SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Open Source.com has raised an interesting issue.
With household and municipal scale electricity generation becoming commonplace, it appears that the energy market is about to experience a major technological disruption. Of course, with disruption comes opportunity, and there's already some clear contenders in the field, from Tesla with their cars and batteries, Suntech with their solar panels, to Vestas with their huge turbines.
There's a big caveat with all of this large-scale investment though, and that's contending with the existing centralized power grids and the utilities that manage them. Open source models are a good fit for this new paradigm, with collaboration replacing monopolies and open systems displacing proprietary vendor controls. High quality open source software tools exist already, including the well-supported PowerMatcher suite, but how will this collection of solutions wrest control of the key "last mile" hardware from the hostile and entrenched utilities?
Any suggestions from the SoyLentil team? If we get it right, all of us could become unfeasibly wealthy...
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday April 29 2015, @09:00PM
this is the power companies best move but it will be a costly investment
The batteries are probably going to have to be near the consumer. (Wasting limited storage capacity on long-line loss would seem to be undesireable) So distributed storage, fed by a grid, means almost all customers are buffered by local-ish storage.
The utility will probably under-provide, meaning almost zero carry-time, in the event of a grid or generator failure. You would have to closely regulate this make sure they can provide 5 nines (or what ever standard is agreed upon).
But why wait for them to do this? New subdivisions are going up every day. Why not build it in as a requirement like water and sewer, and street?
Then again that is only half the issue here. The other half is requiring dispersed solar from the utility, AND accommodating private or community solar [seia.org].
This is the sticking point today. Utilities are rebelling (with valid technical issues, I might add) against haphazard, unplanned, and often mandatory private solar connections that expect to FEED the grid. Instead of 100 homes in a subdivision each feeding randomly, local, subdivision wide, battery buffered storage makes more sense.
Maybe back-feeding to the grid is the problem. Maybe in the end, we don't actually need that. But even if we do need it, a few industrial class interconnects might make more sense than a random collection of various vintage and haphazardly maintained household interconnects.
We can argue where that local-ish storage should be provided by the utility or the neighborhood association or the municipality later.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.