By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
OCT. 24, 2023 | The good aspect of emergencies is that they make you look for ways to avoid that emergency in the future, so that you will improve.
The utility industry, specifically the electrical side, faces a serious and continuing problem: how to generate more electricity, since people are finding more ways to use electric power, from having more cell phones, more vehicles powered by electricity, and even more household items like cordless drills now charged with electricity. Seems utilities continually need to supply more power to customers
But one small utility may have come up with a possible way to benefit the industry.
A utility in Vermont, Green Mountain Power, wants to install storage batteries in many customers’ homes to absorb the additional power that wind and solar energy can now generate when they are producing a lot of it. Then when demand peaks during the summer, the utility could draw power from these many home batteries. By doing that, the utility would not have to build more costly power lines to bring in more electricity.
However, if at any time if the power lines were interrupted, then the utility could pull power from all these many batteries in people’s homes, with no interruption in service to the customers. The battery in the homes could feedback power into the overall system to keep the system intact.
The home batteries would also be a back-up system to the individual customers so that they were never out of power during this emergency.
Yes, all this would be expensive for the utility. But charge that off against the cost of having to add expensive and slow-to-build power lines to bring in power. Not only that, but providing batteries for customers would be a much faster turn-around
There’s another consideration: climate change. We’re seeing more hurricanes, winter storms and wildfires, which are highlighting the possibility that electric grids can be vulnerable. That means that an alternative system, such as storing power in individual home batteries, can offer this additional help to the utility industry.
Green Mountain Power is betting, in effect, that it would be financially feasible to have batteries in the many homes of its customers than to build more power lines to bring in more electricity. It’s a way the electric utilities have never had before, that is, a way of storing power during less costly generation through wind and solar or other means.
All this will be costly, of course. Green Mountain anticipates spending $280 million to install batteries in homes over the next seven years. They feel they will recoup these costs through lower wholesale electric rates.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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