Waldo JaquithOct 9, 2023
Vermont'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
Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries

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.

The New York Times
Show threadRidingbetweenthelines

@waldoj grid scale solar is waaaay cheaper than distributed. It's something like a third the cost on lazard's latest numbers. It's just a much cheaper/ more efficient/ less resource intensive option to build grid scale.

You don't need the subsidies to make grid scale work either!

Oct 10, 2023 at 1:35amWeb
Show threadWaldo JaquithOct 10, 2023
@Ridingbetweenthelines Grid scale power is waaaay cheaper than distributed. It's way cheaper to just generate it instead of storing it in everybody's homes! And yet…
Show threadRidingbetweenthelinesOct 10, 2023
@waldoj can you elaborate on it being way cheaper to generate instead of store? Are you referring to batteries? Distributed batteries can make sense. You don't need solar for that though.