[HN Gopher] DOE: Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Virtual Power P...
___________________________________________________________________
DOE: Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Virtual Power Plants
Author : vikrum
Score : 72 points
Date : 2023-10-02 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (liftoff.energy.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (liftoff.energy.gov)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| From the report:
|
| > "DOE uses a broad definition of VPPs (virtual power plants)
| that includes a variety of mechanisms for aggregating and
| orchestrating DERs (distributed energy resources)"
|
| > "Just as different types of traditional power plants contribute
| to the grid in different ways (e.g., nuclear plants provide
| baseload generation, and wind farms provide variable generation),
| so too do different configurations of VPPs."
|
| Historically grid structure in the USA was broken down into
| baseload, load-following and peaker plants, a choice made based
| on the technological limitations of the power sources (coal and
| nuclear power could not be rapidly ramped up and down. so they
| were assigned baseload status, while hydro and natural gas
| could).
|
| That all fails when you put large amounts of solar and wind on
| the grid, e.g. a large solar PV system might generate 200% of
| demand at noon, (so you divert half or more to storage for use at
| night). Fundamentally this means scrapping the whole concept of
| baseload generation, and instead focusing on storage and
| distribution of energy from highly variable renewable sources -
| which is why nuclear is difficult to integrate smoothly with
| renewables, it's not very flexible. However, DOE is a very pro-
| nuclear agency, hence their reluctance to abandon the baseload
| concept.
|
| I suppose VPPs are a useful abstraction for managing a wide
| variety of resources in one geographical area, but the reality is
| that replacing fossil fuels with electricity across the board
| will require truly massive grid infrastructure investments. This
| will require either steep increases in energy bills for
| consumers, or large tax-financed government subsidies of grid
| infrastructure, and possibly even nationalization of the grid.
| chongli wrote:
| Sounds like this opens up the possibility of a "virtual" power
| generation company to operate entirely by, say, leasing rooftop
| space (for solar cells) all over a grid and trading on the open
| market as a single producer rather than needing all of the
| individual property owners to do their own trading. Seems
| reasonable to me!
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| There are several companies that do this for electric car
| chargers!
| mrbonner wrote:
| What a horrible naming convention. Is it plantless power plant?
| SamBam wrote:
| Essentially.
|
| If you can convince every supermarket in the area to designate
| a quarter of their overhead lights as "optional," and then
| install a device that allows the "virtual power plant operator"
| to turn off all of those lights during an unexpected spike in
| electricity demand, you've just "generated" the additional
| 100kW the grid needed in that moment, just like a regular
| fossil-fuel power plant would have. (And you then pay the
| supermarket for the electricity they "generated" by turning off
| their lights.)
|
| Do the same with smart thermostats, or tapping into people's
| power walls, etc etc etc, and you may be able to "generate"
| many megawatts of power without owning a plant.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| With phones becoming the "hub" of many homes and Apple
| launching some (nearly inconsequential) eco-charging
| functionality in ios17 to avoid charging with emitting
| sources are running in your area, I could see them really
| executing on this.
|
| (I also wish my fridge and other devices had a better ability
| to capture the ebb and flow of electricity prices. Even
| trying to do this with a "smart" thermostat, an ecobee was
| very difficult. Required lots of manual scheduling.)
| megaman821 wrote:
| I have a LG fridge that can reduce its power consumption
| when requested. I have never seen it turn on though, so it
| must require some coordination by the utility that isn't
| there yet.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I'm on time of use billing, and I don't want my fridge to
| reduce its net power consumption.
|
| In fact, I want it to _increase_ its net power
| consumption by running hard when rates are low, and
| backing off when they're expensive. So overall _cost_
| will decrease without any spoilage impacts while
| consumption goes up.
|
| This approach also minimizes the amount of time the
| fridge is working against my air conditioner. And
| maximizes the time it's working with my furnace on cool
| nights.
|
| The most thermally/kwh efficient fridge keeps its
| temperature the same at all times, but that's not the
| most cost efficient/climate efficient approach.
|
| It's like we're not ready to have that conversation.
| leetrout wrote:
| Never heard of a "virtual power plant". So they are aggregate
| power generation instead of a fixed plant... interesting naming
| choice.
|
| > Virtual power plants, generally considered a connected
| aggregation of distributed energy resource (DER) technologies,
| offer deeper integration of renewables and demand flexibility,
| which in turn offers more Americans cleaner and more affordable
| power.
|
| https://www.energy.gov/lpo/virtual-power-plants
| gwbas1c wrote:
| One example is coordinating Tesla Powerwalls (home battery
| backup): https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/virtual-power-
| plant/pge
|
| > By becoming a part of the Tesla Virtual Power Plant (VPP)
| with PG&E, your Powerwall will be dispatched when the grid
| needs emergency support. Through the Emergency Load Reduction
| Program (ELRP), you will receive $2.00 for every additional kWh
| your Powerwall delivers during an event.
|
| I should point out that I have a Powerwall, and I have no
| incentive from my electric utility to use it in any way.
| Overall, with rebates, it cost slightly more than a standby
| generator, and but it requires no maintenance, so it's "worth
| it" for me.
|
| But, $2.00 back on a kwh is pretty nice, IMO.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Why $2 though? When prices hit $1.50, they'll just hit up
| their physical generators instead of your battery?
| noveltyaccount wrote:
| Wow - $2.00 is crazy. I pay $0.15 per kWh (pacific northwest,
| inexpensive hydroelectric power). 13X, quite an incentive,
| even if rare.
| zbrozek wrote:
| California's PG&E is the biggest utility in the US. In
| their territory electricity on the default residential plan
| ranges from $0.41 to $0.54 per KWh.
| callalex wrote:
| And they're raising prices again next year.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Still, that's 4x back. It really helps incentivize buying
| a larger powerwall, and disincentivizes the power company
| from sapping the battery dry right before you need it.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not saying it's a bad deal for the battery
| owner, but rather that it isn't the huge spread that you
| had assumed based on a reasonable electricity price.
| :shrug:
| Scoundreller wrote:
| How many hours a year would one expect to get this?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You're paying retail rate. The utility pays spot prices and
| attempts to manage the spot price vs retail rate spread
| over a window of time.
| SamBam wrote:
| To be clear, I think it's as much about the aggregation of
| "Distributed Energy Resources," DERs, as about the aggregation
| of _generation_.
|
| From my understanding, a DER can be as simple as a smart
| thermostat that can receive a signal from the utility company
| to set the AC up a couple of degrees during a period of high
| electricity demand.
|
| As energy is fungible, saving 1kW by turning off 1kW of less-
| necessary usage is exactly the same as generating an additional
| 1kW to cope with demand.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Exactly the same, except during the hottest and coldest parts
| of the year, I pay an electric bill and still feel miserable.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| The point of these schemes is to provide you with energy at
| precisely those hottest/coldest parts of the year. If you
| want to pay more for potentially redundant backup and/or
| take the risk of the whole system going down, then you're
| only going to be more miserable.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > exactly the same
|
| Of course except it's only the same if they're closely
| connected.
|
| Here in Norway, while energy regions are connected throughout
| the country, the cables are quite limited between certain
| areas. So generation here might not help for usage there.
|
| So being able to control usage, or having extra batteries
| connected near the loads, can be even more useful than extra
| generator capacity far away.
| jakewins wrote:
| Aye but y'all are way ahead! I get to hack on software that
| bids into DSO-level circuits for NODES up in Norway.
|
| I imagine Norway is seeing a lot of the issues - and
| opportunities - that having high EV penetration brings, so
| a good place to watch for what works and what doesn't.
| ghouse wrote:
| It's a horrible naming choice and it shows the industry
| preconception that a power plant is a large, transmission-
| interconnected facility.
|
| It also, IMHO holds on to an outdated concept that all
| generation must be centrally dispatched. There are plenty of
| concepts that allow distributed dispatch including voltage
| (which in turn can be controlled based on local conditions).
|
| Finally (and perhaps most importantly), it implies that only
| devices that export generation are part of the solution. The
| supply and demand must be balanced in real-time. And the demand
| side of the equation is often much less expensive than the
| supply side.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Virtual Power Plants, both in general (see first sentence on
| wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant), and
| specifically in the definition given in the comment you
| replied to, include "demand flexibility" so your comment is
| confusing.
| garba_dlm wrote:
| it's an attempt to bridge the language
|
| because you're right, the people that own this stuff (and
| work on these companies) are used to thinking in terms of
| large transmission-interconnected facilities.
|
| so my take this move has most to do with how to bill people,
| and how to collect payments and pay taxes on said payments
| and so on. I expect that the actual electrical engineering is
| treated as an implementation detail
| idiotsecant wrote:
| What? It's the opposite of literally all these things.
| sunk1st wrote:
| Yeah I think that's why GP is saying it's a poor choice of
| name.
| SamBam wrote:
| But if the industry is the one naming it, why are they
| going against their own "preconceptions?"
|
| I feel like GGP is the one with the preconception about
| the name "power plant," while the industry (as shown
| here) is starting to use it to be this broader term
| encompassing distributed generation and price-influenced
| demand, etc etc.
| ghouse wrote:
| As an industry, the term "power plant" is something that
| generates power (electric energy). However, much of the
| DER opportunity is not generation, but load. Which is why
| the term "Virtual Power Plant" is a misnomer and
| predisposes people to only be thinking about the
| generation side of the supply/demand equation.
| SamBam wrote:
| Right, but it's precisely that shift that the term is
| supposed to induce. From a fungible energy perspective,
| there really isn't that much difference between
| increasing the supply by an additional MW and decreasing
| the demand by an additional MW. Moreover, that additional
| MW that's now in the grid is the greenest possible
| energy, provided without producing a single atom of CO2.
|
| When people thinking about generation they think about
| something different than reducing demand, but it's
| critical to start seeing that those can be the same
| thing, in certain circumstances.
| sanderjd wrote:
| But "PP"s, that is, normal power plants that aren't
| compromised of DERs, are not going to partake in this
| shift of the term from meaning "generation" to meaning
| "generation or load shedding". So you end up with "power
| plants" that everyone understands are suppliers of power
| and "virtual power plants" that are, confusingly, a mix
| of demand reduction and maybe some supply.
|
| So I agree that the VPP terminology leaves a lot to be
| desired. I prefer the more generic "DER" terminology,
| because it is more descriptive; either a generator or a
| load is an "energy resource", and "distributed" is a good
| description of what is unique about these particular
| energy resources.
| hosh wrote:
| I heard of the concept for some time but I guess someone is
| coining it as a term to make it an easier sell.
| Animats wrote:
| Right, this is new hype for an old concept. It's mostly load
| management, with some batteries.
|
| Calling this "virtual power plants" is deceptive. It doesn't
| generate power. It just moves the load around in time a bit.
| There are limits to how much benefit that can yield. At some
| point, customers will want to heat their water or charge
| their car.
|
| Much of this is a attempt to deal with the problem of
| intermittent wind power. Wind power varies about 4:1 over the
| course of a day. Here's today's graph for CAISO, for the West
| Coast.[1] And for PJM, for the East Coast[2]. Both had about
| a 4:1 range today, and for both, it bottomed out about now,
| in late morning. A huge tie line from California to
| Pennsylvania would not have helped. Peak wind output today
| was before dawn, which is the lowest period for load.
|
| At least with solar you know when there's going to be output.
| But even that can vary about 2:1 from day to day in PJM's
| area.[3]
|
| The important question to ask is, if the grid has N hours of
| storage, how often is there a power shortage? What should N
| be? A few hours? A few days?
|
| [1] https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.html
|
| [2]
| https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/wind.jsf
|
| [3]
| https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/solar.jsf
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _It 's mostly load management, with some batteries._
|
| There is some amount of distributed generation out there as
| well, in the form of either oil or natural gas backup
| generators, which can be used similarly as batteries.
|
| Edit to add: This wasn't meant as a disagreement with your
| point. I don't think the existence of a small amount of
| generation changes the fundamental equation you pointed out
| on this.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Yes. VPPs was the more common academic term used for many
| years. Recently, FERC came out with Order 2222 that essentially
| paved the way for Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to
| participate in the wholesale electricity markets (think
| organizations like CAISO that determine the optimal schedules
| for thousands of power plants on an hourly and 5-minute basis
| via a market) via a DER Aggregator.
|
| So if you take all these infinitesimally small sources and add
| them up, a single entity can be a market player for them as a
| kind of tiny virtual power plant. Naturally, this is extremely
| complicated and took years to get through the legal processes
| and for the various grid operators to get it figured out. It's
| still a work in progress.
| jakewins wrote:
| I work on building VPPs. Two interesting problems that come up:
|
| - Counter-factuals; you're often paying someone to _not_ do
| something, and it is really, really confusing and hard sometimes
| to measure whether something didn 't happen. The car didn't
| charge at 4pm.. would it have charged if we hadn't told the
| charger to not charge at 4pm? What if the owner planned to leave
| at 4.10pm anyway?
|
| - Double counting & profit sharing: There is a surprising amount
| of money on the table here and kind of a sudden frenzy - what
| happens when Ford auto-enrolls your new car into their VPP for
| their own purposes, and you sell it yourself to an aggregator
| like us, and your utility sells it too? And how do the proceeds
| get split?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Or you enrol your smart thermostat to raise its set point a few
| degrees during a "grid event", but you put a heat pack under
| it.
| [deleted]
| syntaxing wrote:
| My knowledge might be old but I've been told one of the biggest
| expense for a utility are actually Peakers (more formally known
| as Peaking power plants). Besides the fact they're costly to
| operate compared to normal power plants (about 3X of generating
| cost), it takes a lot to warm up these power plants at a moment
| notice. VPP (as shitty as the name is) would help our
| infrastructure a lot, and would be a net positive for society
| IMO.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > Besides the fact they're costly to operate compared to normal
| power plants (about 3X of generating cost), it takes a lot to
| warm up these power plants at a moment notice.
|
| Our solution in Toronto was to just run them half of the time
| all the time.
|
| Haaaaaaard paywall:
| https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/ontario-gas-plants-were-...
| syntaxing wrote:
| Wouldn't it be more cost effective to make a new power plant
| at that operating expense?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I think the warm-up cost isn't really there when the plant
| is operating continuously.
|
| Oddly for a peaker plant, they built these as combined
| cycle, which wouldn't make financial sense if it was to
| only run for short periods.
|
| A "true" peaker plant is inefficient but with lots of
| capacity but we basically build a "proper" power plant that
| has good efficiency, so it's not too bad. But makes you
| wonder what went so wrong in the planning (even though the
| mistake turned out advantageous).
| leymed wrote:
| I'm not saying it will not have any impact, but will it be at the
| levels mentioned in the report?
|
| My consideration depends heavily on engineering of it. For
| example, applying this in NYC is almost impossible, and dangerous
| for the system. Again you can have DER aggregation at smaller
| levels, but hitting 20% of pick load levels seems extremely
| challenging.
| whiddershins wrote:
| I listened to a whole Joe Rogan podcast where a guest kept
| advocating for using nuclear to balance out the intermittent
| nature of solar and wind.
|
| I could never wrap my mind around how this makes sense. Nuclear
| has a fixed output, it doesn't scale up and down the way fossil
| fuel plants do.
|
| If your nuclear capacity can cover the worst case where solar and
| wind aren't producing, it can cover all cases, and the solar and
| wind become irrelevant.
|
| Seems like the linked concept is similarly making something more
| complicated in the hopes that somehow makes it better.
|
| Like bundling subprime mortgages.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| >If your nuclear capacity can cover the worst case where solar
| and wind aren't producing, it can cover all cases, and the
| solar and wind become irrelevant.
|
| This is plainly false; nation-wide energy consumption isn't
| fixed, it adapts to supply. Not all usage of energy is equally
| valuable, if the prices go up, you might choose to turn off
| your TV, but you'll probably keep your fridge running. With
| more energy, more activity can happen at lower prices.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Nuclear has a fixed output, it doesn't scale up and down the
| way fossil fuel plants do.
|
| This is a very, very old, and very, very solved problem.
|
| Today we'd solve it with batteries: Discharge when demand
| outstrips supply, recharge when supply outstrips demand.
|
| In the past, nuclear power was often paired with pumped
| storage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-
| storage_hydroelectricit...
|
| Today a lot of pumped storage facilities have outlasted the
| nuclear power plants they were built to support. Instead of
| pumping at night, they pump when there's excess solar or wind.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Seems like the linked concept is similarly making something
| more complicated in the hopes that somehow makes it better.
|
| Because battery storage _is_ legitimately better in terms of
| reaction time and efficiency: pumped hydro is 2 min from 0 to
| 100%, with a total efficiency ratio between .65-.85 [1], gas
| plants are at 3-5 minutes (peakers) /up to 30 min (combined
| power+heat) [2] and .35-.50 efficiency ratio (more if thermal
| energy is captured, but that only makes sense for non-peaker
| plants that also provide district heating)... whereas a battery
| plant's reaction time can be measured in milliseconds.
|
| That's orders of magnitude faster and is what makes
| decentralized battery storage worth it.
|
| [1] https://um.baden-
| wuerttemberg.de/de/energie/versorgungssiche...
|
| [2] https://www.ingenieur.de/fachmedien/bwk/erneuerbare-
| energien...
|
| [3] https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/nachrichten/australien-
| ri...
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's definitely not perfect, but e.g. with pumped hydro, you
| can run it in peak hours when demand exceeds baseline supply.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| > Nuclear has a fixed output
|
| A fixed thermal output or a fixed electrical output?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Modern nuclear plants can scale much more aggressively than
| older plants. This is also true of coal plants as well. Still
| not perfect to have them be load following resources though.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| That's exactly what you want for easy control of grid
| stability. Say you typically fluctuate between 100 and 150 GW
| of demand. You turn on 80GW of nuke, leave it running all the
| time, and then as resources come available from intermittent
| sources those can contribute to total load requirements. If you
| have a wide enough diversity of intermittent sources this works
| well. The problem with intermittent generation sources is that
| you must either store energy or overprovision generation to
| make up for the gaps in availability (or make wildly expensive
| transmission improvements but that is another discussion). For
| reasons of expense and reliability you must make a tradeoff
| between how much of your generation is reliable baseload and
| how much is intermittent generation. Nuke + intermittent
| sources is a very good match.
| eppp wrote:
| You could also add time of use pricing to encourage use
| during peak renewable generation.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| My jurisdiction rolled out millions of Time of Use smart
| meters only to find that residential users really didn't
| change their behaviour much. Demand shifting was something
| like a couple percent and faaaar less than predicted.
|
| It turns out when you run surveys, it's the people that
| like to think about answers to questions that respond to
| them, which isn't representative.
|
| 45pg pdf government report: https://www.auditor.on.ca/en/co
| ntent/annualreports/arreports... which starts getting good
| at page 5.
|
| Understated costs and exaggerated benefits. Peak reduction
| targets ended up with increases in peak demand.
|
| As hard as it is for the HNer to believe, the vast majority
| of people will just do whatever they want whenever they
| want.
|
| I see this everywhere: "why would _anyone_ go to this
| expensive supermarket that sells the same crap as the cheap
| one I go to? Why would anyone go to that gas station, their
| price is always higher than the others in the surrounding
| area. Why would anyone buy that car, it has a terrible TCO,
| and on and on"
| toast0 wrote:
| That makes sense. Running laundry or other household
| equipment when energy is cheaper makes sense, but it
| requires a different time commitment. Cooking at other
| times to save energy costs is unlikely.
|
| You'd get more participation if appliances could be
| smarter without increasing cost. The holy grail of delay
| freezer defrost cycles until off-peak, and relaxing
| temperature thresholds a bit to pre-heat or pre-cool
| towards the end of off-peak and let things go a bit
| farther off the set point while on-peak aren't realistic
| for say water heaters, because the increased consumer
| costs to do that (more expensive equipment, more time to
| set settings, most likely some signalling or networking
| to maintain) don't justify the savings.
|
| I'm guessing there's reasonable uptake on smart
| thermostats that can participate in demand control,
| because smart thermostats are desirable anyway, network
| anyway, and can control large enough loads to matter. Not
| everybody will want it, but I'd be ok with starting peak
| a degree cooler or warmer than my set point, and letting
| the temperature float a degree farther during peak,
| because HVAC uses a lot of kWh and why pay 2x for
| those... but then I'm in a low energy cost area with flat
| rates, so maybe I would change my mind after experiencing
| it. :)
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Yeah, basically a human factors approach will work better
| than asking general users to vastly increase their
| cognitive load and/or increase capex for a small value of
| savings.
|
| Free LED light bulb handouts are more effective than
| complex expensive-to-implement programs requiring user
| intervention. Mandating low gpm showerheads works better
| than asking people to take short showers. Better windows
| per building code works better than asking people to
| choose the exotic greenbug window, etc.
| knutzui wrote:
| ToU pricing can be very effectively used by having an
| energy management system. This will automatically shift
| power usage to the most cost efficient times.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| In theory. After 15 years, the best most of us in Ontario
| have is a "4h delay" on a dishwasher and discounted (not
| free) smart thermostats that you have to install yourself
| or pay an installer for. I suppose electric cars do a
| good job here at least.
|
| And this is in new construction.
|
| Overall, it didn't (and may never) make financial sense
| to put light users on smart/time of day metering.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I could never wrap my mind around how this makes sense.
| Nuclear has a fixed output, it doesn't scale up and down the
| way fossil fuel plants do.
|
| Nuclear can and does regulate its output. And the fuel rods
| should last longer if you run at less than full output. But
| fuel cost is not a large component of nuclear energy cost, so
| it doesn't make a lot of economic sense to operate them far
| above or below their steady state maximum capacity.
|
| I agree that nuclear doesn't make a good backfill for
| intermittant sources; but it's not because they can't, it's
| because the economics aren't good.
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Nuclear can and does regulate its output.
|
| They do in France. You kind of have to, if you produce 70% of
| your power in nuke plants. But in the US, it's not done in
| any meaningful sense. All US plants run at 100% capacity all
| the time.
|
| The reason for that is that it's incredibly complicated to
| ramp a nuke plant. If you take a reactor and reduce its heat
| output significantly, the currently active volume of fuel
| moves away from the decay product equilibrium - the reactor
| poisons its own fuel rods with neutron absorbing decay
| products. This makes a subsequent increase in output power
| extremely dangerous and thus impossible in practice. The only
| way to increase power safely is to wait for the radio poison
| to decay naturally, which can takes tens of days (and depends
| on by how much you reduced power).
|
| The only reason the French can ramp the power of their
| nuclear plants up and down is that they have so many of them,
| and they are all controlled by a central authority. This
| means the reactors can take turns in reducing power, each
| night a different set of reactors poison their fuel and
| recover slowly over the next week or two.
|
| There is also of course an economic side to this. In the US,
| nuclear power is so economically risky that planning a plant
| that is not trying as hard as it possibly can to recoup it's
| enormous investment would sound crazy to investors. It would
| make zero economic sense to not run at 100% all the time, and
| would probably make any newly build plant a billion dollar
| loss instantly.
| walr000s wrote:
| The best explanation of Virtual Power Plants that I've
| encountered, from Patrick McKenzie:
| https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/markets-in-power/
| klysm wrote:
| Putting the name aside, this seems like an important step
| forward.
| antr wrote:
| I'll say something unpopular, but the best VPP alternative out
| there is the transmission system operator (doing its job well).
|
| VPPs are a great way for utilities and other companies to get
| customers hooked into long-term contracts and milk for more
| fees.
| vvpan wrote:
| I work for a tech startup that is focused on cooperatives and so
| have been learning about the cooperatives a lot lately.
| Cooperative have and still are playing a great role in things
| like energy and farming. Much of the grid in the US has been
| built by cooperative. But the legislation around them is outdated
| and also inter-cooperative support structures are lacking, for
| example the massive farming lending cooperatives will not lend to
| energy-related co-ops. Our founders moved to Colorado to start
| the company (which specialized in delivery cooperatives) because
| Colorado offers the Limited Cooperative Association entity [0].
| (As an aside I have interviewed with a startup, that we are also
| in communications with, called React Network [1] that is
| specifically focused on co-cops that coordinate energy production
| and storage). I am honestly not sure what point I am trying to
| make except that I wish co-ops played a great part in the energy
| future.
|
| [0]
| https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/business/news/2012/20120402...
|
| [1] https://www.reactnetwork.io/
| sanderjd wrote:
| Would you mind sharing the company you work for? Seems really
| interesting! I'm also hopeful about cooperatives, but don't
| actually know much about what they're up to in the energy
| space.
| vvpan wrote:
| noshdelivery.co provides technology to local restaurants to
| operate their own delivery services (ordering app/driver
| management/etc). The restaurants that we partner with form a
| cooperative and get the software while we get a non-voting
| stake. I think it is quiet cool. The truth is that delivery
| companies are a scourge on the restaurants and restaurants
| will go to great length to avoid working with Grubhub,
| Doordash, etc. We are planning on expanding into a few more
| cities.
|
| If you are interested in cooperatives the most prominent
| public thinker on the topic these days is Nathan Schneider,
| who is a professor at CU Boulder and one of our advisors. For
| example look up an interview with him on "Frontiers of
| Commoning" podcast - "Nathan Schneider on Cooperatives and
| Digital Governance". It is an excellent listen.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I wrote a book on the topic of Virtual Power Plants! [0]
|
| It's good to see the DOE taking this seriously.
|
| [0] Virtual Power : The Future of Energy Flexibility
| idiotsecant wrote:
| How do wheeling charges work in schemes like this? If I have,
| for example, a fleet of EVs signed up for my VPP program and I
| want to sell battery power onto the open market I am putting a
| not insubstantial load on the local residential distribution
| systems that are not usually designed for this kind of power
| flow. Is this captured somehow in the financial model? Surely I
| don't get to ride that infrastructure for free?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| EV charging and distribution is a big issue for the grid,
| because it does require a lot of investment in heavier
| infrastructure, literally more wires so that you can get
| enough power to charge your car. Grid operators are grumpy
| about needing to make this investment.
|
| Networking all of the chargers / vehicles into a VPP, means
| you can actually defer some of that investment (don't have
| all the vehicles charge at the same time or at full speed if
| the local distribution is congested), or provide a valuable
| service to the grid in the form of demand response (Hey grid
| operator, this fleet of cars always charges between 5:30pm
| and 7pm. How much would you pay for 50 Megawatts of lower
| consumption?). So basically it makes it cheaper to charge
| that fleet of EVs from the grid infrastructure and operation
| perspective if you charge them smarter and make the whole
| system smarter.
|
| The VPP operators use this as an additional revenue service
| for the actual asset. The grid is overall cheaper, and the
| VPP operator and asset owner get a cut of those savings.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Grid operators are grumpy about needing to make this
| investment.
|
| Boo fucking hoo. Grid operators have made absurd profits by
| running grids that hadn't seen an inspection crew for
| decades, to the tune that they regularly cause deadly
| wildfires. PG&E is particularly egregious here - the 2018
| Camp Fire was likely caused by a broken C hook dating back
| to the line's construction in _1921_ [1].
|
| Sorry, I can't sympathize with grid operators.
|
| [1] https://hackaday.com/2020/09/17/closely-examining-how-
| a-pge-...
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| I agree! Many aspects of deregulation have been
| exceedingly negative, and a lot of investment is needed
| to decarbonize the grid anyways.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The real exciting thing about Virtual Power Plants, is that
| they expose the cost information to the end user.
|
| Like software reliability, additional 9s of service get
| progressively more expensive. Rolling blackouts on the hottest
| summer days are BAD and have costs associated with them, and
| peaking plants make a ton of money by running only a few days
| per year. It's almost the grid scale equivalent of having a gas
| generator so you can run extra window AC units because you keep
| tripping the breaker. Much cheaper to just turn the thermostat
| up a little bit and accept it being warmer, or turn off your
| cryptominers when the cost is that high.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Link is appropriate here
| [deleted]
| ghouse wrote:
| The electrical grid is designed to cover the highest load
| (typically the hottest hour of the year; A/C drives peak load).
|
| Most of the grid is a fixed cost. The transmission lines,
| distribution lines and the power plants recover enormous
| investments whether they are used or not.
|
| The marginal costs are surprisingly low. Marginal costs of fueled
| (fossil or nuclear) power plants are _typically_ < $0.05/kWh.
|
| Peak load is what drives capacity expansion -- both in wires
| (transmission and distribution) but also generation. Building all
| of this capacity to only run for < 1% of the year incurs
| tremendous cost.
|
| By flattening the (demand) curve (through either generation or
| load reduction) there are tremendous savings for society.
|
| However, electric utilities are natural monopolies, so investor
| owned utilities (contrasted with munis or coops) must
| substantiate investment to their regulators who in turn allow
| them to make a rate of return on their investments. So, these
| utilities only increase profit by increasing investment.
| szaroubi wrote:
| There are some other interesting use cases for smarter energy
| consuming devices, what they call Cold Load Pickup, where a
| section of the grid loses power during a blackout, and power
| comes back. that initial spike kills equipmenton the
| transmission side, if you are able to delay start some
| equipment, you spread the load and reduce strain on the grid.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-10-02 23:02 UTC)