>The US now has over 40GW of virtual power plant capacity, according to internal analysis by Wood Mackenzie. It's still relatively small compared to the roughly 600GW of natural gas and 200GW of coal, but a total of 160GW of capacity could be unlocked by 2030, according to a 2025 US Department of Energy report – equal to some 20% of the country's expected peak energy demand.
>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.
Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
What do you mean? These numbers provide great guidance so that people can understand the size of the battery discharge, and what they could replace.
Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Power isn't a particularly helpful metric here, energy is. Power doesn't tell you anything about how long the batteries will last, it only tells you how quickly they can drain. Also there's a limit to how much power you can draw through residential lines so regardless of whether or not batteries can deliver power on the same order of magnitude as a coal-fired plant, it's highly dubious that these specific batteries can do that.
>Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Hey don't tell me that, tell the BBC. They're the ones who wrote an entire article about "replacing power plants with home batteries".
I agree with how power is a bad way to measure batteries a lot of the time (though if you assume they last 4 hours you shouldn't be too far off).
But I don't think the residential line limits are too bad. A house that's sending out power takes its load off the grid and can also power multiple other houses without any lines being overloaded. And if an area has a high enough battery:house ratio, the full megawatt capacity of powering those houses but flowing the other way is a ton of power. (If the equipment can handle power flowing both ways.)
snickerbockers · · focus · HN ↗
>Through GMP's programme, its virtual power plant has quietly become Vermont's biggest source of power. Now, the state is testing how far this "hidden" form of power can go.
Does anybody at the BBC actually understand what batteries are, and why they cannot possibly compete with power plants!?!?
epistasis · · focus · HN ↗
Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
snickerbockers · · focus · HN ↗
>Batteries do indeed compete with power plants, every day of every moment they are on the grid. They are also consumers from power plants, they go both ways.
Hey don't tell me that, tell the BBC. They're the ones who wrote an entire article about "replacing power plants with home batteries".
Dylan16807 · · focus · HN ↗
But I don't think the residential line limits are too bad. A house that's sending out power takes its load off the grid and can also power multiple other houses without any lines being overloaded. And if an area has a high enough battery:house ratio, the full megawatt capacity of powering those houses but flowing the other way is a ton of power. (If the equipment can handle power flowing both ways.)