,
12 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
1/ Georgia Power (the state power company) offers a billing plan for Electric Vehicles that offers insanely low price of $0.014/kWh for off-off-peak charging from 11pm to 7am. Only it's not, that's ignoring surcharges of around $0.031/kWh 
2/ So it's effectively 4.6-cents per kWh instead of the advertised 1.4-cents, which is still a good deal, just not as good a deal as advertised. For comparison, flat rate pricing is around 11-cents (combined).
3/ I mention this because of the Venezuelan power blackout, which they (probably falsely) blame on cyberattack. Our response to cyber threat to the power grid shouldn't be a secure power grid, but a decentralized one.
4/ There are other reason to encourage the use of solar cells and lithium power packs, but one additional reason would be robustness of the grid. If something were to disable the grid, people wouldn't be so completely hopeless.
5/ Electric grid power is tricky. Many power plants, like nuclear and goal, MUST produce power constantly. It's hard to ramp them up and down as demand changes. Alternatives like solar and wind are even worse, producing power only at inconvenient times.
6/ This causes power prices to wholesale customers to go negative sometimes, because the grid is producing more power than people want. It also means that power companies want consumers to use off-off-peak power.
7/ Something like a Tesla PowerWall in every home would dramatically increase the security of the power grid, and also by soaking up off-peak power and supplying it during peaks, makes it easier for the grid to handle alternate power sources.
8/ Anyway, in doing the cost calculation, Georgia's off-off-peak price is around 5-cents per kWh, not the 1-cents it advertises.
9/ We've installed solar and an LG Chem RESU10H battery at the family tree farm, and it doesn't do what I want, which is to handle everything for me and give me an accounting of how much energy I'm getting from solar.
10/ When you think it through, it's a really tough problem, both from the electrical circuit side, but also what you want. Do you want to maximum for emergency power during outages? maximum solar power generation? or maximum time shifting grid power?
11/ We have to split the grid so that fridges and water pumps work separately from optional parts of the house, so that when power fails, only part of the household keeps power.
12/ If you maximum for keeping the battery full for emergencies, then that means peak power generation from the solar panels may have nowhere to go.
