Green Mountain Power in Vermont, using PowerWall

[RubberToe]

I originally posted this news in the Investors thread, but this follow up seems better suited here. Vermont's Green Mountain Power is going to buy 500 PowerWalls for installation in customer homes in 2016...

Tesla Powerwall Offered To Vermont Utility Customers... $0 Down | CleanTechnica

One of the options is no upfront cost, and $1.25 per day if the customer agrees to share the power in the battery. It will be interesting to see how fast these get gobbled up by customers in Vermont. Anyone here in the GMP service area? Please let us know and keep us posted.

Also, they mention in the article that if enough of these can get deployed, it will cut down on the peaker plant use that is sometimes needed that burns kerosene. Looks like maybe GMP is headed down the road to become one of the first utilities to start using distributed battery storage of solar energy to start reducing fossil fuel use. Be interesting to see over time how that plays out, and whether they can get to a 100% renewable position. Someone has to be first.

RT

 

[gavine]

Awesome....hopefully it is successful and others follow suit STAT.

 

[RDoc]

How would this be an advantage to the customers? Obviously if GMP uses the stored power it's not available for use during peak hours and anyway it's not at all clear that storing power for use during peak times has a reasonable payback period.

 

[jgs]

How would this be an advantage to the customers? Obviously if GMP uses the stored power it's not available for use during peak hours and anyway it's not at all clear that storing power for use during peak times has a reasonable payback period.

Seems to me that it's too soon to say. If GMP ends up using much of the capacity of the unit with any frequency then it's hard to see much value. But if they don't, and it's mostly a just-in-case for them, then it starts to sound interesting.