The more I think about it, the more I think that the grid's days are numbered.
No, not that it'll go away entirely -- at least, not for a lifetime or more. But, rather, that, in ten to twenty years, people will be as comfortable not having a grid connection as they are today not having a landline telephone. Right now, we're about where we were when the Motorola brick mobile phone came out...a few people had already had ludicrously expensive car phones, and the brick was only "portable" in the same sense that a Mac Classic was...but, if circumstances worked out and you had the money, you could do away with an AT&T phone entirely -- even if not many actually did unless they were far enough from civilization that AT&T wouldn't run a line out to you. Today, of course, even schoolchildren have their own smartphones, and most Millennials can't imagine why they'd possibly want a landline. For that matter, Millennials don't even use voicemail or email -- mostly just text and chat, and not even that much voice calling. If the power companies want to prolong their relevance and position themselves as best as possible for a post-grid world, they're going to have to lead the way on things like V2G. A great way to start would be subsidies for EVs in exchange for V2G rights. They could do the same with plain old fixed battery banks. The power company could retain ownership of the batteries in exchange for reduced rates and a guarantee of uninterrupted service in the case of an outage. Or, if you want to own your batteries yourself, the utility could provide a smart meter that advertised both the amount they're going to charge you for usage and how much they're willing to pay for backfeed, and you can provide similar information to the meter. Program your local controller with variables such as the current charge in your batteries and your anticipated usage, and it adjusts the prices it advertises accordingly. You naturally wind up buying power when cheap and selling it when expensive, and the ut ility does likewise, nicely leveling out both grid load and electricity prices at the same time. Instead, of course, the utilities are dead set against change...just like the landline phone companies that fought number portability, the utilities are determined to penalize those who fail to use electricity in the way the utilities are used to. Solar producers, whom they should see as their best customers, are their prime target...which just hastens the demise of the grid. Just as people would rather put up with the hassle of getting a new number than continue to do business with a company that would be dickish about letting them leave, so, too, are people going to prefer the expense and initial inconvenience of going to an off-grid battery solution to dealing with Ma Bell in an electrician's uniform. Cheers, b& -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 801 bytes Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail URL: <http://lists.evdl.org/private.cgi/ev-evdl.org/attachments/20150108/408a86bd/attachment.pgp> _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
