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figbert | on: In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.

I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.

plantain | parent
We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.

> Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. A couple of electricians doing 20kWh (average install size) once per day, with an individual inverter, gateways, etc. is not at scale, by any means of the word.

mrngld | root | parent | next
No, we do not in fact have the "power pipes". Those "pipes" have capacity limits. Those "pipes" and getting them approved and built in the US is a key limiting factor that throttles... pretty much everything. Yes, it holds up data centers, but also I've heard 'green' energy advocates complaining for decades about how difficult it is to get the permits and approvals to get wind and solar facilities hooked up, they're holding up nuclear plants, they're holding all kinds of things up.

There's also something to be said for distributed production and storage. We don't all live in ultra-compact cities. I agree apartment buildings don't need to be playing this game. But Australia (and the US) are extremely dispersed relative to Europe, for example. There should, in theory, be resilience in distributed production and storage that grid managers could call upon to help manage point failures.

figbert | root | parent | next
Base Power is, at present, installing nearly 100 40kWh batteries on homes per day throughout Texas and the Chicago area. It is doubling total deployed capacity approximately every six months (currently at a bit over 0.6GWh total, to hit 1GWh by EoY). Read: at scale.
triceratops | root | parent | next
Those are transmission lines. Utilities do need to upgrade distribution lines and transformers for areas with large-scale adoption of EVs, heat pumps or other increases in electrical load. Localized battery and solar installations can help defer these infrastructure upgrades, if done by planning and consultation with the utility.
ceejayoz | root | parent | next
> We already have the "power pipes", from the power plants.

And when they break, many people lose power.

Ukraine's seen some of the benefits of hyper-local generation over centralized production.

marcosdumay | root | parent
A thousand electricians doing 20kWh installations every week-day add up to 5GWh/year.

There are probably more than a thousand electricians in Australia.