3 ms·

Why not? Maybe because I'd rather not have to spend that much of my own capital on something I'd generally never use. I'd rather not spend the maintenance on th

Why not? Maybe because I'd rather not have to spend that much of my own capital on something I'd generally never use. I'd rather not spend the maintenance on that thing I'd generally never use. And finally, I'd rather not take up the space in my home with a large thing I'd generally never use. 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.

HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
Do you have any reasons besides that?
- vel0city 2y ago
  Sure. Having large batteries is an additional fire risk in my home for once again something I'd generally never need. If these batteries are in my home but managed by the grid operator I'd probably have to allow their people into my home to service them which I'd rather not have to do if it's something I'd generally never use. 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.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    You're not wrong about the fire risk, but just to note, house batteries nowadays are almost always LiFePO4 -- which don't catch fire the same way LiPo batteries like to do. They can still do so for other reasons, like a short circuit in the wiring.
    - vel0city 2y ago
      Fully understood and agreed. That's why I bothered saving that for the second comment, because it's not necessarily that high of a fire risk but it is still a little bit of one. Having that much energy stored in that small of a package will always have some kind of risk of "what happens when that stored energy gets released in an uncontrolled and rapid manner?" And that said, I do have lots of other somewhat beefy batteries around the house. They do a lot of useful things for me such as power my tools including my lawn mower, string trimmer, hedge trimmer, saws, etc. There is a massive one in the car parked in the garage. In these cases it is a useful trade off of that slight risk as I'm actually getting something normally useful out of it.
tzs 2y ago
Batteries can be useful for more than just getting through power outages. More and more utilities are offering time of use based pricing. For people on such plans a battery can be useful even if there are never any power outages by letting you store power from off peak times to use during peak times.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Unless it's a really massive swing it'll be a gamble if it will actually break even. A useful battery install for a home is at least several thousand dollars. I'll install $10k worth of batteries and manage to arbitrage $30/mo off my electrical plan, excellent! I'll break even in 28 years, wonderful! Will the batteries still have a meaningful charge after 28 years of use? Who knows! Meanwhile I'll miss out on the opportunity cost of that $10k over that same period. 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.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Doing some math on that $10k for an example of lost opportunity costs, today you can get a 10yr CD at 5.5% APY. Over a decade that's a hair over $17k, practically guaranteed return. So, to properly break even you're going to need to not just save $10k worth of electricity, you'll need to save something more like $17k. You'll need to arbitrage at least $141.67/mo on average for that entire 10-year period to break even compared to what you could have had just investing that into pretty safe savings. 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.

HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago

Do you have any reasons besides that?

vel0city 2y ago
Sure. Having large batteries is an additional fire risk in my home for once again something I'd generally never need. If these batteries are in my home but managed by the grid operator I'd probably have to allow their people into my home to service them which I'd rather not have to do if it's something I'd generally never use. 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.
- Filligree 2y ago
  You're not wrong about the fire risk, but just to note, house batteries nowadays are almost always LiFePO4 -- which don't catch fire the same way LiPo batteries like to do. They can still do so for other reasons, like a short circuit in the wiring.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    Fully understood and agreed. That's why I bothered saving that for the second comment, because it's not necessarily that high of a fire risk but it is still a little bit of one. Having that much energy stored in that small of a package will always have some kind of risk of "what happens when that stored energy gets released in an uncontrolled and rapid manner?" And that said, I do have lots of other somewhat beefy batteries around the house. They do a lot of useful things for me such as power my tools including my lawn mower, string trimmer, hedge trimmer, saws, etc. There is a massive one in the car parked in the garage. In these cases it is a useful trade off of that slight risk as I'm actually getting something normally useful out of it.

tzs 2y ago

Batteries can be useful for more than just getting through power outages. More and more utilities are offering time of use based pricing. For people on such plans a battery can be useful even if there are never any power outages by letting you store power from off peak times to use during peak times.

vel0city 2y ago
Unless it's a really massive swing it'll be a gamble if it will actually break even. A useful battery install for a home is at least several thousand dollars. I'll install $10k worth of batteries and manage to arbitrage $30/mo off my electrical plan, excellent! I'll break even in 28 years, wonderful! Will the batteries still have a meaningful charge after 28 years of use? Who knows! Meanwhile I'll miss out on the opportunity cost of that $10k over that same period. 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.
- vel0city 2y ago
  Doing some math on that $10k for an example of lost opportunity costs, today you can get a 10yr CD at 5.5% APY. Over a decade that's a hair over $17k, practically guaranteed return. So, to properly break even you're going to need to not just save $10k worth of electricity, you'll need to save something more like $17k. You'll need to arbitrage at least $141.67/mo on average for that entire 10-year period to break even compared to what you could have had just investing that into pretty safe savings. 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.