<story><title>New Tesla battery could power your home, and maybe the electric grid too</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/12/this-new-tesla-battery-will-power-your-home-and-maybe-the-electric-grid-too/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xxxyy</author><text>Doing arbitrage on the power network by storing energy during off-period, and releasing it during high-period is a relatively old concept (eg. [0]). What I don&amp;#x27;t see happening is the price of this battery going low enough to make this kind of arbitrage profitable in a reasonable amount of time. The article does not mention the cost aspect of such an investment.&lt;p&gt;Germany along with a few other EU countries are currently high on renewable energy. As far as I know the most profitable way to utilize electric solar panels is to sell excessive energy back to the grid, not store it in batteries.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>dangrossman</author><text>There are already widespread programs where utilities pay customers a rebate in exchange for remotely turning off their A&amp;#x2F;C compressors at the peak of a heat wave in order to chop the top off consumption spikes. Paying high-consumption commercial customers to turn off entirely for a few hours to avoid spinning up another generation plant happens too.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not too far-fetched to imagine a rebate program on home battery systems if the utility got the same remote control power to disconnect homes from the grid when needed, or even have their batteries dump power back onto it at those times. Essentially, individual homes become part of &amp;quot;smart grid&amp;quot; management systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JshWright</author><text>The problem is, selling it back to the grid only works when it&amp;#x27;s a fairly small fraction of the customer base that&amp;#x27;s doing it. We can&amp;#x27;t _all_ sell power back to the grid.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Why the downvotes? This is a real issue... The current model of &amp;#x27;buy solar panels and pay for them by selling power back to the grid&amp;#x27; will not scale forever...</text></comment>
<story><title>New Tesla battery could power your home, and maybe the electric grid too</title><url>http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/02/12/this-new-tesla-battery-will-power-your-home-and-maybe-the-electric-grid-too/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xxxyy</author><text>Doing arbitrage on the power network by storing energy during off-period, and releasing it during high-period is a relatively old concept (eg. [0]). What I don&amp;#x27;t see happening is the price of this battery going low enough to make this kind of arbitrage profitable in a reasonable amount of time. The article does not mention the cost aspect of such an investment.&lt;p&gt;Germany along with a few other EU countries are currently high on renewable energy. As far as I know the most profitable way to utilize electric solar panels is to sell excessive energy back to the grid, not store it in batteries.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>dangrossman</author><text>There are already widespread programs where utilities pay customers a rebate in exchange for remotely turning off their A&amp;#x2F;C compressors at the peak of a heat wave in order to chop the top off consumption spikes. Paying high-consumption commercial customers to turn off entirely for a few hours to avoid spinning up another generation plant happens too.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not too far-fetched to imagine a rebate program on home battery systems if the utility got the same remote control power to disconnect homes from the grid when needed, or even have their batteries dump power back onto it at those times. Essentially, individual homes become part of &amp;quot;smart grid&amp;quot; management systems.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eigenvector</author><text>Not only will the batteries need to get cheaper, but the available arbitrage opportunity will need to account for the necessary upgrades to utility distribution systems to accommodate large amounts of distributed energy storage (DES). DES, particularly at high penetrations, generally violates the design assumptions of distribution protection systems and requires non-trivial upgrades to protective relaying and SCADA systems to maintain adequate real-time control.</text></comment>