Green Mountain Power is asking state regulators to let it buy batteries it will install at customers’ homes, saying doing so will be cheaper than putting up more power lines.
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Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity.
The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants.
The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses — would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own.
“Call us the un-utility,” Mari McClure, Green Mountain’s chief executive, said in an interview before the company’s filing. “We’re completely flipping the model, decentralizing it.”
Most interesting approach. OPALCO Board should study this and determine whether this would be financially logical to implement on parts of their grid, including an “end user pay” battery that would provide some power during outages.
The OPALCO team is supportive of home battery storage projects. OPALCO members can finance battery storage projects for their home or businesses via the Switch It Up program with no money down. Lots of folks are pairing the storage with solar projects. https://www.opalco.com/save/the-island-way/switch-it-up/
I’ve been looking into the battery storage idea for my own home and frankly, for me at least, the costs far outweigh the benefits. A fossil fuel powered generator (which I already have) and a big tank of fuel turns out to be a far more cost effective system for the relatively short (hours or days, not weeks or months) type of grid failure that we have had in the past few decades. Though we may be in for longer outages as the human climate destabilization experiment gathers steam!
The real solution, for me anyway, is to think VERY carefully about the things I genuinely require that run on electricity.
Lights are nice, especially in the short days of winter, but not actually essential. The same with refrigeration; people survived just fine without refrigerators for hundreds of thousands of years. For me, it turns out to be the well that is the essential system. In an extended power outage, I can heat with the wood stove and do without electric lights, refrigeration, computers, etc. But I can’t do without water. So I’m looking at installing a storage tank for a gravity water supply rather than a Tesla Powerwall battery. And I’m stocking up on candles and lamp oil!
Everyone’s situation is different and home size batteries might be a great solution to brief power outages for some people, but not for me.