Except they're not replacing power plants at all, they're adding batteries to the grid to store and distribute power. After all, something has to charge the batteries.
I live just over the border in Massachusetts and we have something similar, called ConnectedSolutions. It is essentially the same kind of program except that the benefit is a 0% loan on the battery purchase. I have a 15kW battery that allows me to power the entire house overnight without drawing from the grid. When the power company wants to draw from my battery, they send me a notification through my battery’s app. I can opt out some fixed number of times, too. And, just as when my solar runs net negative, the power company pays me (in bill credits) whenever the virtual power plant draws power.
The only drawback, really, is that sometimes you _want_ the charge in the battery for yourself. If you take out a loan with a ConnectedSolutions clause (e.g., a MassSave loan), you are obligated to make your home battery available as a VPP under the terms of the loan.
Fortunately, one of the valid reasons for opting out from a "VPP event" (which is what my battery mfgr's app calls it) is a coming storm. In fact, in my system a "storm hedge" (where the battery tops itself up before a storm) trumps a VPP event, so for all practical purposes, there is little inconvenience. So there aren't really any drawbacks. And when you are done paying your loan you can either stay enrolled in ConnectedSolutions or not.
I say go for it. A 0% loan is great, and it was the deciding factor for us to buy the battery. Honestly, I wish I had bought a bigger battery! 15kWh is good for an evening, but not quite enough if the following day is rainy.
I bought a FranklinWH, both for technical reasons and because I could not in good conscience purchase a Tesla battery. I like the FranklinWH. However, I discovered that it is extremely chatty with a large number of hosts located in China. Most of the hosts it chats with are hardcoded IP addresses. This worries me a bit, not for xenophobic reasons, but because it strikes me as brittle. That said, I did end up putting the device on its own (firewalled-off) subnet. Although the app is kind of opaque, it works fine, and I mostly get the information I want via HomeAssistant, which has a FranklinWH plugin. I'm not sure if I would buy it again but it gets the job done.
My other equipment is mostly SolarEdge, which is excellent and well-behaved. SolarEdge now has batteries too-- I would probably look into them were I to buy a battery again.
A couple things to note. If you get a battery do not put it near your house. Generally, energy storage has a good safety record, but if they do experience thermal runaway, the fire effectively cannot be extinguished until all the fuel is consumed. Mine is 75' from my house because I have a solar groundmount array. Second, my solar installer initially set everything up using wifi, including a high-gain antenna because the array was so far from my house. I pointed out that I had an ethernet switch in my basement, so they ran hardwired networking through the power conduit to my house. Much more stable. Just ask for ethernet upfront if you can.
Yes, but last I checked the bidi chargers were proprietary - tied to vehicle manufacturer - which is a huge disincentive. I don't want my home's battery connector locked into a vehicle brand/manufacturer.
As a consumer, would you want the extra usage on your battery? Those extra cycles have to cause some additional degradation to the system, but I do not know how much.
Net metering rates are pretty poor, so I would guess not much outside of extreme grid instability. Although, you then might want to selfishly hoard the juice for yourself.
Depends on the nature of the agreement and the need for energy. In a load shedding event, the power company may want to cut useless residential consumers so as to prioritize hospitals. From a maximal good perspective, it is better that the hospital is running than I get to run my AC when the grid is straining.
> As a consumer, would you want the extra usage on your battery?
I feel like this is likely going to be a non-issue in practice. Because these batteries are rated to last at least 10 years either way. And by that time, the cost of replacement will be dramatically cheaper.
They're rated to last that long under a full charge-discharge cycle per day. You won't be using them more than that unless you're doing something really crazy.
Yes, thanks for the clarification. It goes without saying nobody can take energy from anyone without their permission. The manufacturers should build all cars with V2G feature, then people have the choice to participate in the energy ecosystem.
In a hypothetical future where every single car participated, you probably wouldn't need to dedicate more than a few % capacity to still make an absolutely massive VPP
I love this. It’s basically an edge cache for power, with an enormous amount of side benefits - smooths out solar power, smooths out the duck curve, and allows the grid to size closer to the average load and absorb the spikes at the edge, instead of cascading into the core.
There was an article earlier about the distribution challenges that come from large workload fluxes, too - tl;dr is the transmission lines get less efficient under higher load, so smoothing out the demand curve to the end user also raises the efficiency of the entire grid.
And with the way that grid costs are coming to dominate electricity costs, these sorts of peak shaving technologies will be huge cost savers in the future.
This comment needs to be higher than all the "but storage is not generation!!" fud in here. Didn't realize how astroturfy hn had become. "edge cache for power" is the true spirit of what this is about
We have this in CA. I have Tesla batteries and they promote wanting me to enroll my batteries into a larger grid so their capacity can be used during higher load events.
I thought it was a novel idea when I heard about it.
Be more explicit. What is wrong with this? It's not all the time, it's only in times of extreme need.
Variable pricing like this enables all sorts of cost saving technologies that bring down the cost of the grid and generating power for everyone, by spending a lot for a very short time, instead of building tons of extra large assets that sit mostly idle.
If somebody is providing a service that operates on the whole sale market, they deserve to get paid like all the other generators that are helping to keep the grid running in these times of need.
It seems like an unreservedly good thing if people with home batteries can help prevent brownouts and reduce prices for everyone else. Also, I believe the $150/day figure was during a rare heatwave event when prices had surged to 100x their typical value ($5/kWh). It’s like any other investment where you outlay cash upfront and hope to make it back over time, whether via reduced costs for your own electricity usage or selling it back to the grid when doing so is profitable.
> Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day
Only on peak demand days, of which there are only a handful every year.
I have Enphase batteries enrolled in an equivalent program, so I've tracked how much I make. Definitely not enough to make much of a dent in the payoff time for the batteries. But a nice perk nonetheless.
It is actually a pretty great way to address marginal demand spikes without overbuilding generation capacity. With the fringe bonus of local protection from short outages.
Which version do you have? I believe they switched to LFP for V3, which should pose significantly less fire risk than the NMC chemistry they were using for V2 and before
The way an electricity utility works, you need power plants (or to buy power from someone with power plants), transmission lines and some form of last mile delivery. You have substations and other infrastructure too. That infrastructure has ongoing maintenance costs but also capex to build it in the first place.
So your per kWh price is the sum of the electricity cost, the maintenance cost and the amortized capex plus some profit.
Utilities are heavy regulated but only the electricity cost tends to be highly regulated. Any maintenance or capex costs can be passed on directly to the consumer. Private equity has realized this. Data centers have realized this where they can negotiate a lower electricity rate and the build out for multi-gigawatt transmission and power generation can be passed on to consumers. This has gotten creative enough that people in unrelated states end up paying more because of upgrades required for shared infrastructure for interstate utility compacts.
The obvious endpoint for all this is for users to eventually opt out. Disconnect from the grid and use totally renewable energy plus batteries. Generally in any urban environment you can't avoid the monthly connection cost even if you use no power. The city will declare your house unlivable. I can see this changing in the coming years with soaring prices that basically go to share buybacks and bonuses for private utilities.
But what if the connection to the grid drops significantly shifting maintenance costs to the rest?
I think the future is going to move away from large connected grids towards self-sufficiency and smaller localized grids, ideally municipally owned. But you can't gradually move from a large grid to smaller grids like this because of the problems of who pays for the grid in between.
I think you are spot on. The grid death spiral. Unless you can have enough generation co-locatrd with consumption you need the grid and the utility scale plants. In the densely populated areas you simply cannot have enough generation within the same footprint as the demand with existing tech.
I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.
It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property, or are only for the homeowner's benefit. The utility company has the right to use that power however they want at any time including the "right to use all the energy in the battery". The homeowner also has to allow contractors, subcontractors, or third-parties onto their property at any time. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth and agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences), but the fine print makes it clear that home owners should not expect that they will have any access to the power that battery provides in the event of a power outage or at any other time.
>I'd feel better about this if they weren't charging people thousands for the batteries. As it is, this looks like a scam by utility companies to force their costs onto consumers and charge them for it on top of that. People should be being paid by the utility for storing, hosting, and allowing access to the power company's distributed infrastructure.
I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of
Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.
There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.
>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)
This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.
>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*
In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate...
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too.
We should be doing this as a society (or as a state or as a utility company) instead of relying on individual do-gooders to pay for it. 70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free. Thanks for sharing your experience.
>We should be doing this as a society (or as a state or as a utility company) instead of relying on individual do-gooders to pay for it.
Sure, but we aren't yet, at least not remotely to the extent required. And we all individually have benefited from the externalized pollution that fossil fuels have been responsible for, this isn't just some nebulous other thing right? It's not unreasonable imo that yeah, we individually should try to pay for that damage we ourselves "profited" from, even while simultaneously trying to vote and organize towards broader solutions. But feeding money into getting off fossil fuel is both directly personally helpful and broadly helpful.
>70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
I don't agree with you, and it's my money, my buildings and my call to make. I've gotten a plenty solid direct benefit in ROI over the last 8-9 years for the $3k it cost me one time only vs the $15k a couple of PowerWall 2s would have been upfront and then the rate shifting and minimal solar I was in a position for at the time, or alternatively the cost of a new generator and then all the fuel and ongoing maintenance required. The $12k in savings thanks to the utility is money I could put into other investments that have had their own ROI since then. I do think the math now for me and a lot of others is different in 2026 then 2017, there are lots and lots of competitive battery and solar and inverter solutions now at radically reduced prices and that seems to just be accelerating, with sodium based systems and other tech coming. But that wouldn't have offset a real chunk of 9 years of carbon equiv release by me. The batteries got far more usage as part of a system for society then just me, and I still did ok even if it didn't perfectly maximize the individual dollar savings.
>They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
If you BYOB you do get that choice, though obviously if you let them take less they pay less. But it's not money for nothing, just a weighing of risk/benefit.
>That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free.
The battery cost per kWh has fallen enough and I think they've gotten comfortable enough with the landscape shift that I can see that making sense now, not early adopter territory anymore. The utility is also in a position to realize benefits like having a bit more leeway in how they dispatch linemen for repairs, if they know someone is covered for 20 hours and it's currently 15 below zero with whiteout conditions that'll clear in 2 hours maybe it's worth something to be able to not have that be an emergency (or instead to direct emergency efforts to someone else who isn't covered).
>Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm glad it's come up on HN. It's one of the few real rays of hope I find in all this, that despite failure of collective action it's just getting so good that the economics and politics are tilting anyway. Won't be fast enough to avoid a lot of bad effects, but it can always get worse so the faster the better.
> They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
Is there possibly a breaker connecting the home mains with the grid? Which side of the breaker is the battery on? Will the system continue to output even if it doesn't have a reference AC waveform from the grid?
> First, the batteries took the place of a generator,
The generator would have been yours, and only used for your needs. It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
> Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead.
They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to. The good news is that in the event where a cable is cut/down and they lose the ability to siphon power from your battery you will be sure to get the benefit of whatever power it has stored. It's also nice that they compensate you for the power that they draw, but again, all of that energy is already theirs by right.
The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about.
It's honestly not a bad idea conceptually. It seems like it can have real benefits, but the terms are exploitative. At a minimum they should be obligated to prioritize your power needs above others when it comes to energy stored in the battery on your premises, and they should be obligated to compensate you for power taken, as well as for providing them storage, access, security and bandwidth for their equipment, and they should also assume responsibility for any damage/harm their equipment causes to your property and anyone one on your property as long as it wasn't caused by tampering or improper use. Ideally, you'd also be able to opt out of all personal data collection (not related directly to the use/monitoring of their hardware), and any loss/theft/damage would be covered by their insurance (provided their equipment was reasonably secured), otherwise they'd have to pay you enough to get additional insurance coverage of your own.
I'm glad it worked out for you when you had it, but unless the terms were very different from what they are today you were absolutely cheated and being taken advantage of, even if you didn't feel that way.
A high trust society doesn't cause a monopoly to become efficient. A society where everyone is thinking of the common good is the one where individualism works, because then you have no need for a giant bureaucracy trying to coerce everyone into doing the right thing, since they would do that of their own accord.
But the disadvantage of bureaucratic management is even larger in a low-trust society where everyone is out for themselves, because then you can't trust the bureaucrats not to be corrupt and they're still sitting on a monopoly.
Unless you are completely off the grid, you are getting power from a local monopoly. This is baked in. You get your water from one source, send your sewerage to one source, get your power from one source, etc. So then the question is how to make the monopoly well behaved and how to keep them that way.
>The generator would have been yours, and only used for your needs.
It also would have required constant testing and cost whether I used it or not, with no ROI whatsoever beyond power backup, a lot more noise/local pollution/size, storage of significant amounts of extra fuel (be it propane or diesel) with the resulting challenges, etc. Maybe the best bet and the one I was most strongly considering would be a PTO generator I could hook my tractor up to, then I'd get all the engine testing and fuel refreshing/storage "for free" on some level, in that I run the tractor anyway. But that still would have been dead cost most of the time, and on a basic but real human physical level, having to go out to the barn to hook things up and unhook them in the heart of winter wasn't a delightful prospect either. Propane doesn't go bad and maybe I could have finagled that into my heating system for a unified tank instead of multiple but that's still its own complexity, and place to house it and so on. And in retrospect that would have reduced the value of the heat pumps I've done since.
Batteries are nice. And I'm glad it wasn't only used for my needs. I like helping my neighbors, my town, and my state.
>It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
I'm definitely sensitive to data collection, and full local control has always been something I've cared a lot about and is a significant consideration going forward. But I've got the PW isolated on its own VLAN going through my OPNsense router, and the granularity of its perspective is I think pretty course. Given what I'm running I just don't think there's a whole lot, if anything, it can glean the power company couldn't already, it's pretty out there on the master panel so it doesn't even see just the house, use from the barn and office and so on is all mixed into the signal. Taking into account what was on offer and far tighter finances at the time I think I did the best I could.
This is also a case where I think some level of regulated, low granularity population data may be pretty important in terms of infra planning our shift to only renewables and a smarter grid. I'll have to keep thinking about that though.
>They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to
I'd have to double check if my terms from back then are different then what they offer now, but ultimately the fact remains that across hundreds of outages and blips over 8-9 years with a couple of devastating floods and storms in the mix it has never been an issue even once. These aren't megacorps, utilities here are pretty tiny by national standards and pretty responsive (as well as regulated).
>The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
GMP has I believe something like 10,000 miles of pole distribution lines for 265000 customers, but of course those customers are not evenly distributed, there are towns around here with literally double digits of people. And it's the biggest one, there are tons of smaller outfits and coops etc. "Reliable" doesn't mean "perfect" and never has, that's just not possible at the prices people can afford here.
I mean really, on some level everyone needs to be ready to contribute in general for life here sometimes. State is responsible for roads and such too, but if it's bad I and others get out our chainsaws (now electric! electric chainsaws are AWESOME) and winch...
You and I live in areas where social norms are to help our neighbours and contribute to our communities. GP seems to live in a place where relationships are contractual - he pays taxes and expects to be served in return with no effort on his part.
Often people from different societies have difficulty understanding how anyone "could live like that" - in both directions.
I am struggling here too. I think there are some decent points at the margins, but I can't get past the idea, "If this is the one place I am being exploited, I would be pretty ok with that."
Helping neighbors and contributing to communities is great! Getting taken for a ride by a utility company isn't either of those things. The relationship with their utility company is literally contractual. They make you sign a contract! A contract with very bad terms. They're pushing some of the typical costs of running their business onto their customers, leaving them entirely responsible in the event that anything goes wrong, even when their customers do nothing wrong and have no control over the situation, and they are making the customer pay them for the privilege while not being legally obligated to provide anything in return.
Also yes, paying taxes should entitle someone to basic minimums like the ability to pay for clean drinking water delivered to your tap, and reliable power delivered to your home. We aren't a developing country, we're the richest nation on Earth. The extent of the "effort on my part" should be limited to signing up with the utility company and paying my bills every month. Everything else is their job. It's what they are paid for. What "effort on your part" are you making in your life to help your water company? Your cable company?
> It also would have required constant testing and cost whether I used it or not, with no ROI whatsoever beyond power backup, a lot more noise/local pollution/size, storage of significant amounts of extra fuel (be it propane or diesel) with the resulting challenges, etc.
According to the utility company you should have one anyway because you may not have access to the power available in your battery even when it is full. Even when you need it, they can decide to send it somewhere else.
> And I'm glad it wasn't only used for my needs. I like helping my neighbors, my town, and my state.
In this case you're also helping your utility company and being charged for the privilege. How often have they helped you with something you weren't paying them for?
> These aren't megacorps, utilities here are pretty tiny
Your energy company is a subsidiary of Énergir. It's the largest power company in Vermont providing service to the vast majority of the state. They also provide power for New York, Maine and Connecticut. Énergir is also the largest natural gas distribution company in Quebec. This is not a local mom and pop operation.
> I mean really, on some level everyone needs to be ready to contribute in general for life here sometimes. State is responsible for roads and such too, but if it's bad I and others get out our chainsaws (now electric! electric chainsaws are AWESOME) and winches and so on and get to work.
How much do your neighbors charge you when you help clear the roads with your chainsaws? Do they make you legally liable for any damage to cars if there are accidents on that road after you helped clear it? Would it be absurd if they did?
If you really want to volunteer to help host/power/secure/connect your utility company's infrastructure for them that's very sweet of you, I'm sure that will save them a lot of money, but they are also charging you a bill to do it for them and then they're leaving you liable for things entirely outside of your control while also making you agree that you'll be responsible for any harm caused by their equipment. They aren't being your friend here. They aren't looking out for you. They aren't acting like a part of your community. They are charging you and your state money, externalizing some of their costs and risks by putting them onto you, and charging you thousands for that.
Data collection is very useful and valuable to you when done right. We need to ensure the data isn't abused, but that doesn't mean data collection is bad when the data is used correctly.
The utility is well aware that power outages happen and make their customers mad. They want to solve them, but they also know cost matters and so that takes many ways to solve power outages out. Data used correctly from systems like this make power more reliable and it can be cost effective. By giving the utility access to this data they can better serve everybody.
Again, the key is that the data is used to serve everybody and not used for any of the abuses it can also be used for.
IIUC, the benefit for the customer is a battery backup that is much cheaper than buying the batteries themselves would be, plus the ability to make money when their battery is taken over for a few hours during occasional peak usage events. Provided the former override the latter, as seems to be the case, I don't see what the issue is.
I think you're claiming that battery backup shouldn't be needed in the first place if the power company was doing their job properly, since then there wouldn't be frequent outages in the first place. But I gather that this just isn't practical in rural Vermont. To put it another way: In that environment, a power company guaranteeing 99.999% uptime could not offer this at a price that is acceptable to most customers. So the equilibrium naturally shifts towards citizens tolerating more frequent outages than would be tolerated in, say, central NYC, and/or paying for mitigations like generators or batteries.
> IIUC, the benefit for the customer is a battery backup that is much cheaper than buying the batteries themselves would be, plus the ability to make money when their battery is taken over for a few hours during occasional peak usage events. Provided the former override the latter, as seems to be the case, I don't see what the issue is.
They don't get a battery backup. The utility company gets a battery backup and the customer pays a large percentage of that cost. The utility company isn't obligated to let the consumer who paid for part of that battery draw power from it, ever. They explicitly state that all the energy it stores is theirs, and that they can drain all of it away any time they want to.
Customers are being contractually obligated to shell out thousands of dollars, over a 10 year commitment they're punished for backing out of, obligated to not hold the utility company responsible for any damage they cause, obligated to take on a bunch of liability for things they have no control over, obligated to allow the company access to their property, obligated to allow the company access to use their internet service free of charge, and for all of that the utility company isn't obligated to do anything but install the company's equipment on the customer's property
All the customer gets is that maybe they'll be paid for the power the company takes from the battery (the company doesn't have to pay anything) and to maybe get to draw power from it if there's a service outage (the company isn't obligated to let them use any of it).
There are customers who say they are being paid for that energy and they have been able to use the power to avoid outages, and that's great, but that can change at any time and for any reason because the terms they agreed to don't obligate the utility to do either of those things. The terms explicitly say that all of the energy in the battery belongs to the utility company and they can use it however they see fit.
Maybe this utility company is the nicest company in the world. Maybe the utility company today would volunteer out of the kindness of their heart to rebuild someone's house if a software update causes the battery to catch fire and the customer's home burned to the ground along with everything in it, but the terms say they wouldn't have to do that and couldn't be made to. Maybe the company would never ever stop paying customers for the energy they take, or leave the customer without power while they drain the full battery to help restore service for businesses or wealthier customers. The terms would let them do those things though.
You shouldn't pay out thousands of dollars, take on a list of obligations, and expose yourself to huge risks and liabilities and then still be forced to just hope that the company will do the right thing, and keep doing the right thing for the next decade of your life. That's the problem.
There’s probably a significant element of consumer batteries being so good, so easy to setup, and so cheap to buy. That it actually ends up being more economical to take this approach, than build dedicated utility scale battery storage.
With consumer units, you can reasonably expect that they’ll operate with zero maintenance and zero direct supervision for a decade plus. If the cost of those units is low enough, that reduced operational burden starts looking very attractive, especially if you want to scale up your battery capacity across your network very quickly.
>With consumer units, you can reasonably expect that they’ll operate with zero maintenance and zero direct supervision for a decade plus
I highly doubt it. You can reasonably expect one hard drive to operate just fine for years, but data centers have to constantly replace failed drives, and that would still be true if they they put each one in a different building. It would just cost a lot more to do.
Assuming they set up the house to island, which depends a lot on the install. Otherwise live power from a house in an outage is a big risk to those working on solving the outage.
Most are hours but there are enough that are a day or more that it is a valid consideration. As to when, honestly I think there are more not snow related. Long stretches of wet (or floods) and high winds not a good mix.
In my experience as a VT homeowner we have relatively frequent short outages. It's pretty rural and the weather is brutal. I think the grid doesn't have as much redundancy as denser areas. We had one 3 day outage 2 years ago in the middle of winter which got quite dangerous, but otherwise I haven't had anything more than a few hours.
Also we have propane heat - but I need electricity for the blower and control board. So the electric consumption is pretty minimal, but it is critical.
You also need to take into account the fact that VPP systems like this stabilize the grid by flattening the peaks and troughs, and reduce the average length of outages.
Base power is doing something similar in Texas. AFAICT, they take a loss on the equipment, charge the batteries when electricity prices are cheap, then sell power out of the batteries when prices are high and keep the difference. The homeowner enjoys only most likely having backup power.
I mean, the electricity still has to be generated. That still costs money. This whole thing only works as long as there is someone willing to buy at the high prices and off peak demand stays low enough to keep prices cheap. Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.
> Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.
What do you mean? The opportunity for energy arbitrage will go away if energy prices are constant. Right now they aren’t, and I don’t really see how they would become constant based on the physics of producing and consuming energy.
Okay, well, that’s clever for now. The real arbitrage base is pulling is getting in while there’s capital to be raised for it and money to be extracted from the market, before competitors emerge and the incumbents respond and everyone realizes the play all along was to build an enormous battery plant without the expenses of land and compliance and negotiating with producers and carriers. They’re in the buying low phase now.
They’ll sell high when PE buys the company and pulls a Broadcom on all the existing customers, who will abandon the equipment after ten years go back to installing Tri-fuel generators while Centerpoint deals B2B with serious battery plant operators instead of B2C with annoying consumers
Customers running batteries they don’t own to store energy they can’t use for a company that won’t share profits is not the future.
Vermont’s project might be more viable, they’re a little better able to see beyond a spreadsheet up there. California will regulate it into unsustainable price territory. In the meantime finbros in Texas will make a killing having Claude build badass dashboards to show how much they make off bored suburbanites stuck on a grid built and operated as cheaply as possible to take as much money as they can before the useless state government is run out on a rail or finally eats the last bite of its own ass
The headline says that the batteries are powering the homes, which is absolutely and technically correct use of "powering".
Maybe you saw "generating"? It may interest you to know that batteries output is counted among "generation" by the EIA and nearly all grid documents I know about, and is also technically correct.
Natural gas is merely stored solar energy too, if it the ideas of batteries "generating" anything rubs you the wrong way.
>The US now has over 40GW of virtual power plant capacity, according to internal analysis by Wood Mackenzie. It's still relatively small compared to the roughly 600GW of natural gas and 200GW of coal, but a total of 160GW of capacity could be unlocked by 2030, according to a 2025 US Department of Energy report – equal to some 20% of the country's expected peak energy demand.
>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.
Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
What do you mean? These numbers provide great guidance so that people can understand the size of the battery discharge, and what they could replace.
Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Power isn't a particularly helpful metric here, energy is. Power doesn't tell you anything about how long the batteries will last, it only tells you how quickly they can drain. Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.
>Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Hey don't tell me that, tell the BBC. They're the ones who wrote an entire article about "replacing power plants with home batteries".
They literally did replace power plants with these batteries though. From the article: “ GMP similarly used to rely on oil, diesel and natural gas peaker plants to meet peak demand. Now the company's virtual power plant has effectively replaced them, says McClure. "We've been slowly able to decommission those as they've become end-of-life," she says.”
I agree with how power is a bad way to measure batteries a lot of the time (though if you assume they last 4 hours you shouldn't be too far off).
But I don't think the residential line limits are too bad. A house that's sending out power takes its load off the grid and can also power multiple other houses without any lines being overloaded. And if an area has a high enough battery:house ratio, the full megawatt capacity of powering those houses but flowing the other way is a ton of power. (If the equipment can handle power flowing both ways.)
I don't think the BBC is confused here at all. Batteries do indeed replace power plants. They are already actively replacing gas peaker plants all over. In California, batteries they are dramatically reducing regular, non-peaker, gas turbine generation, by outcompeting them on the grid.
> Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.
These specific batteries, on the other ends of residential lines, indeed do push power back on the grid in aggregate enough to replace coal power plants. There's nothing special about a point generator on the grid versus the aggregate action of thousands of batteries on the other side of the distribution stations. In fact that's what's so amazing about batteries versus large thermal generators: thermal generators are large because if they get super inefficient when they're not large. Nobody is installing a small coal generator at their home to run daily, and even small diesel generators are hugely inefficient. But batteries are so useful that even accounting for the extra expense of large numbers of custom installs, they reduce grid demand enough to make a ton of financial.
And power is indeed the most important metric when it comes to the grid. It's how everything is run, how individual grid assets are dispatched, because power needs to be balanced at every moment. Somebody could throw an asset on the grid that only dispatched for 15 minutes (or whatever the minimum bid time is), and it would still be described primarily by power. Capacity decisions may be made in kW-month or whatever unit, but you can run a grid on a pure energy market without any capacity market at all, as ERCOT shows.
I think what he was saying is that with a peaker plant you have an extra source of power. So if you have a low wind/low irradiance period - you can rely on peaker to provide more power, but by this stage batteries are long gone.
Is that a local question for Vermont, a nation question for the US, or a global question?
If the question is global, then yes, there are, although as renewable energy has increased globally so has the need for peaker plants to handle the variance in the grid, thus plants that historically has only been used for seasonal variance are now used all year round to handle weather variance. An example of that is the oil power plant in south of Sweden.
> Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
VPPs displace more expensive generation capacity at the margin. Because your marginal loads are for relatively short durations. It's actually quite smart.
I couldn't read the article because of paywall issues. I have a Tesla powerwall that I pay $50 / month to lease from green mountain power. I have piece of mind for power in a rural area - the power company get peaker benefits. Seems like a great deal. I wish we had this in Massachusetts. Mad river valley area.
I think there's suppose to be a feel good in here, but it feels like another race to the bottom. Power companies dont invest their profits they take them and then when the grid becomes unreliable put it on the customers with interesting excuses and eco-fashionable handouts to help the pill go down.
I tried to signup for this program but the building code gets in the way. You need 3' from both edges of the battery to a window or door. I don't have a wall with 8-9' between windows. The alternative is to build a fire proof room in your house which takes up a lot of space. Ultimately it was not worth it even with all the financial incentives. The rules might seem innocuous but they're a dealbreaker. It's far easier to get a propane or diesel generator installed.
Generators are generally used outside. There are some rated for use inside, but they also have strict regulations on how that is done. (there are also some used inside but they will kill someone soon)
Maybe where you live, but where I live the temperature outside is bad for batteries.
Though what is "inside" is debatable. My car can sit outside because it has the batteries in a case that is climate controlled when needed, and so the batteries count as inside even though they are in a car that is outside.
Seems like they supply each person with 2 Tesla powerwalls for the $55/month and get a reduction in their bills that depends on how much power they choose to share to the grid during power outages.
They've already closed down 2 peaker power plants because of this, so it doesn't seem to just be about handling power outages, but also handling fluctuating power usage instead of firing up extra power plants.
>They've already closed down 2 peaker power plants because of this, so it doesn't seem to just be about handling power outages, but also handling fluctuating power usage instead of firing up extra power plants.
Yes, that was a significant early argument I remember around the public benefits. The daily power spikes have always been a major challenge particularly when you don't have much commercial/industrial base. And even in the earliest period of the original 2000 home pilot they were surprised and pretty happy about how much load could be spread and the resulting savings. Note though that regulators were cautious and there was controversy around how well it'd actually work, you can find articles like this 2019 VT Digger one [0] from the era. Fortunately it did indeed work out, but easy to forget it was all pretty new at one point.
I was thinking exactly about this when reading the article. The article writes about house owner benefits but it's the benefits of reduced peaks that are more likely to make providers wanting to do so. With this in place, power plants can take half an hour to increase their generation and top up the battery, instead of having to have faster plants round that caters to peaks.
Lithium is not the way to go for home batteries. As size/weight are not an issue for a basement or shed install, oldschool lead-acid are much cheaper and can be easily recycled once at end of life.
Those tesla wall packs will be a massive headache when they give up the ghost. Read the contract carefully. Who is responsable for end-of-life disposal? Where/how are they to be disposed of? Lead acids can be taken to any number of recycling centers, some will even pay you for them.
Seems like recycling is picking up for lithium batteries and the metal components are still valuable enough.
I think a bigger question is if sodium batteries starts to take over (seems better for homes, heavier but seemingly safer but also for cheaper cars) and lithium/rare-earth metals prices goes down.
Not in homes. Density is a huge issue for commercial installations. The off-grid community also values user-repairabilty and avoiding vendor lock-in. Good luck replacing a dead cell in a tesla pack.
The market for this isn't the off-grid community. It's basically every GMP customer.
You aren't wrong about part of the off-grid community not wanting this. I'm not sure I'd want it if I were doing an off-grid install, but it does stand to grow the off-grid community to include people who are looking for a turnkey solution instead of having to do all the research to put together a more user-maintainable system.
Isn't the Tesla pack just a bunch of 18650 (or some similar cell)?
I wouldn't expect the home owner to repair them. However they should be repairable by someone with training in how to diagnose and replace failed cells. (which mostly means a battery welder and some safety systems)
I was looking into this stuff early this year in India, and found LiFePO₄ more compelling on paper: two or three times the cost, but lasting two or three times as long, allowing deeper discharge so it should be equivalent to slightly higher capacity, and requiring no maintenance. I could easily have overlooked or misunderstood something, and am interested in counterarguments.
The lifespan numbers are lies. I have personal knowledge of deep cycle lead batteries lasting 10+ years, thousands of cycles. Many websites actually cite numbers for sealed batteries as used in cars. "Flooded" batteries last longer than sealed because they can be inspected and maintained. There are also "deep cycle" and "marine" units which are also different than car batteries and can be discharged more.
There are too many variables to make a simple statement. Lead-acid is a lot cheaper and we know how to recycle it. We also have a long proven history of lead acid lasting for decades in ideal conditions (which a house battery is more likely to hit than in a car).
However lead-acid does not like deep discharge so to get max life you will be using much less than the full discharge cycle 80%-100%, and so the lifecycle costs are very different. In some cases lead-acid can be more cost effective if you manage it well, but I would expect lithium to be cheaper for the typical case.
That is lead acid means your real goal is a cheap home backup, which you have to ride out multi-day power outages, and as a secondary you will sell some power to the grid, but you are not trying to make money doing this. By contrast I would expect lithium to make sense if your primary goal is to make money (or at least pay for your home backup system that can ride out a couple hours of outage but not days). The storage to ride out days could work now, but long term as your neighbors buy the system eventually there isn't the need for that much storage and someone gets limited.
We're in the program. As written, it's a 10 year lease, and there's no option to buy-out the equipment at the end. We'll see if they offer that as an option as the end of the lease approaches in another 7 years. For now though, GMP is on the hook to come and get the equipment.
I would also suggest that size and weight are bigger concerns than you're giving credit to. They aren't assembling packs on-site from individual batteries. They're rolling in whole-ass packs in one swell foop. Getting them into basements isn't a small job[0]. Getting them back out will be even less fun for the crews.
Their total on-site install time was maybe 6 hours, and that included tying everything in to the existing system. Putting the hardware in place took maybe an hour of that time. If you want to go with heavier packs or more/larger packs, you're going to add to that a bit. And their doing this in people's finished homes. This isn't new build where they can have a couple of big dudes wrangling packs around without a care in the world for furniture and finished surfaces. The ergonomics of smaller packs matter.
[0] They used a two-wheel dolly with a hydraulic disc brake (bicycle hardware) to get them down our basement stairs.
If the utility owns the packs, part of me wonders why not build out battery stations around substations the utility already owns, instead of managing many small batteries in individual houses.
Seems like the former would have some development costs but ultimately be cheaper to manage
Long term, with people moving towards charging their cars at home, storing excess solar energy at home might be the more economical option because it decreases the amount of power a substation has to send out at peak times.
I guess Vermont’s relatively low population density makes that more likely; with lower population density each service station will either service fewer homes or require more cabling towards those homes. Either way, more cabling is needed per house. Upgrading that to handle the load of charging a car can be costly.
Doing it that way they couldn't charge a lease to the homeowners. By leasing the batteries to the homeowners they're offsetting some of the cost through that lease, but also the selling point for the homeowner is they (presumably) now have a backup in case of a full outage
Also, you're reducing demand on the grid by having them at people's homes, not just reducing the demand on the power plants. If the batteries were centralized you'd still need to move that massive amount of power over distribution and transmission lines, which is actually just as big a problem as needing to spin up a peaker plant. In many areas the bottleneck is transmission not generation
2-wheel dollies with motorized stair climbers are a thing too. Not super common, but aren't cost prohibitive for a use case like this where they'd see daily use.
Lead-acid batteries are amazing for starting an engine, and terrible at basically anything else. They're slow to charge and very sensitive to over-discharge: it's generally recommended to never go below 50% state-of-charge (so you basically need twice the capacity in the first place), and even one full-discharge event will permanently reduce their overall capacity. The fact that they're almost impossible to over-charge means they're never paired with a proper BMS so they usually aren't protected against this type of damage. Also they need to be fully-charged every few days, so they're a poor choice in an application where they're constantly cycled.
Lithium batteries in contrast only need a ~10% buffer, and don't care about being topped off except for calibrating the BMS in certain variants (the only reason why LFP cars want you to charge to 100% regularly), so you don't have to over-provision as much. End-of-life is being sorted out as we speak, recycling companies are popping up as discarded batteries from cars are becoming common. Some may even pay you for them too.
We're in the program. The powerwalls don't share to the grid when there's an outage. We don't get a direct reduction in our bill for having them. Everyone on GMP gets better rates because GMP isn't buying power wholesale at peak rates or generating it with peaker plants.
That is exactly right! Put the batteries where the cost of strain is the highest.
My belief is that this is ideologically/politically motivated. If you put the batteries next to network equipment it will not have the same immediate saving effect/user experience as the battery at home.
Battery at home gets a response of someone being happy about getting apiece of hardware, saving money and being renewable!
Vermont gets occasional ice storms or heavy snow that brings down trees on the power lines, so having a battery in your house can be pretty useful.
I'm a bit nostalgic for the nights when we'd break out the kerosene lanterns. But I concede that this might be more practical and a bit safer (a lot of VT houses are tinder boxes and good luck getting a good fire response in an ice storm).
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[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 59.1 ms ] threadFortunately, one of the valid reasons for opting out from a "VPP event" (which is what my battery mfgr's app calls it) is a coming storm. In fact, in my system a "storm hedge" (where the battery tops itself up before a storm) trumps a VPP event, so for all practical purposes, there is little inconvenience. So there aren't really any drawbacks. And when you are done paying your loan you can either stay enrolled in ConnectedSolutions or not.
I say go for it. A 0% loan is great, and it was the deciding factor for us to buy the battery. Honestly, I wish I had bought a bigger battery! 15kWh is good for an evening, but not quite enough if the following day is rainy.
My other equipment is mostly SolarEdge, which is excellent and well-behaved. SolarEdge now has batteries too-- I would probably look into them were I to buy a battery again.
A couple things to note. If you get a battery do not put it near your house. Generally, energy storage has a good safety record, but if they do experience thermal runaway, the fire effectively cannot be extinguished until all the fuel is consumed. Mine is 75' from my house because I have a solar groundmount array. Second, my solar installer initially set everything up using wifi, including a high-gain antenna because the array was so far from my house. I pointed out that I had an ethernet switch in my basement, so they ran hardwired networking through the power conduit to my house. Much more stable. Just ask for ethernet upfront if you can.
But given they are NMC chemistry, you probably wouldn't want to cycle them a lot for the grid (or just your home).
Car batteries are significantly larger than powerwall.
I feel like this is likely going to be a non-issue in practice. Because these batteries are rated to last at least 10 years either way. And by that time, the cost of replacement will be dramatically cheaper.
They are rated to last at least 10 years (under X usage conditions)
They won't last nearly that long under Y usage conditions if Y is substantially larger than X
Requiring it is crazy.
Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!
There was an article earlier about the distribution challenges that come from large workload fluxes, too - tl;dr is the transmission lines get less efficient under higher load, so smoothing out the demand curve to the end user also raises the efficiency of the entire grid.
It feels like politics to me, and HN is definitely not immune to partisan motivated reasoning.
Distributed power storage/generation has been a thing for a century and it’s finally economical enough to be mainstream.
This was the whole pitch of the solarcity/tesla solar tiles + power wall a decade or more ago.
I thought it was a novel idea when I heard about it.
it shouldnt be celebrated.
Variable pricing like this enables all sorts of cost saving technologies that bring down the cost of the grid and generating power for everyone, by spending a lot for a very short time, instead of building tons of extra large assets that sit mostly idle.
If somebody is providing a service that operates on the whole sale market, they deserve to get paid like all the other generators that are helping to keep the grid running in these times of need.
Not only do peaker plants make the most bucks/KWH, but they increase prices for all generation because of how auctions operate.
During peak need, renting some capacity from subscribers already on your grid means you don't need to build another peaker plant.
Only on peak demand days, of which there are only a handful every year.
I have Enphase batteries enrolled in an equivalent program, so I've tracked how much I make. Definitely not enough to make much of a dent in the payoff time for the batteries. But a nice perk nonetheless.
also
Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg
CATL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPTgg3joL5E
The way an electricity utility works, you need power plants (or to buy power from someone with power plants), transmission lines and some form of last mile delivery. You have substations and other infrastructure too. That infrastructure has ongoing maintenance costs but also capex to build it in the first place.
So your per kWh price is the sum of the electricity cost, the maintenance cost and the amortized capex plus some profit.
Utilities are heavy regulated but only the electricity cost tends to be highly regulated. Any maintenance or capex costs can be passed on directly to the consumer. Private equity has realized this. Data centers have realized this where they can negotiate a lower electricity rate and the build out for multi-gigawatt transmission and power generation can be passed on to consumers. This has gotten creative enough that people in unrelated states end up paying more because of upgrades required for shared infrastructure for interstate utility compacts.
The obvious endpoint for all this is for users to eventually opt out. Disconnect from the grid and use totally renewable energy plus batteries. Generally in any urban environment you can't avoid the monthly connection cost even if you use no power. The city will declare your house unlivable. I can see this changing in the coming years with soaring prices that basically go to share buybacks and bonuses for private utilities.
But what if the connection to the grid drops significantly shifting maintenance costs to the rest?
I think the future is going to move away from large connected grids towards self-sufficiency and smaller localized grids, ideally municipally owned. But you can't gradually move from a large grid to smaller grids like this because of the problems of who pays for the grid in between.
It's not as if the batteries people are paying for become their property, or are only for the homeowner's benefit. The utility company has the right to use that power however they want at any time including the "right to use all the energy in the battery". The homeowner also has to allow contractors, subcontractors, or third-parties onto their property at any time. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth and agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences), but the fine print makes it clear that home owners should not expect that they will have any access to the power that battery provides in the event of a power outage or at any other time.
It is as if. The article says it's a lease agreement, and provides this link.
https://greenmountainpower.com/rebates-programs/home-energy-...
>the homeowner "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
What are you quoting?
I participated in this program early on (currently on year 8 or 9) and I don't think you're giving a fair characterization. First, the batteries took the place of a generator, and have reliable protected my buildings from power outages since. Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead. So there's direct value to having them, particularly in a rural area of a rural state, regardless of any other money. Having a sizable generator isn't free, not just in terms of purchase but in terms of
Second, the utility did in fact pay with a pretty massive discount (around $5-6k per battery at the time IIRC). The amount they were willing to pay wasn't enough to completely cancel out the battery cost back then, but it was like 70-80% of the cost. And in general looking at all the various VPP programs in the region utilities remain very much willing to pay you per kWh, whether it's a lease or BYOB.
There are multiple ways to make a battery work for you in terms of ROI, and the math has changed over the years as various component costs have changed as well as being individual to each person's situation in terms of their own usage patterns and generation. But I don't think this was a scam at all, it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about. In an ideal world neutralizing that carbon pollution would all just be built into pricing so the market could better sort it out, but as it stands I don't feel bad about supporting a shift to some extent too. And even though I'm probably going to just buy my own batteries next time around due to other changes, I'd certainly consider contributing to a VPP again depending. It's been a positive experience.
>The utility company advertises this as a means to prevent power outages (which if they were doing their job in the first place should be extremely rare occurrences)
This is just really hard in some parts of New England given the history of grid development (we have a lot of really weird legacy layouts), weather, trees, population density, and lack of resources. If you're at the end of a quarter to a half mile driveway in the forest up a steep mountain dirt road and aren't able to bury the lines then it can be tough in storms. Plus other weirdness, last year a pole came down and it turns out bears had been using it as a scratching post and just ripped through the entire thing. Was actually pretty cool but also a power outage.
>but the fine print makes it clear that homeowners should not assume that they will have any access to the power that battery holds in the event of a power outage or at any other time.*
In all these years it's never once been an issue though. And I don't consider that "fine print" but obvious: if you're participating in a VPP at all, then obviously there will be times when your battery has been drawn down. That's the deal duh. And with the best will in the world they can't predict things like some drunk driver taking out a pole and causing an outage (this happened again not that long ago). It's not impossible that there could be the bad luck of that happening right when the battery happened to be down to a low level. That's the risk. But they do pay you for it. And almost any way you'd make batteries pay beyond power protection entails some risk or else some cost too, like if you want to rate-shift so that you only pay the lowest night time energy rate...
We should be doing this as a society (or as a state or as a utility company) instead of relying on individual do-gooders to pay for it. 70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Sure, but we aren't yet, at least not remotely to the extent required. And we all individually have benefited from the externalized pollution that fossil fuels have been responsible for, this isn't just some nebulous other thing right? It's not unreasonable imo that yeah, we individually should try to pay for that damage we ourselves "profited" from, even while simultaneously trying to vote and organize towards broader solutions. But feeding money into getting off fossil fuel is both directly personally helpful and broadly helpful.
>70-80% of the cost sounds very good, but if you're not getting any latitude on how the things are used, that 20-30% is still unfair. If they belong to the utility, the utility makes all decisions regarding it, and you are giving up your space for it, if anything you should be getting paid, not paying.
I don't agree with you, and it's my money, my buildings and my call to make. I've gotten a plenty solid direct benefit in ROI over the last 8-9 years for the $3k it cost me one time only vs the $15k a couple of PowerWall 2s would have been upfront and then the rate shifting and minimal solar I was in a position for at the time, or alternatively the cost of a new generator and then all the fuel and ongoing maintenance required. The $12k in savings thanks to the utility is money I could put into other investments that have had their own ROI since then. I do think the math now for me and a lot of others is different in 2026 then 2017, there are lots and lots of competitive battery and solar and inverter solutions now at radically reduced prices and that seems to just be accelerating, with sodium based systems and other tech coming. But that wouldn't have offset a real chunk of 9 years of carbon equiv release by me. The batteries got far more usage as part of a system for society then just me, and I still did ok even if it didn't perfectly maximize the individual dollar savings.
>They could at least let you actively decide if you want to allow it to be drawn down and to what extent; some sort of latitude. As it is, for them it's money for nothing.
If you BYOB you do get that choice, though obviously if you let them take less they pay less. But it's not money for nothing, just a weighing of risk/benefit.
>That being said, the article says that they're starting to install them for free.
The battery cost per kWh has fallen enough and I think they've gotten comfortable enough with the landscape shift that I can see that making sense now, not early adopter territory anymore. The utility is also in a position to realize benefits like having a bit more leeway in how they dispatch linemen for repairs, if they know someone is covered for 20 hours and it's currently 15 below zero with whiteout conditions that'll clear in 2 hours maybe it's worth something to be able to not have that be an emergency (or instead to direct emergency efforts to someone else who isn't covered).
>Thanks for sharing your experience.
I'm glad it's come up on HN. It's one of the few real rays of hope I find in all this, that despite failure of collective action it's just getting so good that the economics and politics are tilting anyway. Won't be fast enough to avoid a lot of bad effects, but it can always get worse so the faster the better.
The generator would have been yours, and only used for your needs. It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
> Part of the program is that in case of storm warnings or other risk it actually switches out from the VPP for the duration to protect you instead.
They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to. The good news is that in the event where a cable is cut/down and they lose the ability to siphon power from your battery you will be sure to get the benefit of whatever power it has stored. It's also nice that they compensate you for the power that they draw, but again, all of that energy is already theirs by right.
The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
> it was a genuine win/win even before getting into softer factors like reducing usage of fossil fuel peaker plants that a lot of us do really care about.
It's honestly not a bad idea conceptually. It seems like it can have real benefits, but the terms are exploitative. At a minimum they should be obligated to prioritize your power needs above others when it comes to energy stored in the battery on your premises, and they should be obligated to compensate you for power taken, as well as for providing them storage, access, security and bandwidth for their equipment, and they should also assume responsibility for any damage/harm their equipment causes to your property and anyone one on your property as long as it wasn't caused by tampering or improper use. Ideally, you'd also be able to opt out of all personal data collection (not related directly to the use/monitoring of their hardware), and any loss/theft/damage would be covered by their insurance (provided their equipment was reasonably secured), otherwise they'd have to pay you enough to get additional insurance coverage of your own.
I'm glad it worked out for you when you had it, but unless the terms were very different from what they are today you were absolutely cheated and being taken advantage of, even if you didn't feel that way.
God forbid we live in a world where sharing and helping others is OK.
I think there are better ways of sharing and helping.
But the disadvantage of bureaucratic management is even larger in a low-trust society where everyone is out for themselves, because then you can't trust the bureaucrats not to be corrupt and they're still sitting on a monopoly.
Actually it very literally does.
It also would have required constant testing and cost whether I used it or not, with no ROI whatsoever beyond power backup, a lot more noise/local pollution/size, storage of significant amounts of extra fuel (be it propane or diesel) with the resulting challenges, etc. Maybe the best bet and the one I was most strongly considering would be a PTO generator I could hook my tractor up to, then I'd get all the engine testing and fuel refreshing/storage "for free" on some level, in that I run the tractor anyway. But that still would have been dead cost most of the time, and on a basic but real human physical level, having to go out to the barn to hook things up and unhook them in the heart of winter wasn't a delightful prospect either. Propane doesn't go bad and maybe I could have finagled that into my heating system for a unified tank instead of multiple but that's still its own complexity, and place to house it and so on. And in retrospect that would have reduced the value of the heat pumps I've done since.
Batteries are nice. And I'm glad it wasn't only used for my needs. I like helping my neighbors, my town, and my state.
>It wouldn't have involved any data collection, the uncompensated use of your bandwidth, or exposed you to so much liability.
I'm definitely sensitive to data collection, and full local control has always been something I've cared a lot about and is a significant consideration going forward. But I've got the PW isolated on its own VLAN going through my OPNsense router, and the granularity of its perspective is I think pretty course. Given what I'm running I just don't think there's a whole lot, if anything, it can glean the power company couldn't already, it's pretty out there on the master panel so it doesn't even see just the house, use from the barn and office and so on is all mixed into the signal. Taking into account what was on offer and far tighter finances at the time I think I did the best I could.
This is also a case where I think some level of regulated, low granularity population data may be pretty important in terms of infra planning our shift to only renewables and a smarter grid. I'll have to keep thinking about that though.
>They may do this, but by their own terms they aren't obligated to
I'd have to double check if my terms from back then are different then what they offer now, but ultimately the fact remains that across hundreds of outages and blips over 8-9 years with a couple of devastating floods and storms in the mix it has never been an issue even once. These aren't megacorps, utilities here are pretty tiny by national standards and pretty responsive (as well as regulated).
>The state contracts them to provide the people with reliable power and you pay them for that service. They should be expected to reasonably deliver that in exchange. Installing their equipment inside people's homes can be part of how they manage that responsibility, but it's still their responsibility and they should compensate you for that and not expect you to pay them even more for the privilege of paying their costs and accepting liability.
GMP has I believe something like 10,000 miles of pole distribution lines for 265000 customers, but of course those customers are not evenly distributed, there are towns around here with literally double digits of people. And it's the biggest one, there are tons of smaller outfits and coops etc. "Reliable" doesn't mean "perfect" and never has, that's just not possible at the prices people can afford here.
I mean really, on some level everyone needs to be ready to contribute in general for life here sometimes. State is responsible for roads and such too, but if it's bad I and others get out our chainsaws (now electric! electric chainsaws are AWESOME) and winch...
Often people from different societies have difficulty understanding how anyone "could live like that" - in both directions.
Also yes, paying taxes should entitle someone to basic minimums like the ability to pay for clean drinking water delivered to your tap, and reliable power delivered to your home. We aren't a developing country, we're the richest nation on Earth. The extent of the "effort on my part" should be limited to signing up with the utility company and paying my bills every month. Everything else is their job. It's what they are paid for. What "effort on your part" are you making in your life to help your water company? Your cable company?
According to the utility company you should have one anyway because you may not have access to the power available in your battery even when it is full. Even when you need it, they can decide to send it somewhere else.
> And I'm glad it wasn't only used for my needs. I like helping my neighbors, my town, and my state.
In this case you're also helping your utility company and being charged for the privilege. How often have they helped you with something you weren't paying them for?
> These aren't megacorps, utilities here are pretty tiny
Your energy company is a subsidiary of Énergir. It's the largest power company in Vermont providing service to the vast majority of the state. They also provide power for New York, Maine and Connecticut. Énergir is also the largest natural gas distribution company in Quebec. This is not a local mom and pop operation.
> I mean really, on some level everyone needs to be ready to contribute in general for life here sometimes. State is responsible for roads and such too, but if it's bad I and others get out our chainsaws (now electric! electric chainsaws are AWESOME) and winches and so on and get to work.
How much do your neighbors charge you when you help clear the roads with your chainsaws? Do they make you legally liable for any damage to cars if there are accidents on that road after you helped clear it? Would it be absurd if they did?
If you really want to volunteer to help host/power/secure/connect your utility company's infrastructure for them that's very sweet of you, I'm sure that will save them a lot of money, but they are also charging you a bill to do it for them and then they're leaving you liable for things entirely outside of your control while also making you agree that you'll be responsible for any harm caused by their equipment. They aren't being your friend here. They aren't looking out for you. They aren't acting like a part of your community. They are charging you and your state money, externalizing some of their costs and risks by putting them onto you, and charging you thousands for that.
The utility is well aware that power outages happen and make their customers mad. They want to solve them, but they also know cost matters and so that takes many ways to solve power outages out. Data used correctly from systems like this make power more reliable and it can be cost effective. By giving the utility access to this data they can better serve everybody.
Again, the key is that the data is used to serve everybody and not used for any of the abuses it can also be used for.
IIUC, the benefit for the customer is a battery backup that is much cheaper than buying the batteries themselves would be, plus the ability to make money when their battery is taken over for a few hours during occasional peak usage events. Provided the former override the latter, as seems to be the case, I don't see what the issue is.
I think you're claiming that battery backup shouldn't be needed in the first place if the power company was doing their job properly, since then there wouldn't be frequent outages in the first place. But I gather that this just isn't practical in rural Vermont. To put it another way: In that environment, a power company guaranteeing 99.999% uptime could not offer this at a price that is acceptable to most customers. So the equilibrium naturally shifts towards citizens tolerating more frequent outages than would be tolerated in, say, central NYC, and/or paying for mitigations like generators or batteries.
They don't get a battery backup. The utility company gets a battery backup and the customer pays a large percentage of that cost. The utility company isn't obligated to let the consumer who paid for part of that battery draw power from it, ever. They explicitly state that all the energy it stores is theirs, and that they can drain all of it away any time they want to.
Customers are being contractually obligated to shell out thousands of dollars, over a 10 year commitment they're punished for backing out of, obligated to not hold the utility company responsible for any damage they cause, obligated to take on a bunch of liability for things they have no control over, obligated to allow the company access to their property, obligated to allow the company access to use their internet service free of charge, and for all of that the utility company isn't obligated to do anything but install the company's equipment on the customer's property
All the customer gets is that maybe they'll be paid for the power the company takes from the battery (the company doesn't have to pay anything) and to maybe get to draw power from it if there's a service outage (the company isn't obligated to let them use any of it).
There are customers who say they are being paid for that energy and they have been able to use the power to avoid outages, and that's great, but that can change at any time and for any reason because the terms they agreed to don't obligate the utility to do either of those things. The terms explicitly say that all of the energy in the battery belongs to the utility company and they can use it however they see fit.
Maybe this utility company is the nicest company in the world. Maybe the utility company today would volunteer out of the kindness of their heart to rebuild someone's house if a software update causes the battery to catch fire and the customer's home burned to the ground along with everything in it, but the terms say they wouldn't have to do that and couldn't be made to. Maybe the company would never ever stop paying customers for the energy they take, or leave the customer without power while they drain the full battery to help restore service for businesses or wealthier customers. The terms would let them do those things though.
You shouldn't pay out thousands of dollars, take on a list of obligations, and expose yourself to huge risks and liabilities and then still be forced to just hope that the company will do the right thing, and keep doing the right thing for the next decade of your life. That's the problem.
With consumer units, you can reasonably expect that they’ll operate with zero maintenance and zero direct supervision for a decade plus. If the cost of those units is low enough, that reduced operational burden starts looking very attractive, especially if you want to scale up your battery capacity across your network very quickly.
I highly doubt it. You can reasonably expect one hard drive to operate just fine for years, but data centers have to constantly replace failed drives, and that would still be true if they they put each one in a different building. It would just cost a lot more to do.
It is not when we are talking about government subsidies intended to redistribute wealth from the poor to the middle class.
> around 50% of the houses in its programme with home batteries also have solar panels
I'm assuming most of these outages are from snow storms. Do these people have to go up on the roof and clear the solar panels?
Easily solved, if addressed!
Also we have propane heat - but I need electricity for the blower and control board. So the electric consumption is pretty minimal, but it is critical.
I mean, the electricity still has to be generated. That still costs money. This whole thing only works as long as there is someone willing to buy at the high prices and off peak demand stays low enough to keep prices cheap. Eventually there’s no more road to kick this can down.
What do you mean? The opportunity for energy arbitrage will go away if energy prices are constant. Right now they aren’t, and I don’t really see how they would become constant based on the physics of producing and consuming energy.
They’ll sell high when PE buys the company and pulls a Broadcom on all the existing customers, who will abandon the equipment after ten years go back to installing Tri-fuel generators while Centerpoint deals B2B with serious battery plant operators instead of B2C with annoying consumers
Customers running batteries they don’t own to store energy they can’t use for a company that won’t share profits is not the future.
Vermont’s project might be more viable, they’re a little better able to see beyond a spreadsheet up there. California will regulate it into unsustainable price territory. In the meantime finbros in Texas will make a killing having Claude build badass dashboards to show how much they make off bored suburbanites stuck on a grid built and operated as cheaply as possible to take as much money as they can before the useless state government is run out on a rail or finally eats the last bite of its own ass
Since you ask
If they can claim "extreme weather" is why rural areas are finally getting their shit together, I can claim the decline of BBC is a sign of the times.
Maybe you saw "generating"? It may interest you to know that batteries output is counted among "generation" by the EIA and nearly all grid documents I know about, and is also technically correct.
Natural gas is merely stored solar energy too, if it the ideas of batteries "generating" anything rubs you the wrong way.
>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.
Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
>Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Hey don't tell me that, tell the BBC. They're the ones who wrote an entire article about "replacing power plants with home batteries".
But I don't think the residential line limits are too bad. A house that's sending out power takes its load off the grid and can also power multiple other houses without any lines being overloaded. And if an area has a high enough battery:house ratio, the full megawatt capacity of powering those houses but flowing the other way is a ton of power. (If the equipment can handle power flowing both ways.)
> Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.
These specific batteries, on the other ends of residential lines, indeed do push power back on the grid in aggregate enough to replace coal power plants. There's nothing special about a point generator on the grid versus the aggregate action of thousands of batteries on the other side of the distribution stations. In fact that's what's so amazing about batteries versus large thermal generators: thermal generators are large because if they get super inefficient when they're not large. Nobody is installing a small coal generator at their home to run daily, and even small diesel generators are hugely inefficient. But batteries are so useful that even accounting for the extra expense of large numbers of custom installs, they reduce grid demand enough to make a ton of financial.
And power is indeed the most important metric when it comes to the grid. It's how everything is run, how individual grid assets are dispatched, because power needs to be balanced at every moment. Somebody could throw an asset on the grid that only dispatched for 15 minutes (or whatever the minimum bid time is), and it would still be described primarily by power. Capacity decisions may be made in kW-month or whatever unit, but you can run a grid on a pure energy market without any capacity market at all, as ERCOT shows.
If the question is global, then yes, there are, although as renewable energy has increased globally so has the need for peaker plants to handle the variance in the grid, thus plants that historically has only been used for seasonal variance are now used all year round to handle weather variance. An example of that is the oil power plant in south of Sweden.
VPPs displace more expensive generation capacity at the margin. Because your marginal loads are for relatively short durations. It's actually quite smart.
Though what is "inside" is debatable. My car can sit outside because it has the batteries in a case that is climate controlled when needed, and so the batteries count as inside even though they are in a car that is outside.
https://electrek.co/2026/07/28/vermonts-largest-energy-sourc...
Seems like they supply each person with 2 Tesla powerwalls for the $55/month and get a reduction in their bills that depends on how much power they choose to share to the grid during power outages.
They've already closed down 2 peaker power plants because of this, so it doesn't seem to just be about handling power outages, but also handling fluctuating power usage instead of firing up extra power plants.
Yes, that was a significant early argument I remember around the public benefits. The daily power spikes have always been a major challenge particularly when you don't have much commercial/industrial base. And even in the earliest period of the original 2000 home pilot they were surprised and pretty happy about how much load could be spread and the resulting savings. Note though that regulators were cautious and there was controversy around how well it'd actually work, you can find articles like this 2019 VT Digger one [0] from the era. Fortunately it did indeed work out, but easy to forget it was all pretty new at one point.
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0: https://vtdigger.org/2019/09/05/state-calls-for-investigatio...
Those tesla wall packs will be a massive headache when they give up the ghost. Read the contract carefully. Who is responsable for end-of-life disposal? Where/how are they to be disposed of? Lead acids can be taken to any number of recycling centers, some will even pay you for them.
I think a bigger question is if sodium batteries starts to take over (seems better for homes, heavier but seemingly safer but also for cheaper cars) and lithium/rare-earth metals prices goes down.
The technology with PbS or even NiFe has existed for decades, but only took off with lithium.
You aren't wrong about part of the off-grid community not wanting this. I'm not sure I'd want it if I were doing an off-grid install, but it does stand to grow the off-grid community to include people who are looking for a turnkey solution instead of having to do all the research to put together a more user-maintainable system.
I wouldn't expect the home owner to repair them. However they should be repairable by someone with training in how to diagnose and replace failed cells. (which mostly means a battery welder and some safety systems)
https://offgridsolarguide.com/lead-acid-battery-brands-for-o...
However lead-acid does not like deep discharge so to get max life you will be using much less than the full discharge cycle 80%-100%, and so the lifecycle costs are very different. In some cases lead-acid can be more cost effective if you manage it well, but I would expect lithium to be cheaper for the typical case.
That is lead acid means your real goal is a cheap home backup, which you have to ride out multi-day power outages, and as a secondary you will sell some power to the grid, but you are not trying to make money doing this. By contrast I would expect lithium to make sense if your primary goal is to make money (or at least pay for your home backup system that can ride out a couple hours of outage but not days). The storage to ride out days could work now, but long term as your neighbors buy the system eventually there isn't the need for that much storage and someone gets limited.
I would also suggest that size and weight are bigger concerns than you're giving credit to. They aren't assembling packs on-site from individual batteries. They're rolling in whole-ass packs in one swell foop. Getting them into basements isn't a small job[0]. Getting them back out will be even less fun for the crews.
Their total on-site install time was maybe 6 hours, and that included tying everything in to the existing system. Putting the hardware in place took maybe an hour of that time. If you want to go with heavier packs or more/larger packs, you're going to add to that a bit. And their doing this in people's finished homes. This isn't new build where they can have a couple of big dudes wrangling packs around without a care in the world for furniture and finished surfaces. The ergonomics of smaller packs matter.
[0] They used a two-wheel dolly with a hydraulic disc brake (bicycle hardware) to get them down our basement stairs.
Seems like the former would have some development costs but ultimately be cheaper to manage
I guess Vermont’s relatively low population density makes that more likely; with lower population density each service station will either service fewer homes or require more cabling towards those homes. Either way, more cabling is needed per house. Upgrading that to handle the load of charging a car can be costly.
Also, you're reducing demand on the grid by having them at people's homes, not just reducing the demand on the power plants. If the batteries were centralized you'd still need to move that massive amount of power over distribution and transmission lines, which is actually just as big a problem as needing to spin up a peaker plant. In many areas the bottleneck is transmission not generation
Source? Last time I checked a few years ago the prices were similar and lithium has dropped significantly since then.
https://www.whalebattery.com/blog-detail/lead-acid-vs-lithiu...
Cost per kWh per year:
lead-acid batteries: $100 per kWh per year
LFP batteries: $50 per kWh per year
https://www.justplugsolar.com/blog/lithium-vs-lead-acid-batt...
US is outsourcing recycling of Lead acids to Africa.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/11/18/world/africa/...
Turns out, they're on top of this.
https://cswd.net/cswd-in-the-news/vermont-expands-battery-re...
Lithium batteries in contrast only need a ~10% buffer, and don't care about being topped off except for calibrating the BMS in certain variants (the only reason why LFP cars want you to charge to 100% regularly), so you don't have to over-provision as much. End-of-life is being sorted out as we speak, recycling companies are popping up as discarded batteries from cars are becoming common. Some may even pay you for them too.
My belief is that this is ideologically/politically motivated. If you put the batteries next to network equipment it will not have the same immediate saving effect/user experience as the battery at home.
Battery at home gets a response of someone being happy about getting apiece of hardware, saving money and being renewable!
I'm a bit nostalgic for the nights when we'd break out the kerosene lanterns. But I concede that this might be more practical and a bit safer (a lot of VT houses are tinder boxes and good luck getting a good fire response in an ice storm).