<story><title>Developers are building communities that act as their own miniature power grids</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/realestate/microgrid-solar-power-energy.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nuancebydefault</author><text>I never stop to be amazed how average consumption figures in the US are often at least 100 per cent bigger than in Europe. At least for water and electricity, let alone fuel.&lt;p&gt;Just a thought that naturally pops up... :&lt;p&gt;If you take the reasoning one step back, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be easier to optimize the consumption side (low hanging fruit) in favour if optimizing the cost per unit of energy?  The latter seems a lot of effort, at least for the devs.</text></item><item><author>rndmize</author><text>This is something I&amp;#x27;ve been curious&amp;#x2F;interested in for a long time, so its good to see that somewhere out there (random Pacific islands aside), there&amp;#x27;s communities making it work.&lt;p&gt;Some rough numbers I did a month or two ago - Tesla offers a megapack that has 3.9 MWh at a cost of $2.4m. &amp;quot;In 2021, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. home was 10,632 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Or about 886 kWh per month.&amp;quot; That&amp;#x27;s about 30 kWh per day; my community has 45 houses, so use of 1.35 MWh in total, so a megapack will provide power for 3 days for the community at a cost of ~50k per house. Probably not worth it and I&amp;#x27;d expect 3 days to be overkill. But a community that was double our size will have a cost of about 25k per unit for 1.5 days of power - which doesn&amp;#x27;t sound too bad to me.&lt;p&gt;Another thing I&amp;#x27;ve found interesting is Anker seems to be getting into the home power business - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.anker.com&amp;#x2F;anker-solix&amp;#x2F;home-energy-solutions?ref=anker-solix-brand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.anker.com&amp;#x2F;anker-solix&amp;#x2F;home-energy-solutions?ref=...&lt;/a&gt; - which I&amp;#x27;m hopeful about, since it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like anyone except Tesla has been able to make something that feels simple&amp;#x2F;easy&amp;#x2F;attractive. Every time I&amp;#x27;ve look at Powerwall alternatives I&amp;#x27;m been unimpressed by the offerings; maybe Anker can deliver.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tzs</author><text>I believe that US households on average get a higher percent of their energy from electricity than do European households. For a proper comparison we need to compare energy use, not electricity use.&lt;p&gt;The average US household used 77 million BTU of energy in 2015 [1]. That&amp;#x27;s 1.94 TOE (tons of oil equivalent).&lt;p&gt;The EU average in 2014 was 1.3 TOE. It ranged from a little under 0.5 (Malta) to around 2.7 (Luxembourg) [2]. UK and Germany were around 1.4, France around 1.7, Italy around 1.9. Belgium was just under 2.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rpsc.energy.gov&amp;#x2F;energy-data-facts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;rpsc.energy.gov&amp;#x2F;energy-data-facts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.enerdata.net&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;executive-briefing&amp;#x2F;households-energy-efficiency.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.enerdata.net&amp;#x2F;publications&amp;#x2F;executive-briefing&amp;#x2F;hou...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Developers are building communities that act as their own miniature power grids</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/realestate/microgrid-solar-power-energy.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nuancebydefault</author><text>I never stop to be amazed how average consumption figures in the US are often at least 100 per cent bigger than in Europe. At least for water and electricity, let alone fuel.&lt;p&gt;Just a thought that naturally pops up... :&lt;p&gt;If you take the reasoning one step back, wouldn&amp;#x27;t it be easier to optimize the consumption side (low hanging fruit) in favour if optimizing the cost per unit of energy?  The latter seems a lot of effort, at least for the devs.</text></item><item><author>rndmize</author><text>This is something I&amp;#x27;ve been curious&amp;#x2F;interested in for a long time, so its good to see that somewhere out there (random Pacific islands aside), there&amp;#x27;s communities making it work.&lt;p&gt;Some rough numbers I did a month or two ago - Tesla offers a megapack that has 3.9 MWh at a cost of $2.4m. &amp;quot;In 2021, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. home was 10,632 kilowatt-hours (kWh). Or about 886 kWh per month.&amp;quot; That&amp;#x27;s about 30 kWh per day; my community has 45 houses, so use of 1.35 MWh in total, so a megapack will provide power for 3 days for the community at a cost of ~50k per house. Probably not worth it and I&amp;#x27;d expect 3 days to be overkill. But a community that was double our size will have a cost of about 25k per unit for 1.5 days of power - which doesn&amp;#x27;t sound too bad to me.&lt;p&gt;Another thing I&amp;#x27;ve found interesting is Anker seems to be getting into the home power business - &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.anker.com&amp;#x2F;anker-solix&amp;#x2F;home-energy-solutions?ref=anker-solix-brand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.anker.com&amp;#x2F;anker-solix&amp;#x2F;home-energy-solutions?ref=...&lt;/a&gt; - which I&amp;#x27;m hopeful about, since it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like anyone except Tesla has been able to make something that feels simple&amp;#x2F;easy&amp;#x2F;attractive. Every time I&amp;#x27;ve look at Powerwall alternatives I&amp;#x27;m been unimpressed by the offerings; maybe Anker can deliver.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eddy_chan</author><text>I would imagine in the southern states where it&amp;#x27;s 40 degrees C+ every day for 3 months-4 months or more on end the heatpump (aka reverse cycle a&amp;#x2F;c) is basically kept on constantly. Let&amp;#x27;s say it draws 1kw on average, that&amp;#x27;s 24kwh right there. They actually draw more than that. There&amp;#x27;s no way around it if you want to live comfortably. But I think the whole society is designed so much around driving everywhere and living in detached houses that the low hanging fruit is actually to install solar&amp;#x2F;batteries for these guys.</text></comment>