[jandrese]

I've been wondering lately if it wouldn't make sense for power companies to offer a battery incentive program to homeowners. They'll cover 1/2 the cost of a battery but mandate that the system be set to draw from the grid when production is high (middle of the day mostly) and be used to power the home in the evening when demand is high but production is tailing off.

Some companies do Time of Use contracts which do this to a degree, but flat incentives (cut a one time check to the homeowner) seem much less complicated. The grid gets smoothing and the homeowner gets to keep the lights on when the power goes out and doesn't have to spend nearly as much on the install. The power company doesn't have to manage a big bank of batteries somewhere and saves on distribution costs. Plus the homeowners technically own the systems so when something goes wrong the power company doesn't have to roll a truck to fix it.

The only real problem with this scheme is that the battery market is already squeezed with so many companies jumping into the electric vehicle business and production lagging behind demand. However, this is likely to be a short term problem, so hopefully in the next couple of years something like this will be practical.

[Retric]

Economies of scale heavily favor grid storage over home storage.

The batteries may be identical but installing them, monitoring them, doing AC>DC>AC conversions etc become much cheaper at scale.

[jandrese]

True, but there are numerous other costs with doing industrial scale storage. You need to buy the land. Need to design and build the facility and interconnects. Need to do the permitting, environmental review, and other paperwork. Need to do the maintenance and deal with security. Building a facility like this usually involves buying all of the batteries at once, which is difficult in a supply constrained market like we are in now.

A sharing program foists most of this complication off on homeowners.

[ZeroGravitas]

Some forward thinking utilities have been doing this for years.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/amp/article/from-pilot-to-per...

The general term is Virtual Power Plant, where software let's a bunch of distributed items act in concert as if they were a big powerplant.