Vermont Utility Plans To End Outages By Giving Customers Batteries (nytimes.com) 102
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity. The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants. The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses -- would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own. "Call us the un-utility," Mari McClure, Green Mountain's chief executive, said in an interview before the company's filing. "We're completely flipping the model, decentralizing it."
Green Mountain's plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers. The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years -- money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines. The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials. Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity. Under the proposal, the company would initially focus on delivering batteries to its most vulnerable customers, putting some power lines underground and installing stronger cables to prevent falling trees from causing outages.
Green Mountain's plan builds on a program it has run since 2015 to lease Tesla home batteries to customers. Its filing asks the Vermont Public Utility Commission to authorize it to initially spend $280 million to strengthen its grid and buy batteries, which will come from various manufacturers. The company expects to invest an estimated $1.5 billion over the next seven years -- money that it would recoup through electricity rates. The utility said the investment was justified by the growing sum it had to spend on storm recovery and to trim and remove trees around its power lines. The utility said it would continue offering battery leases to customers who want them sooner. It will take until 2030 for the company to install batteries at most homes under its new plan if regulators approve it. Green Mountain says its goal to do away with power outages will be realized by that year, meaning customers would always have enough electricity to use lights, refrigerators and other essentials. Green Mountain would control the batteries, allowing it to program them to soak up energy when wind turbines and solar panels were producing a lot of it. Then, when demand peaked on a hot summer day, say, the batteries could release electricity. Under the proposal, the company would initially focus on delivering batteries to its most vulnerable customers, putting some power lines underground and installing stronger cables to prevent falling trees from causing outages.
substations are where it's at (Score:5, Interesting)
Putting their batteries on private premises opens them up to a metric fuck load of liability for fires, leakages, homeowner fiddling, and other miscellaneous awful crap that can happen. Put your money back in your pants Big Electric, and install these batteries at your substations instead. You'll enjoy far less liability, much better control over the installation facility, the same "keeps the lights on" sort of service, and a better ROI from installation size efficiencies.
Re:substations are where it's at (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
As a writer and artist, I ridicule the idiots who think chatGPT and Midjourney will replace true creatives. It's not just focus and clarity that are lost but an unconscious level of communication. Just like phrenology and dyanetics, "AI" will go down as hubris-born bullshit
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
A man called Joseph Campbell will have the last laugh.
Re: substations are where it's at (Score:1)
Most power outages are due to downed cables. Anything short of putting batteries in the homes directly doesnâ(TM)t solve that problem.
Re:substations are where it's at (Score:5, Insightful)
You'll enjoy far less liability, much better control over the installation facility, the same "keeps the lights on" sort of service...
If the lines between the customer and the power station go down, having batteries at the station wont mean squat.
Judging by the name (and a brief look over their website) this appears to be a rural electric company, and for them the biggest issues with reliable service is infrastructure getting pulverized by weather and nature. They many times are running service lines to homes over longer distances from the main lines and through forested areas. So strong winds and falling tree branches are keeping them on their toes compared to suburbia power companies. Having backup power on-site where it only goes 20' to reach the customer is going to be a lot more reliable of a backup plan.
Here's a radical idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Do what a lot of european countries do for the mid and low voltage power distribution system - bury the cables!
Yeah I know, what a concept! But it might just work.
Re:Here's a radical idea (Score:5, Informative)
Burying the cables only works if you can regularly maintain it because fault finding is significantly harder with buried cables than overhead lines. It's also a location headache because the line gets buried, then it gets overgrown and then accessing it can be a big problem, as well as being able to find it in the first place.
In an urban setting, this isn't too terribly difficult as they don't usually run very far before they get a connection so you can generally locate them fairly quickly because manholes are plentiful. In a rural setting, a line may travel for miles before it needs to be connected to something, then you have to un-bury the line (if you can find it) and install a ground level infrastructure to do the hookup. It's all very expensive and while you get protection from the weather, the difficulty in servicing and fault finding can make it more hassle that its worth.
It's why rural areas generally prefer overhead lines - they can be easily inspected, and faults are rapidly detected and easily accessible. If you have a fault in a line, the entire line must be inspected in case there are other faults as well, and with lines easily being several miles long overhead is the way to go.
I'm pretty sure in Europe the same thing happens - in urban areas it's all buried underground but in more rural areas, they will go for overhead lines as well. It's just that Europe's a fairly small continent (there are US states larger than many countries) so getting out there is fairly hard to do and their rural areas can be still fairly densely populated.
France is a fairly large country (2nd largest after Ukraine) - but its total land area is slightly less than 2 Colorados, for example. Or, France is smaller than Texas. In that you're squeezing in 67M people, or about 20% more than California, or about a fifth of the US population all squeezed into Texas.
In other words, going across a European country can be done in a day. Going across the US, takes a few more of those.
When you have miles and miles and miles of open land, burying the power cables doesn't make a lot of sense from any perspective
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not that bad. I used to work in the water industry, and most water and waste pipes are buried. The industry has equipment that helps locate leaks, so they know where to dig to effect a repair. They rely on sound, but you can do it with electrical cables easily enough too.
Another option is to have access pits at regular intervals, where you can check for voltage. They are called pits, but really they are small diameter pipes with a cover at the surface. When you find where the voltage stops, pull out th
Re: (Score:3)
" It's also a location headache because the line gets buried, then it gets overgrown "
Plans and maps are a thing.
"accessing it can be a big problem"
Any company thats paid to bury a cable on someones land has also paid for access. Ditto with pylons.
"It's just that Europe's a fairly small continent "
Define small. Its almost 2000 miles from portugal to greece.
"burying the power cables doesn't make a lot of sense from any perspective"
Fine , so have them blow down as soon as there's a strong wind and have to pay
Re: (Score:2)
Do what a lot of european countries do for the mid and low voltage power distribution system - bury the cables!
Yeah I know, what a concept! But it might just work.
There are good reasons not to bury lines everywhere. Heat dissipation issues, root intrusion from vegetation, and frost heave are the big ones I'm aware of. I've heard stories of determined critters (gophers) chewing the sheathes. Potential for water intrusion of equipment. Things like that.
Now, by and large I'm a believer in burying cables in densely populated areas, or in areas where wildfire is a consideration. But the costs are not trivial, especially in rural areas, and it may flat out not make se
Re: (Score:2)
Europe?
My 1960s neighborhood in the US has buried cables.
A half a mile away, there's a neighborhood with overhead.
We may have more incentive here, though--anything that can't survive 100mph wind just isn't going to stay up.
hawk
Re: (Score:1)
It doesn't help that I live on a dead-end of our local power grid.
I would love for our utility wires to be buried. Our former neighbors were from Switzerland and were shocked that our power lines were not buried.
Of course, at my previous residence the power lines for our subdivision were buried, but they were fed from over
Re:substations are where it's at (Score:5, Interesting)
Put your money back in your pants Big Electric, and install these batteries at your substations instead.
How does a battery at a substation fix the problem of the lines failing between there and the customer's house?
This is Vermont, where the ice and wind takes down the lines all the time. It's not like the power plants are failing to deliver enough juice. This is not California.
Re: (Score:1)
It's not like the power plants are failing to deliver enough juice. This is not California.
So then why are they installing a load shaving platform? Sounds like they should be installing liquid propane generators at their customer locations. FIll the tank once and they can run on generator for a week or better should the lines go down. With energy potential like that, why would you instead drop in a battery that will run out of juice in less than 2 days? What are the mean/median/max outage timeframes of their customers?
Sorry, but this smells like fitting a preferred solution to the problem.
Multiple optimizations (Score:5, Informative)
Why are they installing a load shaving platform: Because they can? Because they think it'd be useful in a future full of green energy? Because the more uses they can use the batteries for, the easier they are to justify?
Why are they NOT installing propane generators: Because that would be more expensive per house, require more maintenance, generate noise concerns, wouldn't solve the "instant outage" problem(you'd still lose power for a minute or so), wouldn't allow them to "bank" excess electricity generated by solar/wind systems, they're in the business of selling electricity and not propane, etc...
My grandparents are in upstate NY, so similar area. Outages are generally limited to a day or two. Plus, well, power demands tend to not be as outrageous as further south, so a powerwall might last longer than that.
I get a fair number of power outages at my house, but they're all generally very short. Eliminating the annoying *blips* just long enough to blink the lights and shut down any computers/electronics not on an UPS would be nice.
Re: (Score:2)
No point in arguing with the anti-electric crowd. They are ill-equipped for that.
Re: (Score:2)
Power demands are lower further north because there is less need for ac, and heating is often powered by gas or oil instead of electric. If you switch people out to heat pumps and electric cars, the demand on the grid will increase significantly in places like this.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You don't want your battery drained by load levelling right before an outage...
If the weather is bad, you'll usually have your heating on and probably want to keep the car charged incase you need to go anywhere. Then the bad weather brings down the power lines and your battery is already drained, it's no longer of much use.
Plus during bad weather solar panels and wind turbines will not be producing much power.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would your battery be drained? Leading up to an outage, you would be using utility power to run your heating and other stuff, not the battery. The battery would only need enough juice to stay charged at full. And because of the way modern battery packs work, that means that it would only charge up at periodic intervals, never letting the capacity get below maybe 80% to 85%. (But could be set arbitrarily high, depending on need given outage frequency and average length.) And that charging would happen du
Re: (Score:2)
"Why would your battery be drained?"
You missed the load leveling part. To handle high demand the utility pulled energy out of "your" battery to keep the grid up. Then the grid goes out, or the line to your house, and now your power outage starts with a nearly drained battery.
Or the battery is drained causing the power outage when the grid can't keep up.
Granted you are no worse off than you were before you had the battery, the grid went down and now you are in the dark. Fire up the wood stove and maybe the s
Re: (Score:2)
You missed the load leveling part. To handle high demand the utility pulled energy out of "your" battery to keep the grid up. Then the grid goes out, or the line to your house, and now your power outage starts with a nearly drained battery.
Load leveling is unlikely to drain your battery completely, and if they anticipate severe weather they can always accept the higher cost and buy more power in order to ensure that the batteries are charged when the storm hits.
They seem to be less about load leveling demand than load leveling supply. IE being sure they have somewhere to put their green power.
Some nitpicks... (Score:2)
To be fair to the Op, making it so that wind turbines can operate during very cold temperatures is indeed straightforward and likely to be done for any turbines in or around Vermont. The trick is that "bad weather" isn't limited to cold, it also includes things like high winds, gusting winds, etc... Which is much more likely to force current turbines to shut down. IE turn sideways to the wind and feather their turbines for low drag. There are designs that are supposed to take this kind of weather better
Re: (Score:3)
Let's think about this a bit.
10,599 kWh/year [eia.gov] for the NE USA single family dwellings.
That's 29 kWh/day, I'll round up to 30. Tesla Powerwalls are 13.5 kWh. So a fully charged Tesla powerwall should give 8 hours of power.
For durability/lifespan issues, it's generally best to keep lithium batteries in the 20-80% range. Also, while peaks are a thing, I don't think that they'd want to take it down to "almost zero" routinely. Honestly, I think that load leveling might only be a kWh or two per day.
But fine, ba
Re: (Score:2)
Wintertime power demand for my all-electric house is three times summer demand, and yes I have a heat pump.
This last summer the heat pump was in cooling mode for part of 19 days, typically 2 PM to 8 PM. The heat pump went to full time heat mode two weeks ago and will stay there until May. The last frost is typically about May Day.
So yes, seasonal electric load will shift a lot if heating changes to electric.
Re: (Score:3)
It is a multi-function platform. It can work with distributed generation as well as load-side management-- it can even work with real-time pricing. Looking at my real-time utility load/export, which is going to be typical for anyone with a PV system and an EV, Without mitigation measures and a lot of diversity this is hell on a utility. The easiest mitigation strategy is batteries.
Re: (Score:3)
1. Propane burns hotter than home heating oil or diesel fuel, producing organic exhausts besides carbon dioxide and water vapor during typical combustion
2. Propane does not usually smell when it is burned.
3. Propane fumes are heavier than air and will settle in low-lying areas. If it leaks don't turn on any lights or electrical appliances, which could ignite the fumes.
Basically removing the benefit of clean energy
Re: (Score:2)
Propane by pipe is only available in cities, and this company serves rural Vermont.
Re: (Score:1)
In that case, what good is a battery? Get a generator. This is vermont, where people can actually freeze to death, not cali-fucking-fornia.
Re: (Score:2)
I've lived in upstate New York, North Dakota, and Alaska.
It's perfectly possible to NOT freeze to death, even in a power outage, with a little prior planning.
What good is a battery? I put an UPS on my oil boiler in Alaska. Just a plain computer one. It was enough to keep my house heated for hours in a power outage.
I'd call that pretty freaking good.
Upgrade to a powerwall? A dozen or so kWh? They're good for a couple days without needing to pull out the generator.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I don't think you realise that historically, everybody in North America froze to death every year until Jesus invented electricity. The place had to be repopulated by conquistadors and pilgrims every year.
Not a lot of people know this.
Re: substations are where it's at (Score:2)
Re: substations are where it's at (Score:2)
(Chuckled at This is not Calif, since PG&Eâ(TM)s crisis is because of storms and fires and downed trees. Different environmental factors, but batteries would help their situation)
Re: (Score:3)
The rationale is that they can buffer local generation and local consumption to manage all portions of the electrical system and not just transmission/sub-distribution. This helps to avoid upgrading distribution transformers to allow for things like EV deployment. It also significantly limits requirements for crews on standby to repair infrastructure while maintaining their customer availability statistics. Having time to assess various incidents prior to starting to dispatch crews give much better optio
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, and at first thought it seems like batteries in substations would keep the benefits of being able to size closer to average demand than to peak demand.
On the other hand that would leave the expense of having to make storm repairs on an expedited basis.
Re: (Score:2)
The tricky part of this is that if you're using it to average demand out (provide power during peak demands/low production periods and store power during low demand/peak supply), it doesn't actually matter that much where you put the storage - electricity will travel both ways on power lines.
So I think their ability to size things appropriately is going to be virtually unaffected whether they install them in or on customer's buildings(assuming commercial as well as residential) or on their own properties.
Al
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, I don't see this being a good long term solution. It might be fine for areas that getting a utility crew out might result in days of outage, but VT is a tiny state and that doesn't tend to be an issue.
Puerto Rico, Alaska and Hawaii however. Good luck getting replacement supplies in under a day.
There are of course places in Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Utah that are pretty much unreachable in inclement weather, but they tend to not receive tornados or hurricanes.
Meanwhile, places like
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
" install these batteries at your substations instead"
That's where the power lines go down, leading to outages.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Green mountain has had no issue with it. And with this approach, the grid, along with distributed batteries, handle varying loads, outages, etc.
From a national security POV, THIS is the way to go.
Now, just have residnetial add in PV (enough to cover the home in an outage, and ideally provide most during fall/spring) and we are looking at a system that is designed to deal with whatever life throws at it.
Re: (Score:1)
"television-size batteries" (Score:3)
I feel like this is a poor metaphor to use for the size of something nowadays. When discussing a battery in those terms some people are going to imagine a CRT television (a cube-form device) and not necessarily a slab-like form. And TVs now are so thin their thickness doesn't really compare to a Tesla Powerwall or whatever this backup cell is.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe it was meant to be comparable to a console television [wikipedia.org]. It's a newspaper article after all; newspaper readership skews rather older than the general population.
Re: (Score:2)
You also have that TVs range from 24" to 85" on the first page of walmart for "television" alone.
That's a bit like saying "around the size of a dog" - from teacup sized Chihuahua to the biggest Mastiffs and Wolfhounds, who are legit as big as people.
Them being *relatively* flat and not a cube actually makes them easier to place.
Re: (Score:2)
in general, dogs are only "relatively flat" after finally succeeding at catching a car . . . :)
hawk
Re: (Score:2)
That threw me a little at first as well, but the batteries are about that size compared to a wall-mounted TV. Oddly (or not), my old CRT tv would be about the same volume if using server rack batteries... so the metaphor still pretty much holds.
Thanks for the laugh (Score:1)
Externalizing much? (Score:1)
would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own
In other words, the utility partially externalizes the cost of the infrastructure to the customer. Nice...
Also worth noting that, ironically, if you take that logic to the end - i.e. that if you have to buy batteries, you may as well buy a generator or solar panels to go with it and stop giving your money to a utility that doesn't do its job altogether - it's illegal in many states [primalsurvivor.net]. In other words, the utility has a license to forcibly extract money from you even if you're not happy with their services.
Re:Externalizing much? (Score:4, Informative)
In this case, it's the utility buying a battery that would normally be the homeowner's expense, but since it's going into the rate base the homeowner is paying for it like they pay for the generators and power lines.
Re: (Score:2)
And the homeowner would be paying more for other mitigations anyway. New power plants, more buried cables, more emergency response crews and standby equipment, portable generators... Or simply more outages.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm checking your link, and I'm not seeing it being "outright illegal".
More along the lines of "you need permits", for the most part, the opposite of "many"
Checking the red states on the map(poor off grid rating) -
New York - they say it's often illegal, but no citations are checked. Googling further has other sites mentioning that it takes effort
Nevada - legal, you just need permits to disconnect.
Utah - legal, they earned their poor due to restricted rainwater harvesting, it looks like. That's also Nevada
Vehicle-to-grid could be a game-changer (Score:1)
if electric companies need on-site battery capacity enough that they are willing to pay for it on a large scale.
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G), also known as Vehicle-to-home (V2H), describes a system in which plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) sell demand response services to the grid. Demand services are either delivering electricity or by reducing their charging rate. Demand services reduce pressure on the grid, which might otherwise experience disruption from load variations. Vehicle-to-load (V2L) and Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) are related, but the AC phase is not sychronised with the grid, so the power is only available to an "off grid" load.
Plug-in electric vehicles include battery electric vehicles (BEV), plug-in hybrids (PHEV), and hydrogen vehicles. They share the ability to generate electricity. That electricity is typically used to power the vehicle. However, at any given time 95% of cars are parked, while their energy sits unused. V2G envisions sending some of the stored power to the grid (or reducing charge rates to pull less power from the grid). A 2015 report found that vehicle owners could receive significant payments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Funny thing though, peak usage is generally during the times of day when your EV is either parked at work, or when you just got home from work and really shouldn't be pulling more juice from the battery.
Personally, I also am not completely sold on the longevity of EV batteries and there's no way in hell I'd let the power company put cycles on my battery if I owned an EV.
Re: (Score:2)
peak usage is generally during the times of day when your EV is either parked at work, or when you just got home from work and really shouldn't be pulling more juice from the battery.
The best time to charge the EV in this scenario is at night, off peak, and/or during the middle of the day from solar. The average American commutes 30 miles one way, which is a lot (I'm doing about 25 miles, ugh) but if your EV has 250 miles of range (which is rapidly becoming standard) then even if you suffer a 33% cold weather penalty you can still get to work and back AND have a bunch of capacity left over to cover an outage. Unfortunately the only EV I could afford would have been a first gen leaf, and
Re: (Score:2)
The electric company has to pay car owners enough to make it worth their while.
Generally the power companies don't make it worth doing these sort of things. Where I live, FPL has an option to allow them to disable some of your high wattage appliances (HVAC, water heater, pool pump, etc.) during periods of peak demand. The savings they give you in exchange is a joke.
For the amount of money they'd really have to put on the table to make it worthwhile, it's probably more cost effective for the power companies to simply buy their own batteries, which don't need to meet the same design c
Not just for outages (Score:2)
Utility controlled batteries would save a shit load of money by switching customers to battery power at peak times and charging them off peak
The true cost of batteries (Score:2, Informative)
I'm in part of this industry so the following are just plain facts.
BATTS:
1. "A variety of manufacturers" works for sourcing cheap batteries for a lot of homes, but doesn't work for supporting them. Tech manuals, testing procedures, replacement processes, and support pretty much require the same batteries. It took the cable companies 15 years to learn that and come up with DOCSIS and remote reboot and reporting.
2. Batteries degrade. In Vermont they have to be indoors. LiOn and LiFePo don't charge well wh
They're systems, not just batteries (Score:2)
While a single system of batteries would indeed be good, keeping your options open to take advantage of prices is also good. Don't want to lock yourself into a single vender and watch them raise the prices. It also gives them the opportunity to do things like switch to a new manufacturer using a new chemistry if it makes sense.
I also have to point out that while you list 4 pieces of equipment, in the case of the Tesla powerwall, they're all integrated. You make a big deal of the inverter needing heavy wi
I have questions (Score:1)
Re:I have questions (Score:4, Informative)
1. The power company
2. The power company
3. Probably not.
The most likely thing to happen would be that the battery would be BEFORE the meter, so they only ever get charged for energy they use.
So, if the power company, for example, uses the battery to cover a high demand period, power from the battery will flow into the customer's wires through the meter, and they'll be charged as their plan calls for, even as more energy flows up the power line to their neighbors.
If there's an outage(like a branch takes out their line), then they'll still have power from the battery, being charged for those kWh. When the line is reconnected, the battery will recharge.
Great idea! (Score:2)
Then they won't call them 'outages' but 'emptiness'.
burying power lines- help power outages (Score:2)
North Americans (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Burying high voltage power lines is extra expensive. Maybe you meant the local distribution lines, which are at a more moderate voltage? Those should indeed be buried. We historically haven't done so because America is big and buried lines cost twice as much. But we really should do it anyway. We aren't because we don't hold power companies liable for the fires they start, but we should do that.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The "America is big" argument gets pretty thin after a while. It ain't as big as Yurp, for example.
The population densities are far lower. Americans are spread out over larger areas per capita. As I am fond of saying, the only part of e.g. the UK which is as sparsely populated as the USA is the Pitcairn Islands. In some areas fewer subscribers therefore have to pay for much longer runs.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You literally have to compare the USA to all of Europe for a size comparison to make sense, the US being ~80% of Europe's size even without its outlying territories... let's face it, nobody expects Alaska to be fully wired.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's pretty uneven, though Europe overall has more buried wiring than we do... but not as much more as you'd think from what people say about it and us.
I'm broadly in favor of burying the wiring regardless of the cost, the power companies have been profiting from evil for their whole history. I mean, Erin Brockovich for fuck's sake.
Re: (Score:2)
yurp has about 25% more land mass than the contiguous 48 states.
If you count Alaska, the difference is only about 10%.
And if you include Hawaii, well, err, that doesn't add much but a rounding error.
hawk
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's a few things at play here.
First, you'd have to clear and maintain a large swath of forest for bury cables. You can't have the trees growing on top of the cabling/conduits. With pylons you only need to keep the trees trimmed and generally don't need to fully clear the entire path - just around the pylons and perhaps a gravel service road. (Though a path might still be cleared if the pylons are not tall enough, clear-cutting is not a strict requirement as it is with buried conduit)
Second, burying requ
Like the one in my basement since Oct 2019 (Score:4, Informative)
It does exactly what I got it for, and I'm happy with it. Since installation there have been 42 "events" with a total usage of about a day, the longest 3 hours. Most of the events have been ten minutes or so, just a few longer ones. It's kind of nice to find out about a power outage on my phone, then look out and see the street dark. (numbers off the app on my phone)
I've been in this house 40 years now, serviced by GMP. When we first moved in the power reliability was rather iffy. I'd started looking into a generator and sizing things up - then the reliability got much better. It was that way for a long time, then probably 10 years or so ago the reliability started dropping again. So when the battery option popped back up I was an early adopter.
A few notes that others have hinted about. It's not just a battery, it's got an ethernet cable into my network, so it talks to the utility. It's also got an environmental system built in for both cooling and heating, though sitting in my basement it stays at a pretty constant temperature. Because it's got constant monitoring GMP will know if things start to go south, and I suspect I'd get a notification on my phone. So it's not like the thing is suddenly going to burst into flames with no warning at all - there will at least be prompt notification. More likely it's not completely out of the blue and there are warning signs.
Pass (Score:2)
Yeah, that's going to be cost-effective (Score:2)
The fees to manufacture, deliver, install, and dispose of not to mention the regulatory baksheesh will all be added as inscrutable line-items on your bill.
Maybe the should have kept their nuclear plant (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Indian tailings ponds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Production of Uranium Feed Materials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Preppers Influenced Govenment (Score:2)
This is a great idea! (Score:2)