Comment by no_wizard
2 years ago
I have a friend who works in the energy industry specifically targeting power grid management.
It is far easier for power companies to manage power loss for things with consistent power usage (low variance) than high variance / inconsistent power loads.
Businesses tend to be very consistent, even if their power draw is high, like manufacturing or hospitals etc.
Residential power tends to be more variant and harder to fine tune for because it can spike quite suddenly in unexpected ways and tends to add more base load over time.
Therefore, it’d actually make more sense for power companies to buy people homes in other states if lowering base load is a concern, since residential is where all the major issues are for load balancing, no?
> it’d actually make more sense for power companies to buy people homes in other states
No, because of scale. A large factory is one entity to deal with. Moving just one out of state is possible, but meaningless as even though houses are significant overall you need to deal with many houses before an actual difference is made, while if you can deal with a factory you can make a large difference for the same amount of effort.
A factory/hospital is also easier because they probably have a backup plan. if there is any possibility that the power will go out they are likely to have made backup plans. You are overall cheaper than their backup plans, but you can probably make them a deal where they run their backup plan instead of connecting to you. Since they already have the generator it isn't a problem for them to use their generator on your busy days, and so a small discount makes it easy to work with the factory than a home owner who is probably thinking about friends and family they are moving away from.
The power company has a list of who these deals are with and the priority order. I know of one factory with a coal boiler from the 1800s, and a generator from then 1920s - the whole is very inefficient and takes a full day to start up, but the power company makes it worth while to keep everything operational because every 5 years they can power it on and supply the whole town (at 5x the normal cost of power from the plants they run all the time). Meanwhile there is a store near my parents that is running their generator every hot day - a modern diesel generator when sized properly is not a lot more expensive than grid power so the store doesn't need a big incentive to use it instead of grid power.
Of course all of the above is for exceptions. Where I live now we have built far more wind than needed most of the time, and as a result 80% of our power is renewable. There are very few days when backups are even needed.
Would it help if the state were to provide tax incentives for in home battery backups?
Not yet anyway. While batteries are interesting, they do start on fire once in a while. We think with correct engineering that risk can be mitigated, but we shouldn't roll things out too fast just in case it really can't.
A lot of states are looking into large battery facilities specifically for frequency regulations.
I kind of wonder why there has been so much push for consumer solar / battery over neighborhood solar / battery projects. At least in Texas, there is so much empty land, it seems like it would be more effective to 'imminent domain' some land or leverage existing right-of-ways for solar array + battery storage, rather than putting the burden on individual homeowners to purchase what is effectively community infrastructure (if we were allowed to sell power back to the grid).
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You could certainly make an argument that zoning needs to be "power neutral": can't zone any houses or businesses without zoning an equivalent power plant. Very SimCity.