3 ms·

In order to "dispatch" power as-needed, you need buy in from municipal power companies to grid-connect the supply (or generation). As we're seeing (eg. in Hawa

by beambot 11y ago

In order to "dispatch" power as-needed, you need buy in from municipal power companies to grid-connect the supply (or generation). As we're seeing (eg. in Hawaii), the power company becomes less-and-less incentivized to permit grid-connections as the rate of decentralized supply (or generation) increases. What I'd really like to know: How will the power companies adapt to new, decentralized generation (or storage) on a massive scale? Or alternatively: The municipal power companies budgeted their massive expenditures over decades; does this analysis account for all the expenses municipal power companies will necessarily incur (and pass to consumers) if the status quo shifts?

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Homeowners in Hawaii are using batteries to go completely off the grid, so as to not be required to get permission from the utility for their solar grid tie connection. The upside is, once the utility comes around to investing in their transmission infrastructure, they can receive power from those houses. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/business/energy-environment/solar-power-battle-puts-hawaii-at-forefront-of-worldwide-changes.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/business/energy-environmen... “I’ve actually taken people right off the grid,” he said, including a couple who got tired of waiting for Hawaiian Electric to approve their solar system and expressed no interest in returning to utility service. “The lumbering big utilities that are so used to taking three months to study this and then six months to do that — what they don’t understand is that things are moving at the speed of business. Like with digital photography — this is inevitable.”
brandmeyer 11y ago
Well, right now many of the Independant System Operators (ISO's) have specific markets for frequency support which are theoretically separate from the market for energy supply. So as distributed renewable dump-as-much-as-available style generation gets added to the grid, in principle the price for frequency support increases. In the same vein, distributed energy storage works very well for frequency support, which can drive the price for that service downwards. That still leaves the wires themselves. At the residential level, you typically pay a flat connection fee for the wires (and distribution and maintenance thereof). Commercial sites pay a Demand Charge for their peak total power consumption at any time during the billing period. So that's how the interconnect infrastructure gets paid for - the commercial demand and residential interconnect charges.

by beambot 11y ago

toomuchtodo 11y ago

Homeowners in Hawaii are using batteries to go completely off the grid, so as to not be required to get permission from the utility for their solar grid tie connection. The upside is, once the utility comes around to investing in their transmission infrastructure, they can receive power from those houses. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/business/energy-environment/solar-power-battle-puts-hawaii-at-forefront-of-worldwide-changes.html http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/business/energy-environmen... “I’ve actually taken people right off the grid,” he said, including a couple who got tired of waiting for Hawaiian Electric to approve their solar system and expressed no interest in returning to utility service. “The lumbering big utilities that are so used to taking three months to study this and then six months to do that — what they don’t understand is that things are moving at the speed of business. Like with digital photography — this is inevitable.”

brandmeyer 11y ago

Well, right now many of the Independant System Operators (ISO's) have specific markets for frequency support which are theoretically separate from the market for energy supply. So as distributed renewable dump-as-much-as-available style generation gets added to the grid, in principle the price for frequency support increases. In the same vein, distributed energy storage works very well for frequency support, which can drive the price for that service downwards. That still leaves the wires themselves. At the residential level, you typically pay a flat connection fee for the wires (and distribution and maintenance thereof). Commercial sites pay a Demand Charge for their peak total power consumption at any time during the billing period. So that's how the interconnect infrastructure gets paid for - the commercial demand and residential interconnect charges.