Ha, came in here just to find this sort of comment.
For international readers: In ZA we have this thing backwards, and during an electricity crisis nearing 20 years soon. Everyone who can afford it (middle class and up) is installing backup inverters & batteries, and solar if they can afford that extra cost. However feeding back into the grid is a net-negative for citizens, as the power utility charges a fee to do so and pays less than the cost of solar output to these producers. Even Cape Town's payback scheme which came in last year as a "great solution" is still at best a break-even for some.
One of the consequences is that many renewable energy producing houses don't feed back in and are also not consumers of grid power. Over time this may leave the main revenue stream of the state power utility to be only that of poor & non-paying municipalities.
Our only refuge from the madness is coming to HN and seeing others actually do this thing right, and wishing for things to be better.
Interesting. I’m in Australia with a modest home battery and my electricity billing is “wholesale” price so shifts every 15 minutes. When there’s grid instability my pay for feeding in can be $30 a kWh! It’s therefore in my interest to be grid connected and ready to export at all times.
My solar panels sit idle for most of the day. By 09h30 in the summer my batteries are fully charged, and it's only running my water heater (geyser). I estimate I have about 15kWh of excess that I should be able to export on a daily basis. But I can't, because "reasons".
My father, with a much bigger system and an old school disk-style power meter is exporting close to 30kWh a day "illegally" once he's done charging his batteries and all that.
And now they want to bring in additional fees and charges for selling to the grid, and they want to buy back at ridiculously discounted rates (1-10% of the buy-cost), which immediately makes it a non-starter for most. So even though 50-60% of all installed systems (my estimate) are ready and capable to export, nobody does, because "reasons".
That seemed easy. What was required to make the batteries dispatch power in this way? I have rooftop solar and batteries in the UK and I would definitely engage in a similar scheme like this except I wonder how much work the power companies would have to do to make it work.
Chances are your system is already capable of doing this. If you have a hybrid or grid-tied system that is.
All that's really required is a suitable power meter that links up with a central control authority to orchestrate the whole thing. That's where the complexity lies.
Technically it's easy. The complexity is all with laws and commercial interests.
There are hundreds of thousands of residential batteries in the UK already, and ~0 of them currently can be called on for demand frequency response. That's because 'demand response' is not something you can typically be credited for on your electricity bill. The closest you get is you might have a half-hourly varying pricing scheme encouraging you to discharge your battery when prices are low. The only UK supplier to do that so far (octopus) still uses day-ahead prices though - so you aren't reacting to market conditions, but instead predicted market conditions 24 hours ahead.
I think the fix for the uk is for the regulator to step in and switch half hourly pricing for second by second pricing. Get rid of 'frequency services' (unnecessary with second by second pricing). Then make most/all users of the grid pay those second by second prices (no more 'fixed X per kwh' contracts).
All electricity contracts should be pay-in-advance, and meters should have an option to cap spend per hour/day.
Nobody wants to spend their time micromanaging their electricity usage to such a point. Such a scheme to all users will never pass. Lack of day-ahead means it's impossible to plan anything.
Readit News
For international readers: In ZA we have this thing backwards, and during an electricity crisis nearing 20 years soon. Everyone who can afford it (middle class and up) is installing backup inverters & batteries, and solar if they can afford that extra cost. However feeding back into the grid is a net-negative for citizens, as the power utility charges a fee to do so and pays less than the cost of solar output to these producers. Even Cape Town's payback scheme which came in last year as a "great solution" is still at best a break-even for some.
One of the consequences is that many renewable energy producing houses don't feed back in and are also not consumers of grid power. Over time this may leave the main revenue stream of the state power utility to be only that of poor & non-paying municipalities.
Our only refuge from the madness is coming to HN and seeing others actually do this thing right, and wishing for things to be better.
My father, with a much bigger system and an old school disk-style power meter is exporting close to 30kWh a day "illegally" once he's done charging his batteries and all that.
And now they want to bring in additional fees and charges for selling to the grid, and they want to buy back at ridiculously discounted rates (1-10% of the buy-cost), which immediately makes it a non-starter for most. So even though 50-60% of all installed systems (my estimate) are ready and capable to export, nobody does, because "reasons".
https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/virtual-power-plant/pue...
You need to buy a battery from a vendor who is orchestrating a virtual power plant program, and live in an eligible geography.
All that's really required is a suitable power meter that links up with a central control authority to orchestrate the whole thing. That's where the complexity lies.
There are hundreds of thousands of residential batteries in the UK already, and ~0 of them currently can be called on for demand frequency response. That's because 'demand response' is not something you can typically be credited for on your electricity bill. The closest you get is you might have a half-hourly varying pricing scheme encouraging you to discharge your battery when prices are low. The only UK supplier to do that so far (octopus) still uses day-ahead prices though - so you aren't reacting to market conditions, but instead predicted market conditions 24 hours ahead.
I think the fix for the uk is for the regulator to step in and switch half hourly pricing for second by second pricing. Get rid of 'frequency services' (unnecessary with second by second pricing). Then make most/all users of the grid pay those second by second prices (no more 'fixed X per kwh' contracts).
All electricity contracts should be pay-in-advance, and meters should have an option to cap spend per hour/day.