California's First Solar-Powered Microgrid Neighborhood Has a Giant Community Battery (theverge.com) 90
As part of a series of articles on smart homes, the Verge visits an energy-efficient home in the southern California desert that's "part of California's first planned smart, solar-powered residential microgrid community."
A surprisingly small number of solar panels on the roof soak up the sun in the desert landscape... funneling power into the tightly designed building envelope. Here, a 13-kilowatt hour home battery sits beside a smart load panel that controls every electrical appliance in the home, from the hybrid electric heat-pump water heater and high-efficiency heat pump HVAC system — both Wi-Fi enabled to share data — to the light switches, EnergyStar fridge, and energy-efficient induction cooktop. Using software algorithms, the Schneider load center intelligently determines where to best draw power from — the SunPower solar panels, the battery, or the grid. It then makes recommendations the Conriques can use to set automations that change power sources or reduce energy use when prices and demand spike...
The 43 new residences in KB Home-built Shadow Mountain, which launched in November 2022, and the 176 more planned as part of two communities, Durango and Oak Shade, are all-electric, solar-powered smart homes. By next year they will be connected to a 2.3 megawatt-hour community battery, sending any excess energy their panels generate to the common power source and creating a community microgrid. When the power goes down, the microgrid will kick in, isolating all 219 homes from the grid and keeping their essential functions up and running. The homes will draw first from their own battery (and potentially their EV) and then from the community battery. "When the system hits a potential steady state, they can ride a power outage for days, if not in perpetuity, with proper solar production," explains Brad Wills of Schneider Electric, manufacturers of the home's smart load panel, the community's microgrid components, and the software that runs the system...
Developed as a partnership between SunPower, KB Home, University of California, Irvine, Schneider Electric, Southern California Edison, Kia America, and the US Department of Energy, Shadow Mountain is designed to be a blueprint for how we can build better, smarter communities in the future... A recent DOE study estimated that by 2030, grid-interactive efficient buildings like those at Shadow Mountain could save up to $18 billion per year in power system costs and cut 80 million tons of carbon emissions annually.
The article describes how the community helps the larger power grid:
The 43 new residences in KB Home-built Shadow Mountain, which launched in November 2022, and the 176 more planned as part of two communities, Durango and Oak Shade, are all-electric, solar-powered smart homes. By next year they will be connected to a 2.3 megawatt-hour community battery, sending any excess energy their panels generate to the common power source and creating a community microgrid. When the power goes down, the microgrid will kick in, isolating all 219 homes from the grid and keeping their essential functions up and running. The homes will draw first from their own battery (and potentially their EV) and then from the community battery. "When the system hits a potential steady state, they can ride a power outage for days, if not in perpetuity, with proper solar production," explains Brad Wills of Schneider Electric, manufacturers of the home's smart load panel, the community's microgrid components, and the software that runs the system...
Developed as a partnership between SunPower, KB Home, University of California, Irvine, Schneider Electric, Southern California Edison, Kia America, and the US Department of Energy, Shadow Mountain is designed to be a blueprint for how we can build better, smarter communities in the future... A recent DOE study estimated that by 2030, grid-interactive efficient buildings like those at Shadow Mountain could save up to $18 billion per year in power system costs and cut 80 million tons of carbon emissions annually.
The article describes how the community helps the larger power grid:
- They can send electricity back into the grid during periods of peak demand.
- The local power company now also has the option to "island" the entire community off the grid in times of high demand.
- The community "is also trialing high-output vehicle-to-home and vehicle-to-grid functions."
Couldn't electric cars form a part of the battery? (Score:2)
Even taking account of the cars not parked at home at any one time, the cars could form a sizable "community battery".
Re: Couldn't electric cars form a part of the batt (Score:2)
Re: Couldn't electric cars form a part of the batt (Score:4, Informative)
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One of the advertised selling points for the Ford F-150 Lightning is to serve as a battery backup for your house, at least.
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Re:Couldn't electric cars form a part of the batte (Score:4, Informative)
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A water tower can be used to not have to run water pumps during relatively short power outages. It would also be possible to have a diesel pump to refill the water tower in emergencies. Pumping directly is more efficient than converting to electricity first.
Re: Couldn't electric cars form a part of the batt (Score:2)
If you have a running water source and dam, you can use ram pumps to move water through water treatment and upstream above the reservoir⦠a very simple purely mechanical design with few moving parts.
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Plus you don't want to run your battery below 20% or you may harm it.
That is nonsense.
The 20% margin is already build in into your battery. When the indicator displays: 0% it is actually 20% - how dumb are you?
but I'm assuming this neighborhood has guaranteed water in an outage? ... just lol.
Who cares? If not they have a pump, too.
And? How much power does a pump draw? Lol
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From tesla's website:
Discharging the Battery to 0% may result in damage to vehicle components. To protect against a complete discharge, Model 3 enters a low-power consumption mode when the displayed charge level drops to approximately 0%. In this mode, the Battery stops supporting the onboard electronics and auxiliary low voltage battery.
Sure this is at 0% but since there is such a high risk of cost and inconvenience at 0% I think I will be charging it at 20% anyway, thanks. Nice to know you 'can' charge
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And the glaring issue with your brain is: you are obviously to stupid to unplug your EV in such a situation. Welcome your Darwin award.
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Yes, it's mentioned in the article summary and it was brought up in a article wherein Telsa was promoting a plan to use this very feature a couple years ago.
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Average car drives 10k miles per year / 365 days * 0.25kWh/mile = 6.8 kWh/day
Assume some of that charging is done during the day and q you quickly see it is a non-issue.
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Not that it changes your overall point (which I agree with), but 0.25kWh/mile is above average. 0.30 would be a more reasonable estimate.
=Smidge=
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Not by sales volume. ;)
Eventually we should see smaller cars at under 0.2kWh/mile
Simple principle: (Score:2)
Re:Simple principle: (Score:5, Interesting)
We already have three grids that cover the US - West, East, and Silly-Party Land. It certainly seems feasible to attach battery storage to at least the two existing non-Texas grids.
Re:Simple principle: (Score:4, Funny)
I'm glad that Governor Abbott is protecting our families from the Giant Communist Battery recently detected in California. We can't even tell if the thing's male or female. It's not to be trusted. And if we elect him just one more time, he'll finally take care of it, with bombs.
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The thing is, this kind of thing only works for single family houses. Apartment buildings have a lot less solar exposure per resident. They're cheaper to heat or cool in extreme weather, but that's partially *because* they've got a lot less exposure to the thermal environment per resident.
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The only reason it doesn't work for apartment buildings is because someone will steal your solar panels if you leave them loose on your balcony and it's against the law to bolt them down since it's not your property.
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Offsetting the whole amount may be unreasonable in a lot of situations, but offsetting enough of it to be worth doing is not.
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Depends somewhat on the area in question, but many apartment buildings/complexes have large parking lots which could have large solar canopies installed strategically throughout them to both provide shade, weather protection and power. That said solar/wind/batteries are only a part of the solution to our energy needs, these kinds of microgrids will NEED other sources to cover lulls in solar/wind production such as hydro, fossil, hydrogen, nuclear, etc (either local or national grid based) baring some kind
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The thing is, this kind of thing only works for single family houses.
"This kind of thing being..." the power grid? The giant community battery? I assume you mean solar power because tenants are often pretty powerless to put up panels over the landlord's wishes and there often is not enough roof area per person to fully power all the tenants. In a community where all of the residences are planned around solar, however, excess power from other parts of the system can be used for apartment dwellers and solar panels at the apartment building and maybe over areas like parking lot
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This kind of thing being a solar home that sufficient in power if you have enough storage. The other comment about solar roof on top of the parking structure addresses the problem, but the additional area is only sufficient for the very small multiple dwelling unit structures.
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This kind of thing being a solar home that sufficient in power if you have enough storage.
The kind of thing described in the actual article though has a grid connection, a community battery, individual batteries per home, and solar panels on each home. It's an extremely redundant system. You seem to be describing off-grid systems. For example, you seem to think that apartment buildings will have to power themselves entirely from the sunlight that falls on the property of the apartment complex. This is not the case.
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Too late, maybe the industry shouldn't have blown their wad on sodium fires (though they don't even seem finished doing that yet).
At last (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what has been proposed by many as the way forward for some years. It's great to see it implemented on a small scale; let's hope the concept will spread to everywhere where it's viable. Add in tidal power in coastal areas, this may not merely be desert areas...
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Just sucks for the areas that can't afford their own microgrid. But I guess poor people don't really need electricity anyway, right?
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Just sucks for the areas that can't afford their own microgrid. But I guess poor people don't really need electricity anyway, right?
If it's all done correctly, the areas which "can afford their own microgrid" make the public grids less likely to fail during peak demand and loss of generation capacity. This would actually make things *better* for poor people.
With enough micro-grids, the entire grid system becomes more resilient - that benefits everyone.
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Unfortunately the benefits lie mainly within the microgrid. To the macro-grid, the microgrid just becomes a more moderated load that they can charge less to maintain. It also makes solar energy without storage less viable in the areas that are left.
The upshot is that retrofitting/converting an area (independent of economic status) keeps getting cheaper and easier. Money needs to go into energy efficiency for low income housing though to actually make it work.
Some and some (Score:2)
Poor people living in relatively densely populated parts of cities are cheap to provide with grid electricity compared with the cost of low density suburban housing. Others in rural areas do indeed need subsidies, which started with the New Deal, and is now the Rural Electrification Adminstration
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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The most painful part of the transition to local renewables and storage will be that people who can't do it, because they can't afford the up-front cost or because their landlord has no interest, will lose out. There is going to have to be some kind of government assistance, probably a combination of grants (wealth transfer) and laws forcing landlords to install it.
It's inevitable, it can't be stopped now that the technology is here. As ever, we can only do what we can to mitigate the worst of the new inequ
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Just sucks for the areas that can't afford their own microgrid. But I guess poor people don't really need electricity anyway, right?
There's absolutely no reason you couldn't divert funding currently intended for macrogeneration projects to microgeneration projects. Well, there is one reason, of course — utilities' profits on delivering service to customers are usually strictly capped by statute because they have abused the privilege in the past, so they are only really allowed to profit from new generation projects. And there's probably less profit in residential, because the costs are higher. That's where the bulk of the solar in
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There's absolutely no reason you couldn't divert funding currently intended for macrogeneration projects to microgeneration projects.
Well there's no physical or technical reason.
But FYGM is going to kick in immediately and the people with their own microgrids aren't going to want money to be invested in "those places".
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One thing missing from TFA is any information about how efficient these homes are.
The old Passivhaus standard requires a maximum of 4.5kWh of energy per day for heating and cooling, which means that the home must be well insulated and suited to its environment.
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This would also help a lot with the forest fires.
We have power lines going into faraway mountain villages with very small population. Granted, they, too need modern utilities. However cost / benefit does not add up.
Especially for maintenance, which means those high power lines don't have trees trimmed around them. One more storm, and another large forest fire, causing billions of damage, loss of forests, and unfortunately life as well.
Let's do a simple calculation. How much does it cost to reliably bring po
In dollars (Score:1, Troll)
A 13 kwh battery plus inverter for every home is roughly 20k-25k.
A 2400 kwh community battery plus power electronics is at least a few million. Spread over 200 homes, each one's share is another 10-20k each.
From the numbers, it'll probably work fine most days and nights, but if everyone's got a bird in the oven on a cloudy thanksgiving afternoon, some external baseload will be necessary to keep the lights on.
Average load != expected peak load.
Here's a car analogy.
Where I live in eastern Massachusetts, Thank
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Gas ovens had better broilers, but on balance I still don't want it back. Gas is for the hob, not the oven.
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I don't get this attitude that the range needs gas. I know for restaurants that do certain types of cooking it is easier, but I can't find anything that says gas is actually better.
(A commercial 8-burner range going electric might need 480V/60A 3-phase power, which isn't easy to retrofit in most places. At 240V single phase it becomes 200A, or the size of a typical residential service.)
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Can't convert BTU to Watts directly, it's 3-5 times as efficient at heating the pan.
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Induction stovetops are most efficient at heating the pan. Sure, you're limited to certain types of cookware, but that's not really too bad a restriction.
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They aren't. They convert electricity into heat, and the electricity was generated with a 60% loss.
The most efficient way is: gas ... or any other fire.
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That is thermodynamically impossible. However, gas can be faster at heating due to convection around the sides of the pan.
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There are two major destinations for the thermal energy, gas is more efficient at heating the air.
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After all, benzene is good for you!
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you get huff more benzene from gasoline and diesel vehicles and filling stations than the minuscule amounts from gas ranges. It's like saying your drinking water has heavy metals in it, which is true no matter how pure it is.
Electric ovens (Score:2)
Actually, I'd argue that despite their being 240V devices, electric ovens are actually lower power use - you can seal them up tighter, due to not needing to get rid of combustion gasses, or to pull in enough fresh air to combust. Plus, unlike the range, an oven is insulated(at least enclosed), reducing heat loss that way. So keeping one hot isn't actually that much power if you look at the average, even if you're keeping it hot for hours because you're cooking a turkey.
Air conditioning on a hot summer day
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The point, rather, is to lower our carbon footprint, not completely implement your "lefty" fevered dream.
Re: In dollars (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the point is, as always, to live, and to live well. Reducing the quality of life to third-world sporadic electrical outages in the service of some green religion is about as tenable as third-world sporadic electrical outages in the service of the glorious proletarian revolution.
local wifi? remote cloud? forced to buy ISP servic (Score:2)
local wifi? remote cloud? forced to buy ISP services?
water (Score:4, Insightful)
These homes will have power, will they have water?
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Re: water (Score:2)
Yes. They will have water. Most of California's freshwater goes to agriculture. I guess the question is, how much food will California be exporting in the future?
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Considering we'll just keep taking whatever we demand from the Colorado river, likely as much as the farmers can manage.
That assumes the Colorado continues to reach us. It already doesn't reach the sea, and if the districts near the top took all they wanted, it already wouldn't reach the districts at the bottom.
"The local power company ... has the option" (Score:2)
Does the local power company have the obligation to prioritize local demand and reliability? They can do so, but must they?
They can also make a lot of money from the battery storage during the run up to curtailment, while spot prices are peaking, but then have nothing left when curtailment actually hits.
Re: "The local power company ... has the option" (Score:5, Informative)
Not a household name? (Score:5, Informative)
Anything to destroy big oil and plastic (Score:1)
Beautiful attack surface (Score:1)
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"heat-pump water heater and high-efficiency heat pump HVAC system — both Wi-Fi enabled to share data" Beautiful attack surface. Please connect more appliances to the internet.
Replying just to raise the profile of your comment because I think you've raised a valid point which merits further discussion.
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Imagine smart grids/homes on a large enough scale, then imagine a hacker enabling or disabling the large smart loads all at once.
I assume this would create damage/problems.
Neighborhood Walls (Score:2)
California's First Solar-Powered Microgrid Neighborhood Has a Giant Community Battery
In brightest day,
In darkest night,
No electrons
Will escape my sight
Let those who worship
Fossil Fules
Beware my Tesla,
Elon Rules!
The model for electric utilities is broken (Score:4, Interesting)
However we can't do it under our current 100+ year old model of guaranteeing a fixed return on investment to the utilities and then regulating the price of electricity through the public utility regulators. The regulators are dumb. Like mind boggling dumb. Everyone one of them. California and Texas are not outliers. They are dumb in Canada, they are dumb in the UK and they are dumb in Australia. (They are marginally smarter in France) They are dumb because of how they are structured and we can't save this model. It made sense in the 1920s but it doesn't anymore. The easiest solution is to have the electric utilities separated into a connectivity units and generation units and have third parties buy electricity from the generators and then resell it to consumers. We also need to eliminate the caps on maximum prices and enforce contracts the way they are written. So if someone in Texas agrees to pay the spot price for electricity and it is -20C out and the price is 100/kwh then you either pay the $100/hour or go without. This means the generator who insulates his fossil fuel system and can still generate in the cold makes back his investment. It means the generator who sold a futures contract for power will insulate their system so that they don't have to cover themselves on the spot marked when everyone else fails. It also means that people will be incentivizes to consume power when the wind is blowing or the sun shining. I know we tried deregulation but we f#@ked it up royally. In California the middle sellers to consumers couldn't enter into futures contracts so we got all kinds of market manipulation. In Texas the whinny left set the price cap to low and basically said consumers, even if they agreed to pay the spot price wouldn't have to if they price was to high so there was no market incentive to insulate the generation or improve the reliability. In Oklahoma, I ran a pilot that set the price to 0 at night and the highest price was $0.78/kwh. Median home saving was $50/month and Oklahoma Gas and Electric (OG&E) would have saved billions plus they would not have needed to build 2B in peaker plants. The public regulator told OG&E to pass 100% of the savings on. OG&E said F#@K you, cancelled the project, built the 2B in peaker plants and then made an 11% return on that 2B. The model is badly broken.
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Actually I would say it is sized almost exactly where I would expect it to be. 50% local storage and 50% community, sized at roughly average daily use. The goal of these community microgrids is to limit import and export to a logical minimum. The batteries are sufficient to limit diurnal im/ex, although seasonal im/ex is still necessary.
The BS is the smart load panels; Schneider is really pumping them these days. You need metering and trending of all loads, but switching at the breaker is just stupid for 95
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Factories can't just furlough their workers cause there is too little generation. A couple can modulate their production rate, but it's still very inefficient labour and capital wise.
Consumers could chose to set their thermostat only high enough to prevent freezing pipes, but they'd rather pay the billions for the speaker plants too.
Demand side modulation is stupid, just dimension supply and price structure for worst case. Most economically efficient and consumer friendly. Sky high spot prices mean there is
2.3 MWh divided by 213 homes (Score:2)
Roughly 10 kWh per house - Better hope the grid comes back inside a day, and that nobody has to charge their EV.
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Roughly 10 kWh per house - Better hope the grid comes back inside a day, and that nobody has to charge their EV.
Better hope no one has to run their 3kW air conditioner for more than 3 hours either
sharing data (Score:1)
Inside note from an insider (Score:1)
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The Energy "island" (Score:2)
re: "The local power company now also has the option to "island" the entire community off the grid in times of high demand."
Didn't take long to take resource sharing to become a new form of high-tech gated community.