Don’t agree , the stability of the grid is N overriding requirement. Too much adhoc microgeneration causes destabilisation. Other then large scale generators I don’t see why anyone should get paid to be amateur part time hobby electricity generators
This is fun because we understand very similar facts, but see opposite solutions. It is a tendency to look at small contributions as insignificant, forgetting about the power of large numbers. When statistics on plastic pollution (from ourworlddata.org) in 2010 say that the average person in the U.S. discarded 12oz or 0.34kg of plastic per day, that doesn't sound like a very big problem until you mulitply it by 300 million people over the course of a year discarding over 4 million tons of plastic.
Another example in the opposite direction was during world war 2, when the recycling programs were set up to collect metals for industry, they took in huge quantities of metal, a dozen tin cans or bag full of pop bottle caps at a time.
The key word in the quote above is 'adhoc'. Just letting people do what is easiest for them will be chaos. But we know what the protocol for behavior modification of humans is. It is money. So the reason people will choose to store energy and release it to the grid at an advantageous time is to make it financially beneficial for them to have that behavior. Since the value of any one transaction is very small, the behavior has to use automation to make it worth while.
The issue is the electricity supply wants to move to hour to hour tariffing using smart meters. How then does your car know when to start charging. Until we have an industry wide protocol I’m refusing to go smart meter tariffs.
I agree with this statement. The same as humans have a common financial protocol for the most part, automated home power systems must have a common way to communicate with smart meters and the grid to make things work well. However, I can imagine a world where 20 million of the homes in the U.S. have 5kw solar systems with 20kwh of storage and an average of 4 sun hours per day. That is 400,000,000 kwh (400 gigawatt hours) of daily power generation and storage available, which becomes very useful if it can be coordinated (That is enough power get 19,834 Deloreans to time travel per day if they each need 1.21gigawatts for one minute!). The other advantage it has is that the power is available at the point of consumption, so it can actually reduce load on the transmission system.
A final advantage is that distributed systems are more robust against disruption. I thought of this when I saw the news on the missile attack on the power station in Kharkiv Ukraine. Missiles may provide a large impact on a small location, but they are useless against distributed infrastructure.
Power generators will be financially motivated to fight progressing to this system, not because it won't work, but because it might work well.