Can someone explain to me why being able to build off the electrical grid is worth all this effort since you're still going to need running water, sewage, bins collecting, broadband and a number of other things?
I don't have water or sewage at my house. I have a well and septic system. I also have a propane generator but it's only for power outages, that happen more frequently when you live in the country. I do have a private company collect my garbage.
I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.
Water and sewage -- Most people in rural america and even in semi-suburban america already use their own wells and septic systems for water and sewage. Likewise with trash, many people drop their trash off at the dump/recycling center themselves.
Broadband, yep, no DIY solution there but various forms of wireless internet are available that make it quite feasible to have a completely unwired home if not disconnected.
But still the question is, why would I want that? I'm all for distributed power generation, but it can still be optimized better when it's connected to a grid.
There are many possible reasons. You might enjoy the feeling of independence or self reliance that supplying your own power brings. You might be a weed grower and not want to be found out because of your energy bills. You may feel that it's more responsible to produce your own electricity and have a clear understanding of its environmental costs. Grid power may be unreliable in your area, or expensive. Maybe you think that power lines give you cancer. Maybe grid power is simply unavailable in your location.
All those are good reasons to also have your own power. You'll get your independence and might even save some money.
But even then it's still good to be connected to the grid. It will serve as a backup line and if you produce more enery than you can consume, you might be able to sell something back to the grid.
And THAT is a primary reason utility companies are fighting grid-connected consumer solar right now. If you are grid attached you are part of the cost of maintaining the grid that is normally offset by your revenue to the utility. If you are just using it as a glorified battery backup by feeding in excess during the day and pulling during the night and you are a net zero to then company then your per-customer revenue is much much lower. If only a small percentage of customers do this then you can level it out. If that percentage starts to grow then something has to give. Either you lower your maintenance budget, lower your operating costs, or lower your net profits. No one directly involved wants any of those to actually happen. This is obviously greatly simplified (e.g. The extra cost of handling customer generated power), but you get the idea.
Or you negotiate with whomever licenses you to be allowed to change your charges so that the maintenance is covered by a connection/subscription fee and usage is billed separately.
This is increasingly how utilities are structured in Europe: You have connection charges, and usage charges, and they may be due to different companies (though are often billed together via the provider you pay usage charges to).
This has come as part of breaking up utility monopolies so that people can e.g. pick "their" electricity provider (of course in practice this just means the providers settle overall relative supply between each other).
The "grid" doesn't yet exist in certain plots of land. One may want to build a house in the woods, but not pay the costs to get electric/water/sewage run to the property from whatever main road is closest.
The question isn't "why would I want that" it's more "given that I live in a place where grid hookup is $100k since I'm 10 miles from the nearest power line, what is my next cheapest alternative?"
Once the question is framed properly -- at least for a few million people in the US -- then the motivation for storage becomes much clearer. If you have a battery and an inverter then you hook that up and it feeds the house. And all your other power generation choices feed the battery. Solar, wind, hydro (if you live on/near a stream or river), small generator, etc.
If it costs $100k to get hooked up and then you're paying some fee for power every month it might make sense to buy the battery for $20k, buy a generator for $5k and spend $10k on a wind turbine and $10k on solar. That's $45k versus $100k which is a good chunk of change plus you can expect your prices to go down as solar panels and batteries and whatnot get cheaper, whereas fuel is only going to get more expensive.
Even with a grid connection, this would be useful as it would allow the power companies to generate more during off peak hours. A distributed power storage solution combined with a centralized power generation solution would be extremely efficient. It's like turning your home into a hybrid.
And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern.
Then there's the question of the power price. I don't think the battery will be cheap when revealed, but after a while, they will and help us with solar/wind created energy.
> And fail hard too - blackout (then brownout) are more and more a concern.
Maybe I'm just spoiled by the German power grid. As far as I can remember I only a single blackout of 30 minutes in the last 15 years
(some time around 2008).
(One must still be cautious - even with 0% interest rates - since the principal is still repayable. If your part of the economy goes bad, a default on a 0% loan is just as bad/likely as a default on a 5% loan.)
Well. Broadband is available wirelessly either via cell, wifi, or satellite, so there's not a requirement for a physical connection. Water and sewer have localized options with wells and septic, but they are also extremely inexpensive to build and maintain and have a relatively small environmental impact.
Electricity, on the other hand, has no viable localized option today. It's also the only one of these that has a significant drop in efficiency due to the distribution itself and has a significant impact to the environment.
Local power storage means that grid can balance the load between peak and non-peak times. Also, local power storage means that wind/solar now has a solution for time where power output is reduced.
Having a battery that can power a home for a week is huge, if it's affordable. This could significantly reduce power generation costs.
I'm not just talking about electrical loses, though that is a factor. Having to build 2-3 times the capacity because power generation can't be distributed throughout the day is a huge inefficiency.
Having to build 2-3 times the capacity because power generation can't be distributed throughout the day is a huge inefficiency.
This seems to me the big benefit here -- enough penetration of home backup batteries means public power generation doesn't have to be built up to provide massive peak surges. Further, trickle charging the backup batteries during the evenings/nighttime and allowing them to meet some needs during the day also means a higher net usage of generated power, so perhaps levels of generation could go down altogether.
There's also then the capitalistic angle -- if you want more peak power at your house, you can buy more batteries in lieu of (or in concert with) installing secondary power systems.
But reducing gross energy production due to higher net utilization would be a really cool thing, so long as the total cost to the macro system (considering full life of the battery vs. load taken off power plants) is a net positive.
From the research I've done on solar power systems (for powering homes) the market does not have an obvious pre-packaged solution that is made for storage of excess capacity generated by your solar panels.
One commonly suggested (and substantially cheaper) option is to just set things up so you don't have local battery storage and just redirect all excess power back to the utility company.
The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for.
But beyond that, as power requirements in appliances / computers / electronic gadgets continues to decrease, and efficiency and capacity of alternative energy solutions continues to increase, there will likely come a time (in the not-too-distant-future) when there will [at least in theory] no longer be a need for utility companies.
In fact, from varied sources online I've gotten the impression that many countries (besides US) have substantially reduced power requirements per household where even today it's feasible (for those with sufficient roof space) to move all of their power usage off grid, and rely strictly on power generated by solar.
> The problem with that has already been mentioned. You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for.
That's not a problem, that's how the markets work. When electricity is abundant (i.e. sun is shining, wind is blowing), it's cheap; when it's in demand (in the evening, after the sun and wind stop but people want to cook and watch TV), it's expensive.
The problem with energy storage isn't just a home-problem, it's a network-wide issue. AFAIK, current batteries aren't really able to solve this issue, in the long-term (i.e. considering the lifetime and replacement of the battery).
"You're giving power back to the utility company at a fraction of what you purchase electricity for."
Not if your region was forced to subscribe to a feed-in-tarriff subsidy scheme for solar. Around here, there was a time when solar generated power earned 10x the value of the same amount of energy purchased from the grid. That multiplier has fallen thankfully, but is still greater than one.
Those batteries can come in useful even when you're still connected to the grid.
Right now, some locations have laws and/or regulation that force grid companies to buy solar-generated electricity from home owners at fixed rates. This makes a lot of sense right now as a measure to encourage the adoption of solar, as a way to get off fossil fuels. In the long term, it might become a less useful measure, and we might want to allow market mechanisms for time-of-day-based pricing. This is already happening on the big players' market, where you see drops of the spot price of electricity at noon on sunny days. Extending these market mechanisms to individual homes makes sense, as long as home owners are empowered by technology to make use of it.
A large battery is an important piece of such empowering technology (combined with being able to set a smart policy for when to run off the battery, when to run off the grid, and when to feed back into the grid).
The grid will become less reliable over time as utilization increases, and in many cases we have fundamental limitations that make broad-scale robustness difficult to implement.
So fake it out. If I have a reliable local power source, I can easily take short outages without user impact.
I get water from my well, have a septic tank in my backyard and use a 3G connection (there is no landline connection available where I chose to live). Getting off the electric grid would be nice, not to mention it would be cheaper too!
I note that people replying to this are saying that you can avoid those things (if you live sufficiently rurally, which is only true of a fraction of the population), but not really saying why you'd want to.
Here in Scotland it's the other way round. Orkney is detached from the grid and trying to get itself connected, so it can better balance local renewable generation with the rest of the UK (and thence ultimately the European grid as a whole). Maybe they'll go to municipal batteries but the cost is still not attractive.
Not sure most of those need physical connections. We can drive our garbage to the dump and also compost. We could dig a well, and we have a septic tank. We could get satellite internet. Physical connections for electricity is about the only absolute, unless you go solar, but then there's not a good storage mechanism for cloudy days (from what I can tell).
I don't see the big benefit here being living off any grid. To me, the benefit could be to charge battery when electricity is cheap, and also - if the battery is portable - to easily get a power source places where there is none.
I live in the Ohio Valley, near Pittsburgh, so we get some of the lowest amount of direct sunlight in the US. I'm not sure if solar is viable in my area yet.