<story><title>Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-15/tesla-wins-utility-contract-to-supply-grid-scale-battery-storage-after-porter-ranch-gas-leak</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>Having real-time pricing of electricity coupled with users who can adapt their usage automatically to real-time prices will also considerably moderate power demand.</text></item><item><author>nl</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s pretty important to realize that this isn&amp;#x27;t the problem that needs solving.&lt;p&gt;Batteries aren&amp;#x27;t great for large amounts of power for long periods of time (yet). What they are good at is smoothing out the supply curve from potentially intermittent suppliers like solar and wind, and that is one of the things that causes price spikes.</text></item><item><author>1024core</author><text>&amp;gt; Tesla&amp;#x27;s contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day&lt;p&gt;This is &amp;lt; 0.1% of the total number of homes in SoCal, just to put it in perspective.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Scarblac</author><text>In the Netherlands there is a lot of reclaimed land that needs a lot of water pumped out regularly (though not 24&amp;#x2F;7, during normal weather).&lt;p&gt;I know there have been pilots with some of the larger pumping stations to incorporate the current real time price of electricity, as well as the forecast rain within the next few hours to decide when to turn on. Not sure if it&amp;#x27;s actually used in production now.&lt;p&gt;That sort of thing is a great fit for that problem.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tesla Wins Contract to Help Power the California Grid</title><url>http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-15/tesla-wins-utility-contract-to-supply-grid-scale-battery-storage-after-porter-ranch-gas-leak</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>WalterBright</author><text>Having real-time pricing of electricity coupled with users who can adapt their usage automatically to real-time prices will also considerably moderate power demand.</text></item><item><author>nl</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s pretty important to realize that this isn&amp;#x27;t the problem that needs solving.&lt;p&gt;Batteries aren&amp;#x27;t great for large amounts of power for long periods of time (yet). What they are good at is smoothing out the supply curve from potentially intermittent suppliers like solar and wind, and that is one of the things that causes price spikes.</text></item><item><author>1024core</author><text>&amp;gt; Tesla&amp;#x27;s contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day&lt;p&gt;This is &amp;lt; 0.1% of the total number of homes in SoCal, just to put it in perspective.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nl</author><text>Yes.&lt;p&gt;Also, trading off the reliability of power.&lt;p&gt;This seems outrageous to many of us in the West, but here in Australia our power utility already cuts power to neighborhoods in half hour blocks during peak power consumption during summer (I believe they exclude hospitals and some other sites like that from this policy).&lt;p&gt;The infrastructure savings made by this are &lt;i&gt;huge&lt;/i&gt; (think of 99% reliability vs 99.99% in software), and the few that really need it can invest in backup solutions for those times.</text></comment>