe 8 hours.
IMO people often don't take the time to think about energy enough. By some quick math, I've found that the energy taken out of one 0 degree celsius ice cube to make it freeze (latent heat of fusion) is roughly equal to the energy in a ubiquitous AA battery. About 4 watt hours
Readit News
Today, California has issued a FlexAlert, and Powerwalls in PG&E and SCE will start discharging at 6pm to help reduce load on the grid. It's not a daily action, but it's emergency support when the grid needs it the most.
And the time window when it happens is important: Powerwalls are contributing to to reduce load when the grid needs it the most. It's not meant to support the entire grid, just directly attack the problem at the time where every Watt and Watt-hour counts.
You don't need to own Powerwall to benefit from this, just like how you don't own the peaker plants that typically spark up at these times. You benefit because there's a big chance that there won't be rolling blackouts in California this afternoon—distributed assets like this can be dispatched.
Dispatch Info: https://twitter.com/AlexGuichet/status/1559748677626777600
A VPP tracker in the Tesla community: https://www.lastbulb.com/virtual-power-plant
Some technical details of how Tesla VPPs work, as organized distributed systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggdYts4muu0
CAISO Grid Outlook: https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
I wouldn’t want to go from a 7-10 year battery replacement cycle to a 3-5 year battery replacement cycle out of pocket just because “I’m Doin’ My Part for the Grid(TM)”.
The pack should be good for over 1k cycles. This is definitely a beneficial thing for the owner at these prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
My experience was their algorithm is terrible and it gets into a charge+discharge cycle for no reason for hours at a time, costing $0.40 to charge and earning $0.10 to discharge, plus wear, for no benefit to the grid.
I used to turn off my battery a lot.
Exact mentality why we'll never ever fix our ways of life
And as it is, utilities in the CAISO are generally too fossilized and change averse to view behind the meter aggregation as something that they can benefit from, and they will likely instead fight it. Smarter utilities would see the opportunity and approach regulators with rules changes that profit everybody. Instead, we will need legislators to impost such schemes on regulators and utilities, as there is zero innovation among leadership of utilities, and regulators have zero capability for this too.
(Perhaps I exaggerate, SMUD is tiny but they may have the vision for at least part of this. Vermont's Green Mountain Power has the leadership that we need in California, though.)
Also, too, it's a brand new technology just being rolled out, and building more capacity at the limits of factory bandwidth. You're acting like the number of powerwall users are all we're ever going have, which seems silly.
https://www.caiso.com/participate/Pages/Load/Default.aspx
I think the demand response stuff adds up to about 2GW, so the same as the grid batteries at the moment, and both are set to grow at rapid rates.
Apparently, (as of 2021) Tesla has only sold about 200,000 powerwalls globally, so I guess that sort of checks out.
Annoyingly, our batteries are set to minimize our bill, but didn't get the memo about the special rates today (they are not powerwalls). They stopped selling back to the grid just before 6pm, and are almost half full as I write this.
More annoyingly, every morning they aggressively charge themselves during the precommute CO2-intensive demand spike, since power is cheap then (due to a policy setting, they normally only charge from solar)
I wish I could forbid them from charging before 10am or that PG&E would fix their rates.
Right now I'm a net generator, even with our 100 deg days, but I am not 100% off grid. The Panels charge the Powerwall during the day, the Powerwall is drained overnight.
The batteries currently do not survive the night. Even though the house cools down, it retains enough heat that the AC still kicks on, thus draining the battery. Note my AC is 78 all day/night. We got a thing from the power company "do these things on this day and get power credits by lowering your usage", and, of course, we already do all that...no credits for us!
So typically during transition at dawn, I pull in grid power.
But I'm still a net generator, they get more than I take.
The concern was simply if I enroll in this, then the batteries kick in and drain even before the evening, and I go to grid power sooner.
But, thinking about it, "I don't care". It's an offset. They're draining because they need the load NOW, and I can provide it. Later, when things settle down, I'll pull it back.
I think this works out, simply as a "be a good citizen", use my battery to prevent someone in Fresno's AC browning out late in the heat of the afternoon.
Maybe I'm just being whimsical, but I'm still thinking about it.
Also thinking about bolting on another battery, I already have two.
Another idea: assuming you have an electric water heater, when your battery has been fully charged and you still have excess generation, use the excess to heat your water heater up to a very high temperature like 80 degrees C. You'll then be using very little hot water in the evening for showers and dishwashers, etc, and the water heater basically won't need to turn on at all.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f9GpMWdvWI
Reddit discussion: https://reddit.com/r/technologyconnections/comments/oo2b3i/b...
He estimates it at 16 KWh of storage. Same ballpark as a Powerwall, right?
People have mentioned roof insulation. It’s a good idea, although if you have solar panels, you might want to cool the outside of the roof under the panels to improve their efficiency. I’ve seen technology using water evaporation; maybe that one is less popular these days. There should be a way to do it by heating the water for your shower.
The most effective idea is a lot low-tech though: outside blinds. Covering your glass windows from the outside is what prevents most of the heat from getting in. Even better if you can have slated blinds that block the sun but let the air through. Anywhere traditionally warm in summer (i.e. built before AC), I’ve seen houses with wooden blinds that you can shut all day, while you keep the windows open.
Blow in, not spray on, insulation is the easiest, cheapest, bang for your buck home improvement I ever made. It took 3 hours and ~$1000 of insulation from Home Depot.
The house maintains its temperature so much better. Outside noise is reduced. My bills are smaller. And I can keep my AC at 72 now - or whatever temperature I feel like really.
To help with this, we had a second Tesla battery installed!
Although, sadly, in South Australia, Electricity is charge at a flat rate, day or night!
As another comment points out, with wildfires it's kind of useless when the air quality outside is bad.
Am I misunderstanding something?
F-150 Lightning called it right: EV’s should ship with grid-tie inverting.
The CAISO shows that their current power generation capacity is about 53000 MW.
A Tesla model 3 has 60kWh of capacity. A million of those would allow generating 60000 MW for an hour if they would be discharged from full to empty during the span of that hour.
In practice, they wouldn't be able to be discharged that quickly and there would be losses due to going from DC to AC, but it's interesting to think that the total deployed battery capacity of EVs could have a significant impact on the need for peaker plants in the upcoming years.
Those batteries have long lives in the car and then typically a second life in storage solutions. Some cars now come with vehicle to grid technology and when they are plugged in, they could be used to provide power to the home, or the grid.
So we have a fleet of car batteries that is currently growing by the hundreds of gwh per year and soon twh per year that can be plugged into the grid. Even just using a tiny amount of that represents an enormous amount of power.
That's a huge buffer to dump excess power in during the day (from e.g. solar panels) and withdraw from during peak hours. The current Tesla virtual power plant is tiny in comparison. If you then consider that batteries have a fixed number of cycle times (around 1500 or so), you basically get to pwh scale in terms of amounts of energy that flow through that buffer every year. A lot of that power is cheap renewable power. Just with car batteries. Other storage solutions are available. The world currently produces a bit over 25 pwh per year currently.
Degradation of lithium batteries is also not constant. It depends on several factors such as C rate, heat, and voltage. All of these factors would be far less during load sharing than just driving your car.
And keep in mind most people wouldn’t want to share their entire batteries. They would want to save most for themselves. If they only offered 10% of their capacity for load sharing, then the shared usage would be far less than a full cycle.
Dead Comment
Here in Massachusetts, when VPP has an event, it drains my Powerwalls down to 20% no matter what my reserve is set to. And Tesla's "Storm Watch" feature isn't triggered by the typical summer thunderstorm that causes power outages here in the north east. The result is that during the heat waves 2 weeks ago (8 out of 14 days were over 90 degrees F), we had several severe t-storms that caused power outages right after VPP had drained our Powerwalls to 20%. Thankfully all of them were short duration for us (an hour tops), although half our town was out of power for 12 hours after one storm.
Prices infrequently get to $2000/MWh so I expect most years the powerwalls would not be called upon at this price level.
It is weak that they only pay for energy delivered instead of being available to deliver as reserve, but I am sure that will come once the technical details are ironed out.
The downside of this type of tech is that it adds a dependency on the internet for reserve power.
I haven't researched this yet, but wouldn't a true "smart" grid have wiring for communications as well as power?
I mean, my home is already served by cable for the telephone company, cable for the TV company, and a choice of several cellular connections.
Most 'smart grid' stuff doesn't try to reinvent the wheel.
I think the bigger problem is that residential users can't really guarantee supply, so it doesn't work for the utility to contact for that.
But I’m not an expert on any of this.
"California needs energy now more than ever, and as a SolarEdge system owner with a battery, you can help.
By participating in PG&E’s Battery Storage Pilot, you can receive between $462 and $1848 and help keep the grid clean and reliable."
With that said, you can operate autonomously on the grid with solar and batteries (and the inverters will sync and follow grid voltage and frequency), and can even use export restrictions so you never send power back to the grid (curtailing) if desired; but energy marketplace participation is much more than that. Enphase and SolarEdge (inverter and energy system manufacturers) are positioned as competitors to Tesla for VPPs, but haven’t made the effort (that I’m aware of).
https://nest.com/energy-solutions/
1. https://clean-coalition.org/distribution-system-operator-dso...
[1] https://www.solarquotes.com.au/battery-storage/vpp-compariso...
https://www.ohmconnect.com/
Edit: turns out 1 KWh is 2.6 million foot pounds, so that's either a very tall hill or a lot of water :-)
So 1KWh would be the output of a pro cyclist going hard for 2.5 hours, or a decently fit person biking for maybe 8 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4O5voOCqAQ
IMO people often don't take the time to think about energy enough. By some quick math, I've found that the energy taken out of one 0 degree celsius ice cube to make it freeze (latent heat of fusion) is roughly equal to the energy in a ubiquitous AA battery. About 4 watt hours
(Apply conversion efficiency of the human body before embarking on this business opportunity...)