Why millions of Americans give up control of their thermostats | by automatically rerouting power at need, "virtual power plants" can smooth the unpredictability of wind and solar
Why millions of Americans give up control of their thermostats | by automatically rerouting power at need, "virtual power plants" can smooth the unpredictability of wind and solar
That's a very rosy picture, but they skipped a very important detail, alas. Or well, a few.
First, selling your power to the power companies in Texas is great! Except the amount they pay you is always going to be substantially less than the price you're going to pay later to import a kwh.
We have the Freedom(TM) to pay two seperate charges for power: the delivery cost, and the power cost. This is a great Freedom(TM) because it lets the power company pay you the power cost for your exported power, but you get to pay both halves when you no longer have that kwh in your batteries later.
Also this is just an attempt to get someone else to pay their CapEx to catch extreme usage events, and the incentives being paid out to people who have spent tens of thousands of dollars is still tilted in the power company's favor. The article itself even says it's helping them make a bigger profit: if it was a fair set of incentives, well, then that wouldn't be what's actually happening, would it?
And, worse, any non-Texans might not catch how unlivable shit gets if your A/C starts screwing with the set temperature when it's 110F outside. The article says it turns it 'off', but the impact I've seen from some friends who have one of these plans setup is that it simply sets the temperature to something like 86; high enough to stop the usage, but not quite enough to kill you or your pets if you're not aware it's done it. Still, not the most pleasant.
Still, it's a good idea and a step in the right direction, but we need (lol, lmao) actual real regulation around this and the incentives to be a little less... lame. They're very much structured around the 'well, what else are you going to do with your excess?', rather than with a real intent of fair dealing.
If it was really smart, it would let you set what you're willing to sell energy at, then when the utility company says "we're paying x, take it or leave it," the system can say "leave it" until they decide to pay more. They aren't buying from you because there isn't a need, so why should you be paid low-demand prices?
Yeah, that would be an improvement, especially since the price per kwh can spike like crazy during situations where they really need you to sell back to the grid.
The only issue that I can see happening is that everyone would then move the 'sell price' slider to the maximum setting and leave it there and I'm not entirely sure the power companies would shrug and play along.
My $5 is that they'd keep the low offering price and just wait for SOMEONE to eventually decide that whatever, some ROI is better than no ROI and we'll end up back where we started.
This is one of those problems that probably has to be actually regulated by someone "impartial" that's setting the prices that are not unreasonable for either party, but I'm still in Texas and we can't agree on regulating anything anywhere at any time, so I'm less than hopeful.