Ready for something different? (It really gets depressing writing about war and political dysfunction. Besides, all the news isn’t bad, although it sometimes seems that way…)
There is a mystifying (at least to me ) disconnect between the truly remarkable ability of humans to create tools–technologies that make our lives immeasurably better–and our evident inability to engage in rational self-government. That said, it’s worth exploring some of those technological breakthroughs, and the policy decisions they enable, if only to remind ourselves that we humans can, on occasion, be productive, rational beings.
A recent example, courtesy of the New York Times: Vermont, where Green Mountain Power is asking state regulators to let it buy batteries it will install at customers’ homes, saying doing so will be cheaper than putting up more power lines.
Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity.
The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants.
The plan is a big departure from how U.S. utilities normally do business. Most of them make money by building and operating power lines that deliver electricity from natural gas power plants or wind and solar farms to homes and businesses. Green Mountain — a relatively small utility serving 270,000 homes and businesses — would still use that infrastructure but build less of it by investing in television-size batteries that homeowners usually buy on their own.
“Call us the un-utility,” Mari McClure, Green Mountain’s chief executive, said in an interview before the company’s filing. “We’re completely flipping the model, decentralizing it.”
This plan has all kinds of benefits, not least because providing batteries to customers turned out to be cheaper than paying recovery costs when lines went down and building more power lines to improve the system.
About those power lines: I have often wondered why utilities don’t bury them. They are not only ugly blights on the visual environment, they are vulnerable to all kinds of damage–high winds, fires, even automobiles crashing into the poles. I realize that burying the lines would be more expensive “up front,” but it has always seemed to me that burying them in accessible conduits would save the costs and time expended when those lines went down, or had to be replaced for other reasons.
The battery idea is even better.
Critics of the industry have pointed out that utilities haven’t been particularly innovative; instead, they’ve continued to spend large sums on new long-distance power lines, that–as the linked article notes– can take years or even decades to build because of environmental reviews and local opposition.
A May report by the Brattle Group, a research firm based in Boston, concluded that utilities could save up to $35 billion a year if they invested in smaller-scale energy projects like home batteries and rooftop solar panels that can be built more easily and quickly.
Green Mountain’s proposal seems to recognize that reality, said Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It really is the model, especially if you’re worried about power outages,” she said. “It really could become the example for the rest of the country.”
Ms. McClure said the high cost of large-scale power projects threatened to raise electricity rates so much that many customers might struggle to pay for energy.
According to the article, power outages cost utilities in the United States about $150 billion a year. Experts have projected that modernizing U.S. electric grids could cost “well into the trillions of dollars.” Green Mountain has been spending roughly $20 million to $25 million each year just managing trees and other vegetation around its power lines. In an omen of climate change to come, the utility spent about $55 million on storm recovery this year–far more than the less than $10 million a year it averaged between 2015 and 2022.
Batteries will massively reduce outages and save maintenance dollars. Getting rid of those ugly power lines is just the cherry on top of the sundae.
If we could only apply these same sorts of innovative ideas to our political system….
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