Waldo JaquithVermont's Green Mountain Power is going to equip every customer with a backup battery, since that's cheaper than making their power grid more resilient. This is the first half of a good idea. The remaining half would be to provide customers with heavily-subsidized solar panels (amortized over a decade's power bills), creating a distributed power-generation system that can serve customers even when disconnected from the grid. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-home-batteries.html?unlocked_article_code=LeKDfU8q__Ways4PG2VyNTDvV6LLU5JNc5L7H_qb312SZnm9OaYuY573BIxiljZ3L55mi6HAWbKGEhmVrH-jIKJnEl6G6t-8FQxeMxe_HZwRtuDnLZeKjkJxgwym5CKHNMWQ23ZrHZ8Zvg3DQwG9Te1D2nLCwW7ixhHUoqUMB7Of3RMrFAS5Y80nHGWd1X8KFKIboUuhOHllGyZ7UHSNNtG6yBOAdPphYFkw1YycDthyDatHwumZki5-XcUEf4yxBv55nlOb0FrwJqhCt17gFpPXgqWUqK5dbsUOHY7eVd799Nd113qS21tX0eiIS3YWXBzfpWimAhK6PbfgbSfGVqktp52RLdkdSvnY2BkhhOzhuTHcE19JHaAG&smid=url-share
Jeff Zugale - Z Factory@waldoj I’m gonna say similar things to what I said in another related thread. Are these batteries cobalt-free, or is it okay to abuse Kenyans to power your house?
There are a lot of other long-term ramifications - economic, environmental and political - to this that I’m not sure are being considered.
The fact that’s it’s apparently cheaper (at this moment) to equip a million houses with batteries than to fix the electrical grid should TERRIFY you.