The war between solar homeowners and utility companies has been an ongoing, fierce fight. Homeowners with rooftop solar want to be compensated at retail rates for the energy they feed back into the grid. Meanwhile, utilities want to maintain lower rates and keep control over the centralized grid. Residential energy storage could help solve these issues.
Through a collaborative and cooperative effort, utilities and residential solar storage owners could build a stronger, more reliable distributed electrical grid. To move forward, it’s necessary to take advantage of new technology, open up communication and give up control. The technology is here, and costs are down, making a battery-based distributed grid more possible now than ever. With a distributed grid, everyone wins.
Using advanced tech and communication
The growth and advancement of technology, especially in the solar and energy storage sector, has been on an upswing in the last decade. The electrical grid infrastructure, however, remains largely unchanged. Systemic change on the utility side will inevitably be slow, but it’s time for utilities to catch up with the growth of energy technology. The companies that do this will be able to do their jobs better – namely, continue to reliably meet energy demand.
Solar photovoltaic installations are on the rise, and more and more solar homeowners are looking for a way to store the energy generated by their panels. As a result, the battery business is booming, with many big brands unable to meet the growing demand. This means that residential energy storage capacity, especially in locations like Southern California, is rising, even though that storage capacity isn’t owned by utilities.
But just because utilities don’t own it, that doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t use it. Another area of major technological advancement is the progress of communication. It’s time for utilities to start using that, too.
In a world of lightning-fast information exchange, it’s surprising how little utilities and customers are communicating. There have been many compromises proposed to wage peace between solar homeowners and power companies, but there hasn’t been a lot of talk of the free-flowing information. Communication, itself, could be the compromise everyone is looking for.
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