I'm an amateur here, but here's what I understand.
1) Yes, any storage capacity connected to the grid could, if run by a benevolent dictator, help the grid a lot. The basic idea of load shifting I'm sure you're familiar with, is to store energy when the load is low (and energy is cheap), and redistribute it when the load is high (and energy is expensive). By doing this, you smooth over supply and demand, reduce volatility, reduce market imperfections, reduce difficulties in planning generating capacity that is subject to wildly fluctuating demand etc. Further, this makes more renewables viable (which increase volatility/intermittency/imbalance issues, but are inevitably necessary on large scale for the future of humanity).
2) There's no such benevolent dictator. In reality there's tons of economic actors, and they have to deal with the economic reality of batteries, which are not at the moment economical (i.e. zero or positively profitable) to load shift.
i.e. a battery has limited lifetime. e.g. the Tesla Powerwall has 6.4kwh capacity, 5k cycles and costs $3k. That means you can charge and decharge a total of 32k kwh, for $3k, or in other words $9.35 cents per kwh just to store the energy. And that's before figuring in cost of installation, or the $2k inverter or the roundtrip efficiency of 92%. Now note that this is roughly the cost of electricity retail in most US states. So participating in load shifting will usually mean you're buying energy at 6 cents at a nightly rate, storing it for 9 cents, and then selling it for 10 cents at a daily rate, or something to that effect, it's a money losing proposition at the moment.
3) If you can't (or won't) aid the grid then, then it becomes a question of: do your presence on the grid help it, or vice versa. And the answer is probably that the grid would be less burdened if we didn't all pile up on it as much. Going off-grid then may be better.
4) Further, in some areas storage is renewable-empowering. e.g. in off-grid locations, or in areas where the grid price is so expensive (e.g. Hawaii), that generating your own energy and storing the excess for later when the sun's down, instead of consuming energy from the grid when the sun doesn't shine, is cheaper. (although again, even here if you'd have sold that excess energy instead of storing it, and then bought the cheap nightly rate later on, it'd probably have been even more economical.)
tl;dr, it's mostly bs. Batteries don't make economic sense in most states and connecting to the grid where possible tends to make sense in terms of economics and sustainability. And there's no surprise there, i.e. connecting to a bigger (grid) rather than an isolated (off grid) market tends to improve efficiency and allows a better distribution of scarce resources, which happens to be sustainable in this market, too.
> the Tesla Powerwall has 6.4kwh capacity, 5k cycles and
> costs $3k. That means you can charge and decharge a total
> of 32k kwh, for $3k, or in other words $9.35 cents per kwh
> just to store the energy.
6.4kwh * 5k cycles == 32000 kwh for a price of $0.09375/kwh of storage. That still isn't economic in most places, of course.
> I think you math is a bit off here:
> the Tesla Powerwall has 6.4kwh capacity, 5k cycles and
> costs $3k. That means you can charge and decharge a total
> of 32k kwh, for $3k, or in other words $9.35 cents per kwh
> just to store the energy.
> 6.4kwh * 5k cycles == 32000 kwh for a price of $0.09375/kwh of storage. That still isn't economic in most places, of course.
As far as I can see we posted the exact same thing.
I'm an amateur here, but here's what I understand.
1) Yes, any storage capacity connected to the grid could, if run by a benevolent dictator, help the grid a lot. The basic idea of load shifting I'm sure you're familiar with, is to store energy when the load is low (and energy is cheap), and redistribute it when the load is high (and energy is expensive). By doing this, you smooth over supply and demand, reduce volatility, reduce market imperfections, reduce difficulties in planning generating capacity that is subject to wildly fluctuating demand etc. Further, this makes more renewables viable (which increase volatility/intermittency/imbalance issues, but are inevitably necessary on large scale for the future of humanity).
2) There's no such benevolent dictator. In reality there's tons of economic actors, and they have to deal with the economic reality of batteries, which are not at the moment economical (i.e. zero or positively profitable) to load shift.
i.e. a battery has limited lifetime. e.g. the Tesla Powerwall has 6.4kwh capacity, 5k cycles and costs $3k. That means you can charge and decharge a total of 32k kwh, for $3k, or in other words $9.35 cents per kwh just to store the energy. And that's before figuring in cost of installation, or the $2k inverter or the roundtrip efficiency of 92%. Now note that this is roughly the cost of electricity retail in most US states. So participating in load shifting will usually mean you're buying energy at 6 cents at a nightly rate, storing it for 9 cents, and then selling it for 10 cents at a daily rate, or something to that effect, it's a money losing proposition at the moment.
3) If you can't (or won't) aid the grid then, then it becomes a question of: do your presence on the grid help it, or vice versa. And the answer is probably that the grid would be less burdened if we didn't all pile up on it as much. Going off-grid then may be better.
4) Further, in some areas storage is renewable-empowering. e.g. in off-grid locations, or in areas where the grid price is so expensive (e.g. Hawaii), that generating your own energy and storing the excess for later when the sun's down, instead of consuming energy from the grid when the sun doesn't shine, is cheaper. (although again, even here if you'd have sold that excess energy instead of storing it, and then bought the cheap nightly rate later on, it'd probably have been even more economical.)
tl;dr, it's mostly bs. Batteries don't make economic sense in most states and connecting to the grid where possible tends to make sense in terms of economics and sustainability. And there's no surprise there, i.e. connecting to a bigger (grid) rather than an isolated (off grid) market tends to improve efficiency and allows a better distribution of scarce resources, which happens to be sustainable in this market, too.