Virtual Power Plants: Where Home Batteries are Saving Americans from Blackouts (msn.com)
- Reference: 0178698960
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/16/0335211/virtual-power-plants-where-home-batteries-are-saving-americans-from-blackouts
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/home-batteries-are-saving-america-from-blackouts/ar-AA1Krtjs
But they also note that "roughly 1 in 10 Puerto Rican homes now have a battery and solar array for backup power" which have also "become a crucial source of backup power for the entire island grid."
> A network of 69,000 home batteries can generate as much electricity as a small natural gas turbine during an emergency, temporarily covering about 2 percent of the island's energy needs when things go wrong... "It has very, very certainly prevented more widespread outages," said Daniel Haughton, [transmission and distribution planning director for Puerto Rico's grid operator]. "In the instances that we had to [cut power], it was for a much shorter duration: A four-hour outage became a one- or two-hour outage."
>
> Puerto Rico's experience offers a glimpse into the future for the rest of the United States, where batteries are starting to play a big role in keeping the lights on. Authorities in [2]Texas , [3]California and [4]New England have credited home batteries with preventing blackouts during summer energy crunches. As power grids across the country groan under the increasing strain of new data centers, factories and EVs, batteries offer a way for homeowners to protect themselves — and all of their neighbors — from the threat of outages. Batteries have been booming in the U.S. since 2022, when Congress created generous installation tax credits for homeowners and power companies.
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> Home batteries generally come as an option alongside rooftop solar panels, according to Christopher Rauscher, head of grid services and electrification for Sunrun, a company that installs both. More than 70 percent of the people who hire Sunrun to put up solar panels also get a battery. With the tax credits — and the money saved on rising electricity costs — solar panels and batteries make financial sense for most American homes, according to [5]a study Stanford University scientists published Aug. 1 . About 60 percent of homes would save money in the long run with solar panels and batteries...
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> Those batteries can have broader benefits, too. Utilities pay customers hundreds of dollars a year to sign their batteries up to form "virtual power plants," which send electricity to the grid whenever power plants can't keep up with demand. California's network of home batteries [6]can now add 535 megawatts of electricity in an emergency — about half as much energy as a nuclear power plant... [H]omeowners can make thousands of dollars a year lowering their energy bills, selling solar power back to the grid or enrolling their batteries in a virtual power plant, depending on their power company's policies and state regulations. "Over time, you would get the full payback for your system and basically get your backup for free," said Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering who co-authored the Stanford study.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/home-batteries-are-saving-america-from-blackouts/ar-AA1Krtjs
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/interactive/2024/virtual-power-plants-clean-energy-electricity-demand/
[3] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/grid-edge/californians-saved-the-grid-again-they-should-be-paid-more-for-it?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template
[4] https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/northeast-heat-wave-solar-battery-benefits
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-025-01821-w
[6] https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Assessing-VPP-Performance-Impacts-of-a-Test-Event-in-California-1.pdf
Excellent technological idea (Score:3)
Problem is, investor owned utilities pay little to nothing for using the battery power and charge customers a lot for the power
We need a fair payment system with the customer being in control of how and when their batteries are being used
Re: (Score:2)
> It should work like net metering, where the meter runs backwards when running on battery.
No. Because that's just being paid the same rate as the power you buy. During "emergencies", you should receive the spot market electricity price. That could be 10x the retail purchase price.
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> During "emergencies", you should receive the spot market electricity price. That could be 10x the retail purchase price.
I don't disagree but currently utilities are not legally obligated to provide uninterrupted power which means they would simply not buy the power and allow the power to go out.
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The spot market price is already the price that they have agreed to pay somebody. I'd like to see them justify paying $X to the Children of Enron but not the person with a Tesla Powerwall. Particularly when your lights go out but his stay on.
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You need an open standard for communication with the batteries and an electricity reserve market which allows the agglomerated storage to participate.
That said, larger players will soon drop the value of battery storage on the reserve market through the floor through economy of scale.
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> larger players will soon drop the value of battery storage on the reserve market through the floor through economy of scale.
Wouldn't that be a win for everyone?
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We already have that. There is no requirement that end users tie their solar or batteries to the grid, and even with grid-tied systems, they can be disconnected.
I have solar that is grid-tied. PG&E pays me for the electricity I feed back into the grid. I can turn that off by flipping a switch.
Of course, they pay me less than they charge me for the power I pull, but that is reasonable. Grocery stores do the same: the farmers are paid less than what the grocery stores charge customers.
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> Of course, they pay me less than they charge me for the power I pull, but that is reasonable. Grocery stores do the same: the farmers are paid less than what the grocery stores charge customers.
It is reasonable up to a point. PG&E takes it way beyond that point, though, IMO, paying between 2 and 8 cents per kWh, while charging 37 to 63 cents per kWh for power consumed.
It is pretty clear that PG&E only pays you anything for excess solar because they were forced to do so by California Assembly Bill 920, and that if they could get away with it, the compensation would be zero.
With regulated utilities like this, they should be required to pay homeowners a rate that is close to what the average
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Just delivering some power to save on gas is not very valuable, having high availability reserve power available on demand is where the money is.
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> Problem is, investor owned utilities pay little to nothing for using the battery power and charge customers a lot for the power
Not really, no. Last night PGE was paying a premium over the buy price for my battery surplus being sold back into the grid.
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> We need a fair payment system with the customer being in control of how and when their batteries are being used
I don't know where you live, but here in California he have exactly that.
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>> We need a fair payment system with the customer being in control of how and when their batteries are being used
> I don't know where you live, but here in California he have exactly that.
Does it actually cover the wear and tear on the batteries? Have you calculated it? Because I did, and they're paying for only about [1]64 minutes per day [slashdot.org] at current battery costs, assuming the actual power distribution and replenishment comes out price-neutral for the homeowner. Meanwhile, their big test of the system ran for two hours. If that becomes normal, then it's anything but a fair payment system, unless they're paying a *huge* premium per kWh on top of that.
It's PG&E, so you can generally assu
[1] https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23764872&cid=65577704
Re: (Score:2)
Your calculations are naive. I have done them too, but I don't have time to go step by step to explain it to you. A key thing you're missing is that the Powerwall has a finite lifetime in years, and for some reason you assume 4k cycles results in a non-functioning battery. You further misquote the cost. In California, I'm seeing a net cost of $7,500 when installed with solar, which is how most people acquire these. You need a better understanding of the subject to properly analyze it. Disclaimer: I worked i
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> Your calculations are naive. I have done them too, but I don't have time to go step by step to explain it to you. A key thing you're missing is that the Powerwall has a finite lifetime in years,
Nope. Not for LiFePO4 batteries (PowerWall 3). They exhibit [1]minimal degradation from long-term storage for an entire decade [sciencedirect.com].
> and for some reason you assume 4k cycles results in a non-functioning battery.
The general consensus is that at the 80% mark, you should not continue using the cell, for several reasons:
The capacity loss often accelerates beyond that point.
Capacity loss can be indicative of [2]dendrite growth [batterypoweronline.com], which can lead to catastrophic failures (read "fires").
But sure, if you want to take that risk, go for it. Nobody is stopping you.
> You further misquote the cost. In California, I'm seeing a net cost of $7,500 when installed with solar, which is how most people acquire these. You need a better understanding of the subject to properly analyze it. Disclaimer: I worked in the electric utility industry and had to do these kinds of analyses for a living.
Nope. The true cost of wear on a PowerWa
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775325016155
[2] https://www.batterypoweronline.com/news/a-look-inside-your-battery-watching-the-dendrites-grow/
Suckers game (Score:4, Insightful)
In an attempt to be isolated from outages, Individual households will spend large amounts of money installing solar and batteries, but the utilities will take over those household batteries whenever they want to supply power to stupid AI datacenters.
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> In an attempt to be isolated from outages, Individual households will spend large amounts of money installing solar and batteries, but the utilities will take over those household batteries whenever they want to supply power to stupid AI datacenters.
Exactly! When PG&E pays for the batteries and installs them at their cost, then they can have access to them.
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PG&E pays a large premium for that power, do you know nothing at all about the subject? See others on this thread who participate in these programs.
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Excuse me! Excuse me! This person was OUTRAGED on the internet. How dare you attempt to add facts or reasoning into the situation! Its obvious that PG&E will force them into putting the battery on the wall and then use it any time they want at gunpoint! And even if it's not true, it _could_ be true because they imagined it, so that's just as good!
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PG&E touched my junk! #metoo
Yes but actually, no. (Score:2)
> In an attempt to be isolated from outages,
Are they not being isolated from outages? Besides, being part of the Virtual Power Plant (VPP) is voluntary, you can always quit.
> Individual households will spend large amounts of money installing solar and batteries,
True and per TFS "About 60 percent of homes would save money in the long run with solar panels and batteries."
> the utilities will take over those household batteries whenever they want to supply power to stupid AI datacenters.
No. The whole VPP scheme is a stopgap measure for energy generation. This means merely stabilizes the grid load while other power plants come online to meet the electrical demand. Also note that excessive utilization of the distributive capabilities will no doubt place a g
Re: (Score:2)
Only if the battery owner agrees to it. You don't have to set up your battery to be capable of feeding power back onto the grid. The primary benefit to the battery owner is that they can charge it on off-peak hours and then be safe in the event of a brownout or blackout during peak hours.
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You DO realize that participation in virtual powerplant operation is opt-in, right? And that you typically get paid quite well for the power you provide (which didn't cost you anything to produce because sunlight is free).
If you have access to a VPP program it's a pretty good way to accelerate the payback of the installation costs.
=Smidge=
Batteries generate? (Score:2)
"A network of 69,000 home batteries can generate as much electricity as a small natural gas turbine during an emergency..."
No they can't, batteries cannot generate electricity at all.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> "A network of 69,000 home batteries can generate as much electricity as a small natural gas turbine during an emergency..."
> No they can't, batteries cannot generate electricity at all.
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct.
That said, I assume that the person meant to say "A network of 69,000 fully charged home batteries can provide to the grid as much electricity as a small natural gas turbine during a fairly short emergency."
In other words, until the batteries run out, they can provide the same power (and, for a fixed period of time, the same energy) to the grid as a small natural gas turbine.
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You're both wrong, per Merriam-Webster. See definition 2 below and consider how batteries work:
> generate /jn-rt/ [Slashdot can't cope with special characters in 2025, lol]
> transitive verb
>
> 1: To bring into being; give rise to. "generate a discussion."
> 2: To produce as a result of a chemical or physical process. "generate heat."
> 3: To engender (offspring); procreate.
> 4: To form (a geometric figure) by describing a curve or surface.
> 5: To produce (a program) by instructing a computer to follow given parameters with a skeleton program.
> 6: In generative grammar, to construct (a sentence, for example) through the successive application of linguistic operations, rules, and conditions.
> 7: To beget; to procreate; to propagate; to produce (a being similar to the parent); to engender. "every animal generates its own species"
>
> Similar: beget procreate propagate engender To cause to be; to bring into life.
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In the context of electricity, a generator is different from a battery, even if tney both generate electricity in the sense of definition 2 above:
2: To produce as a result of a chemical or physical process. "generate heat."
A generator in this sense is a mechanical device rather than a chemical one.
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TFA never used the word "generator", nor did anyone upthread until you just introduced that.
My definition came from American Heritage, not Merriam-Webster--mea culpa. But if you check M-W you will see a specific reference to electricity in the definition for "generate".
You learned something today, be thankful.
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This predictable pedantry accompanies every single discussion of batteries on /.
Batteries can serve as a source of energy to feed into the grid in times of need. In a practical sense, for the purposes of this discussion, they are an energy source.
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> No they can't, batteries cannot generate electricity at all.
Of course they can, it's one of the only two things they do.
Non-rechargeable batteries do one thing: generate electricity from chemical reactions.
Rechargeable batteries do two things: generate electricity from chemical reactions and consume electricity to drive chemical reactions from a lower energy energy state to higher energy state.
Are you maybe confusing batteries with capacitors? You might be correct in saying that capacitors cannot generate electricity since they simply allow electrons to move around
Joint the exploiters at neighborhood scale (Score:3)
In Texas, a relatively small capacity equivalent to around 100 PowerWalls is sufficient after a lot of paperwork to become a wholesale power generation company. Then you can charge 30X normal rates for the power you contribute to the grid during Texas' routinely declared power emergencies. Get the whole neighborhood in on it under an LLC or non-profit charter and profit rather than being exploited. Or set it up as a MUD which can help make your neighborhood harder to annex if you are in a neighborhood under threat of annexation. And for neighborhoods that already have a MUD and a place to put a bunch of batteries, it makes much more sense to do this at neighborhood scale since the ROI is so much higher.
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Considering the massive benefits of battery peakers, they could be a screaming bargain. 30X sounds higher than the price cap, though.
the missing information is what is being paid to gas peakers running on spinning reserve during these spikes. It's been quite a while since I worked in the ERCOT market, so I'm out of touch. But I recall the horrors of unhedged positions and market rates well enough to know that even with price caps it could be brutal.
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Sounds like a good project for an HMO.
How Does It Work? (Score:2)
In my experience, those that install home batteries install enough capacity to run their home, or a subset of its load, for a period of hours. Perhaps over night. The idea is that the panels stop generating and you have the battery to carry you overnight, maybe.
But, in this case we're talking about outages, so your home will be on solar and battery only. Yet, you'll have enough to let the grid pull from your battery? How does that work? In a hour or two your batteries are dead and you're out of power like t
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> Your home battery is no substitute for a proper electric grid maintained by a proper civilization.
Your "proper electric grid" is no substitute for a real grid. It's predominantly tree-structured, with generation far from the point of consumption. What would actually be as robust as possible would be a system which could break itself into small pieces and allow local generation and storage systems to provide power to as many users as possible in scenarios where there is damage to the network. The place for centralization is in standards for that equipment to follow so that they can cooperate to deliver t
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Grids aren't tree structures, that's why they're called grids.
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> Grids aren't tree structures, that's why they're called grids.
They are called grids, but they are a hybrid of a grid and a tree structure, and many cities (or even entire counties) are fed by only a single connection. Virtually no neighborhoods are multiply connected. At the interstate level it's fairly gridlike, but the closer you get to a house, the less like a grid it becomes.
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Tough to explain stuff to people who don't have the technical background to understand it.
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> Tough to explain stuff to people who don't have the technical background to understand it.
Does it even take a technical background? Just a little paying attention and a willingness to look things up if you lack personal familiarity goes a long way. There's maps of power connections, you can download free GIS data that shows where the transmission lines are and load it up in free software... (I use QGIS)
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I was being generous. Opening a website can be "technical", right?
What damage do you imagine happening? (Score:3)
Look I get it you've got prepper fantasies but specifically what damage do you imagine is going to happen? I would like a list.
Because right now it just seems like you are anxious for the collapse of civilization because you think you're going to somehow come out ahead during that mess.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
> Look I get it you've got prepper fantasies but specifically what damage do you imagine is going to happen? I would like a list.
Look I get it, you've got fantasies of mental competence, but every time you reply to one of my comments lately you prove you're nowhere near.
So no answer then (Score:2)
Pretty typical. Right wingers always retreat to baseless accusations and insults because your ideas don't work in the real world.
You got to be pushing 50 man. Don't you ever question your worldview? Look around. Is this how things should be?
I know you're not happy because nobody posting here is. This is a dead forum from the '90s.
Re: So no answer then (Score:2)
I feel called out now. Thanks for that.
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> Pretty typical. Right wingers always retreat to baseless accusations
You wouldn't know an actual leftist idea if it fucked you in the eye socket.
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A wide area grid is not really necessary if buildings were far more self-reliant, which is possible with good design. Passive and active solar, R-60 insulation values, heat exchangers, max solar orientation, battery and mass walls, heat pumps, and EVs would allow many if not most us not to rely on Big Energy, which is what the upper class fears the most; that we should become independent of their classist and exploitive transnational corporations. People, this is exactly what economic slavery looks like.
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> Your home battery is no substitute for a proper electric grid maintained by a proper civilization.
So I guess all of Europe isn't a proper civilization then, 'cause this kind of thing probably could have averted the Iberian Peninsula blackout a few months ago.
As renewable energy takes a larger share of the capacity, the stability offered by the large physical mass of turbine wheels is reduced. We need to add more capacity to absorb and supply energy to the grid, and batteries do that pretty well.
Also th
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A few hydro-supplied countries excepted, renewables will never supply more than 10% of our median energy needs. Iberians and the USA have no "free" energy supply like Scandinavia --- drill baby drill ...
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Consider the parts of the United States where solar and wind are relatively easy to capture and store. They could easily have well north of 10% of their annual electricity produced by renewables in a few decades if they choose to.
Note: I recognize that you said "median" and I'm talking about "average." I think "average" is probably a better measure for this than "median" anyway.
Re:Americans are obsessed with individualism (Score:4, Informative)
As I write this, CAISO reports 70.4% of California's load is being served by solar, 5.8% by wind, and 1.8% by hydro = ~78%. Net load is actually negative because about 7.5GW is going into battery storage.
I don't think this counts residential solar since it's not properly on the CAISO system and ends up simply being less load to serve.
Our energy is expensive, but it's rapidly going green and I love it.
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What in the world are you talking about. Texas as I write this is running 30% solar and 10% wind. And tonite when demand drops to around 55GW wind is expected to crank up to around 20GW or around 35% of demand. This is pretty typical (ie median) energy needs. The problem is the exceptions. Because on a cold windless night people still want to stay warm and on a hot summer days there is usually a gap in time when the sun sets and people's demand to cool the remnant heat out of their houses keeps demand up be
So when I say civilization is collapsing (Score:1)
That doesn't just include America. I'm calling out America because our dumbass obsession with individualism is spreading to other countries. This is intentional our billionaire class spends quite a lot of money on propaganda globally.
I don't pay as much attention to Europe I can tell you that you can thank globalist billionaire propaganda for the brexit nonsense. But a little bit closer to home and still not America I have people in Canada demanding their first amendment rights so that they don't have t
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Residential solar and battery storage is about the most cooperative thing I can think of (especially considering the virtual power plants etc), but because you don't understand how any of this works you think it fits your cynical hipster agenda.
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> Also this is like, the exact opposite of individualism; It's collectivism. People contributing their individual resources for a common good.
It looks a lot more like cooperation to me. Collectivism is people's individual resources being redirected to some central authority, if you're lucky it's for a common good. We haven't been lucky often.
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> Collectivism is people's individual resources being redirected to some central authority,
That central authority being the electric utility, yes.
=Smidge=
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> And it's going to be the death of us.
> Your home battery is no substitute for a proper electric grid maintained by a proper civilization.
> This is a classic Band-Aid on a bullet wound. We know AI is coming for both our jobs and our electricity. And our solution is to retreat into our castles.
> But we don't have castles we have moderately sized housing. We aren't Kings we are peasants. Just because we've got PlayStations and air conditioners doesn't mean we have become Kings.
> It's that hyper individualistic hubris encouraged by the upper class and the elites so that we don't form communities that could cause them problems.
We should all fight the good fight to somehow fix our broken civilization, but in the mean time you can either sit in darkness during blackouts, or you can take action to make yourself self-reliant for home energy.
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Nobody is "individual like Silvergun. But, his karma pays the slash-dot tax for occasionally correct analysis. Remember, the original local energy source was not solar or even battery ... but a fireplace . Every "moderately sized" grass roofed hovel had at least one ... maybe two. If you were wealthy, you hired a stonemason to carve a flat slab circling it. 'Course that darn hole-in-the-roof ... like leaky solar panels ... made everyone change to the grid. Life is better now. Deal wi
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Electrolysis/fuel-cell might become as cheap as an air conditioner and seasonal hydrogen storage as cheap as a septic tank.
Then peasants can be their own power companies.
Our power grid is being devoured by AI (Score:2)
You think the billionaire is pushing for that or going to let you have frankly anything? You're not going to have air conditioners you're going to have staggering poverty like you see in South Sudan or Russia outside of the two big cities
You are a perfect example of the problem that I'm talking about. The billionaires aren't going to let the peasants have anything because they are not content being billionaires they want to be trillionaires and the only way you do that is to claim all the property and g
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"But we don't have castles we have moderately sized housing."
And we don't own it, we rent it from the slum lords that are taking our electric. They will be buying all the castles along with everything else.
So a bunch of us technically owned property (Score:2)
But the thing is if you're over 50 you're starting to need pills to keep yourself alive and if you're over 60 you absolutely need those pills no matter how healthy you think you are. You were also going to periodically need some heart surgery, typically stents, or you're just going to die of a heart attack or a stroke.
They will use access to that medical care to extract the property that the people here own. Your mortgage your house to afford medicine and before long the bank and the guy with a gun call
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Depends on your genes. I'm well into my 60's, no pills. Swim every other day, walk every day. I'm not fooling myself, eventually I'll need some, just not yet. Heart rate at rest is low 50's and BP is normal at the moment. Eating well which generally means not eating out can make a big difference. Salt is not your friend.
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This is not individualism, not even close, this is classism and corporatism, which are the result of selfishness and greed. Ethics matter more than money but overy affluent people don't want to see how their lifestyle is both unsustainable and rooted in economic exploitation.
Money is power and power corrupts. This is what a corrupt and decadent society in decline looks like.
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I, unlike you, have worked in the electric utility industry. Your notions about grid robustness are laughably wrong. Stay in your lane and let us engineering types sort it out.
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This entire submission demonstrates how individualism saves the power grid from failure. Call it a band-aid or whatever else you want to call it. You're still an asshole.
"If only more Americans would kneel and obey!". No, fuck off.