Solar power is neat and electric vehicles are cool and heat pumps are more powerful than it seems like they should be, but these days the technology that’s really accelerating the energy transition is batteries.
Plus, we can play along at home! Try doing that with nuclear power.
We can buy batteries to serve as a generator that doesn’t stink or deafen you when power’s out, which lets us take better advantage of solar panels (if you’re lucky enough to have them) by shifting sun power after sunset. But you might be able to play even more.
A few of the utilities providing electricity in New Hampshire are paying customers to help them install home batteries as part of shifting the grid to “non-wires alternatives” — balancing supply and demand of electricity without building expensive poles, towers and wires. These programs are still tiny, far from the virtual power plant of 21st century dreams, but they’re a start.
Eversource is leading the pack, partly because it is by far the biggest electric utility in the state. If Eversource is your utility, it will pay you $240 per kilowatt-hour to buy a household battery from the Enphase company for a total of up to $3,000 ($10,000 for small businesses) as long as you let them draw some power from it.
The program has various limits on the number of times per year it can be used, how much power much be left in the battery and when you can opt out because you want to keep a full charge.
The money comes from the New Hampshire Clean Energy Fund, which comes from an old divestiture fund related to the scrubbers on the now-closed Merrimack Station power plant.
At the moment, Eversource has 71 units installed in this program with 24 under construction, totaling 1,070 kilowatts. On a peak summer afternoon or amid a winter polar vortex, New England power plants are often producing more than 20,000,000 kilowatts, so this is barely a drop in the bucket. It might still be worth the effort, however, because that will shave production from power plants during such peak moments. This “peak shaving” can save a surprising amount of money and is good for the rest of us because it might keep from turning on the most expensive, dirtiest, least-productive power plants.
Versions are available for commercial and industrial sites as well as municipal buildings.
Eversource is also opening Connected Solutions in New Hampshire. It has been running in its Massachusetts and Connecticut utilities for about 6 years. This doesn’t give an upfront payment but provides $225 for every kilowatt they draw, up to 60 times a summer. Making $1,000 or more a year is fairly typical for those who are enrolled and you can use any brand of battery you choose.
Liberty also has a battery support program, although they still call it a pilot so I’m not sure how accessible it is. As far as I can tell, Unitil and N.H. Electric Cooperative don’t have similar programs, although NHEC has rolled out a big battery of its own to help with peak shaving and balancing the grid.
Eversource has another way to get customers to help it shave peak load: smart thermostats, which reduce demand from individual homes rather than increase supply, but that’s a topic for another day.
I mentioned at the start that batteries have become an energy superstar. That isn’t an exaggeration but it might be a surprise, since they don’t generate electricity but only store and release it. Yet in the past few years as their price has fallen — for which we must thank China rather than ourselves, I’m afraid — batteries have allowed everybody to take dirt-cheap electricity from solar or wind and turn it into that most valuable of modern commodities: dispatchable power.
Global installations of batteries last year rose 40% because everybody’s building them as fast they can be connected to the grid. Go online and you’ll see huge battery farms being set up from Texas to Mongolia to Australia, not because of tree-hugging mandates but to save money. There are now so many in California that, at times this spring, batteries have produced almost as much electricity as is being used in all of New England.
It’s all part of the evolution of the energy grid. Isn’t it fun that we can be part of it?
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