Here’s how microgrids are empowering regional and remote communities

October 2, 2024 8:29 PM

Here’s how microgrids are empowering regional and remote communities across Australia. Small renewable energy systems are replacing dirty diesel generators in remote communities. This study of 20 Australian microgrid feasibility projects reveals widespread benefits.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (10 comments total)

Meanwhile in the US northeast microgrids are being considered for grid resilience, but not without pushback from established utilities.
posted by SteveInMaine at 10:44 PM on October 2 [2 favorites]

It's not here yet it I want to see incentives for batteries on a local level- soak up excess power on a busy solar day and then give it back at night.

Microgrids are super cool!
posted by freethefeet at 4:06 AM on October 3 [1 favorite]

My local electric company has a program where they give you something like $500 up front, and $100 per year, per qualifying battery, that you have connected to your home solar system.

Once the salt batteries are available, I’m there.
posted by funkaspuck at 4:50 AM on October 3 [2 favorites]

This is one of the things that excites me most about solar+battery technology. I know we need large scale solar in areas with with large grids to reduce emissions, and that's obviously important. But for end users, there's little change. The fact this combination can bring reliable, clean power to remote communities means significant quality of life improvements for their residents.
posted by mollweide at 6:08 AM on October 3 [5 favorites]

YES!! This is the way it needs to be done.
posted by BlueHorse at 9:50 AM on October 3

Once the salt batteries are available, I’m there.

EV batteries that no longer yield acceptable range in the car can also be given useful second lives as house batteries. Most will last many years before further degrading enough to be worth sending off to the recycling knackery. A used Nissan Leaf battery pack with enough wear on it to reduce the car's range to half of what it was new can still store almost twice as much energy as a new Tesla Powerwall and costs a lot less.
posted by flabdablet at 10:00 AM on October 3 [2 favorites]

flabdablet - there’s even a company that is building grid tie battery substations meant just for used EV batteries. There are other more scrappy DIY methods where folks take the packs apart, but this place has built a system that interfaces with the existing car battery management system so they have to do minimal processing of the used packs.
posted by mrzarquon at 11:39 AM on October 3 [1 favorite]

That's also the approach taken by the DIYer reported on in the article I linked to, for what it's worth. It seems sensible to me. Given the charge management infrastructure already there in the battery pack, needing only a bit of comms format conversion to make it interwork with a grid-interactive inverter, why would anybody not go that route, at least initially?

I can see tearing a pack down once enough of its cells have failed to make it unmanageable, but at that point you'd have to question how much service life the remaining cells would be likely to yield, and whether just shipping the whole pack off for raw materials recycling would be a better use of time and money.
posted by flabdablet at 9:00 PM on October 3

Once this becomes more of a thing, I expect we'll see grid-interactive inverter manufacturers like Fronius offer models with direct support for the CAN bus ports on car battery packs, making the whole exercise completely plug and play.
posted by flabdablet at 9:23 PM on October 3

These are all good things. But I was surprised to hear that there was some resistance from a few communities in Northern Canada. A friend from a First Nation had to explain it to me: if you're used to getting $250K/year from the government for diesel, but another government department says they're going to give you $2 million to build a self sustaining system, it's better to keep taking the disel money because you don't have to spend it on only diesel. One the $2 million is gone, there's no more money coming in.
posted by scruss at 7:54 AM on October 4