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US$145 / kWh -- GM's late 2015 price for Volt / Bolt power -- is OK. But the differential in price, in New England where I live, between peak and offpeak elect
by OliverJones 10y ago
US$145 / kWh -- GM's late 2015 price for Volt / Bolt power -- is OK.
But the differential in price, in New England where I live, between peak and offpeak electricity, is US$0.027 (2.7 cents) per kWh. I worked it out: my investment in a battery setup at those rates would take about 17 years to pay off: far too long.
If we want this to work, we need a smart grid: a grid that can announce pricing based on current costs. Then we need baseload electricity costs (hydro, nuclear, gas, coal) to be significantly lower than peakload (fuel oil, Storm-King style pumped gravity storage) costs.
The smarts for a household energy storage system wouldn't be hard to work out IF the grid were smart enough to advertise present costs, and meters were smart enough to bill for present costs. My Power Wall could charge with cheap power and run my lights during a nasty summer brownout.
I understand they're experimenting in Europe with announcing prices using the FM radio sub channels now used to display song names. That's interesting.
- snowwindwaves 10y agoThe real time electricity price for several states is published.[1] Sounds like you need a smart device not a smart grid. Lots of utilities have adopted smart meters, Ontario and British Columbia certainly have. I don't know as much about the states. 1: http://www.nyiso.com/public/markets_operations/market_data/pricing_data/index.jsp http://www.nyiso.com/public/markets_operations/market_data/p...
- Zigurd 10y agoHear, hear! Be very skeptical when an industry wants to go from dumb to "smart." They want you to remain captive. They want to resist margin pressure as they get ridiculously past merely "mature." They want to resist becoming the transitional backup system for a "smart edge." Newly built grids, and peak capacity will be lighter, cheaper, and local. These trends will be spotted in developing nations first, where the grid providers are unable to keep up with new demand, but they will hit mature grids, too, because they will cost less.