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.
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. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
Homeowners must also agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. They have to agree to the “Customer Privacy” terms, which will only be shown to them "upon installation of the Equipment".
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 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.
The utility also requires homeowners to agree to terms that state the utility will not be liable for any damage to persons or property caused by use of/replacement of/repair of/or the utility's failure to repair the utility's equipment and software. The homeowner also "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
This would be a bad deal even if the utility were paying a monthly fee to homeowners. The fact that they've conned customers into paying the utility for using them, their internet, and assuming all liability/responsibility for the utility company's hardware is insane.
>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 by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.
> 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.
If home owners are paying then it might be less efficient for the overall economy but better for the utility company. It is often easier to find a million people willing to spend a thousand dollars than finding one person willing to spend a billion.
It's more economically optimal to convince wealthy Vermonters to house the batteries by branding it as subsidized resilience than it is to buy and maintain substations?
It's a 10 year lease agreement. You pay them, and when the 10 years is up you have to return the batteries. At no point does the customer own the batteries.
It's like leasing a car, except with a car lease you have the option to pay extra to buy it out at the end and take ownership; with this lease agreement you don't.
This is like leasing a car except that the dealership can show up with other customers to take "your" car for test drives or just to drive it around for any other reason whenever they want to, for however long they want to, and they won't pay you back for any of the gas they use. Basically turning your personal garage into their distributed showroom.
IIRC pre-covid when the program was quite new, customer could buy the batteries outright. Later on they added the lease option.
One of the issues with these is the limited storage capacity. While it is nice for short outages, there are sometimes multi-day events in the winter. I think the longest was in the late 90s from an ice storm and was over a week. If you have solar, less of an issue but not everyone does (though solar does have surprisingly good install base in Vermont).
I've not checked to see if GMP limits the install locations but do recall some states/munis trying to limit them to outside the home due to fire risk.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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 ($5/kWh). It’s like any other investment where you outlay cash upfront and hope to make it back over time, whether via reduced costs for your own electricity usage or selling it back to the grid when doing so is profitable.
And when the power lines fall down in rural areas, how will people heat and power their homes? I guess they could buy some batteries, but then they'd sit idle most of the time. Maybe they could find some other profitable use and share the capital cost?
Be more explicit. What is wrong with this? It's not all the time, it's only in times of extreme need.
Variable pricing like this enables all sorts of cost saving technologies that bring down the cost of the grid and generating power for everyone, by spending a lot for a very short time, instead of building tons of extra large assets that sit mostly idle.
If somebody is providing a service that operates on the whole sale market, they deserve to get paid like all the other generators that are helping to keep the grid running in these times of need.
for single individuals to earn as much as (i assume US$) 150 a day means that the grid is horrendously unbalanced.
hell if I emptied my 30kw into the grid in my state/country at the most expensive time I'd earn AU$21.00
to earn US$150 means either HUGE battery capacity (and transmission capacity) or utterly rediculous power pricing... both mean really lousy power supply and grid design.
I'm all for indipendance but the reality is we live in communities and count on the collective to rise us all up together.
that sort of profit is a clear warning sign of a broken community.
It depends a lot on the market, but before there were lots of batteries this was extremely typical in the Australian grid. You probably just weren't exposed to it as a consumer! Massive price fluctuations were the impetus for one of the first large scale grid batteries in Australia, and the batteries worked really well to solve it. It doesn't happen often, and nobody is getting paid $150 every day for their home battery. It's just for the extreme events.
As more and more batteries are deployed the price swings will decrease.
It's not a "broken community" it's just end consumers being able to help out in times of great grid need and getting compensated fairly for it.
California rate payers are being forced to essentially pay for fire insurance for CA residents who live in tinderbox areas, by way of PG&E rates, and burying lines that serve widely dispersed populations. That's the big difference. The vast majority of US residents have much lower utility rates.
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.
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.
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.
>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!?!?
> 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.
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.
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 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 as someone points out below - the proliferation of EVs also helps this, because they can act as a “deep” reservoir so the local residential batteries can be much smaller - more buffers than something expected to run the house for more than a couple hours, so that makes the whole setup even cheaper, depending on when and where the EVs are getting charged.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> I always wonder what happens when these things catch fire
If you're hoping someone will chime in to tell you they have magic firefighting foam inside them or something, I regret to inform you that what happens if it catches fire is exactly what one might naively expect from large lithium batteries.
Newer LiFePo4 (Lithium Iron Phosphate) batteries don't have the fire issues that the previous Lithium Ion generation did. They are a bit more expensive and heavier, but they are superior in every other way (safety, lifespan, max charge cycles).
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 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.
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. Physical access aside, they also have to allow the utility free access to their network and free use of their internet connection/bandwidth. The utility will not compensate homeowners for any of that.
Homeowners must also agree to install the utility company's cell phone apps/software. I'd bet those apps are collecting data and probably pushing ads too. They have to agree to the “Customer Privacy” terms, which will only be shown to them "upon installation of the Equipment".
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 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.
The utility also requires homeowners to agree to terms that state the utility will not be liable for any damage to persons or property caused by use of/replacement of/repair of/or the utility's failure to repair the utility's equipment and software. The homeowner also "bears the entire risk of loss, theft or damage" to the utility's equipment.
This would be a bad deal even if the utility were paying a monthly fee to homeowners. The fact that they've conned customers into paying the utility for using them, their internet, and assuming all liability/responsibility for the utility company's hardware is insane.
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 by charging then and then running off your batteries during the day, then you'll of course be at risk of lower remaining storage if there's then a grid failure too when you were expecting to charge back up again. You can spend money on that risk in turn, but there's no free lunch here.
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.
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?
It's like leasing a car, except with a car lease you have the option to pay extra to buy it out at the end and take ownership; with this lease agreement you don't.
One of the issues with these is the limited storage capacity. While it is nice for short outages, there are sometimes multi-day events in the winter. I think the longest was in the late 90s from an ice storm and was over a week. If you have solar, less of an issue but not everyone does (though solar does have surprisingly good install base in Vermont).
I've not checked to see if GMP limits the install locations but do recall some states/munis trying to limit them to outside the home due to fire risk.
I thought it was a novel idea when I heard about it.
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 shouldnt be celebrated.
During peak need, renting some capacity from subscribers already on your grid means you don't need to build another peaker plant.
The better option is for the government/utility company to build out the required storage for a fraction of the cost.
Ex ante, sure. Right now, the existing batteries are a sunk cost the utility didn’t have to pay capital costs for. The right answer is to do both.
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.
hell if I emptied my 30kw into the grid in my state/country at the most expensive time I'd earn AU$21.00
to earn US$150 means either HUGE battery capacity (and transmission capacity) or utterly rediculous power pricing... both mean really lousy power supply and grid design. I'm all for indipendance but the reality is we live in communities and count on the collective to rise us all up together.
that sort of profit is a clear warning sign of a broken community.
As more and more batteries are deployed the price swings will decrease.
It's not a "broken community" it's just end consumers being able to help out in times of great grid need and getting compensated fairly for it.
> 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?
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.
Easily solved, if addressed!
>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!?!?
VPPs displace more expensive generation capacity at the margin. Because your marginal loads are for relatively short durations. It's actually quite smart.
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.
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 as someone points out below - the proliferation of EVs also helps this, because they can act as a “deep” reservoir so the local residential batteries can be much smaller - more buffers than something expected to run the house for more than a couple hours, so that makes the whole setup even cheaper, depending on when and where the EVs are getting charged.
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.
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.
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.
Requiring it is crazy.
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
But given they are NMC chemistry, you probably wouldn't want to cycle them a lot for the grid (or just your home).
If you're hoping someone will chime in to tell you they have magic firefighting foam inside them or something, I regret to inform you that what happens if it catches fire is exactly what one might naively expect from large lithium batteries.
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.