New to all this (no PTO even) but don’t you get notification alerts if you set your phone for them and can’t you take yourself out of SW or adjust the battery level settings? All remotely from your phone? Usually these weather/grid events are announced they are coming. I’ve seen a number of posts from owners yesterday that they turned their SW off before it would trigger.
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StormWatch on in NorCal again! (September 2020)
- Thread starter jboy210
- Start date
New to all this (no PTO even) but don’t you get notification alerts if you set your phone for them and can’t you take yourself out of SW or adjust the battery level settings? All remotely from your phone? Usually these weather/grid events are announced they are coming. I’ve seen a number of posts from owners yesterday that they turned their SW off before it would trigger.
Me too. I just flipped Storm Watch on this morning at 9am. My PWs got down to 30% last night. I will let it grid charge to 60% and turn it back off. Solar should be able to fill it up from there. This is the 5th time I have used Storm Watch to make up for excess use and poor solar production during these Red Flag warnings. The main cause is the inability to naturally cool the house at night because of smoke.
I leave Storm Watch turned off until I want it to charge from the grid. I don't want any chance that it will consume grid power during Peak periods without my knowledge.
You can do those things, the question is, should you? If the purpose of your Powerwalls is to provide backup power in case of a grid failure, then without knowing when that grid failure will occur, you want to have your Powerwalls charged. In yesterday's scenario, charging them from the grid early while running my A/C to cool the house down let me have them full by 2 PM. At that point, I shut off Storm Watch and the A/C and from 2PM through 6 PM I was exporting much of my solar power to the grid.
Yup I got a notification so I shut Storm Watch off.
I was lucky to be near my phone at that time though as most of the afternoon I was in the pool with the kids.
There’s roughly 7 million detached homes in California. If 1% of them had Powerwalls that simultaneously drew 10KW, that’s a sudden additional load of 700MW. That’s 15% of the state’s generation ability! Even if half the people saw the notice and knew to promptly switched Storm Watch off, that’s still a 350MW shortfall in generation, which would cause rolling back outs. This Storm Watch trigger behavior must be changed before Powerwalls become more common.
I think the impact is much less than you state. If SW came on during the morning, your PWs would be charging from both Grid and Solar. Typically, my PWs are charged 100% before noon just from solar. Thus, if SW came on in the afternoon, their would be no extra load on the Grid until Peak. Granted, that is the worse time, but you would only be drawing from the grid for your house not to charge the PWs.
RKCRLR
Active Member
My PSPS watch notice says to expect the power to be turned of between 1 am and 5 am Tuesday morning. So I don't want to run down my Powerwall today and be low on power tomorrow morning. And with the smoke my solar isn't putting out much so it will take a while to recover.
I usually keep a 60% reserve and like yours my Powerwalls are normally full around midday from the solar. When it’s above 100F too much is going to AC so they only get to around 80%. I’m sure others are in a similar situation.
It doesn’t matter if I’m out by a factor of ten as any additional grid load is bad when the system is maxed out.
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Switching SW off takes quite a bit of time. I turned mine off and its been over 2 hours and SW is still active. I want to turn it off to avoid Peak charging.
AMPd
Well-Known Member
RKCRLR
Active Member
I know my solar production is down due to the smoke. Could that have something to do with it?
700MW is about 1.5% of the total 50,000MW California will need at peak today.
Every little bit helps, but your scale is off.
Late yesterday afternoon, CAISO announced they had a transmission line from Oregon and a power plant in-state go off-line. See PDF linked from this Twitter post:
https://twitter.com/california_iso/status/1302779414439235585?s=21
My uneducated guess is that might be responsible for the drop in production.
Bruce.
... if only this was available, might make it worth your while to share your PowerWall for the few hot weeks a year. Would be even better if this were an option for Tesla cars.
Autobidder
Autobidder
Mine changed within 5 or 10 minutes. I think the SW label may still have been on, but the PWs were powering the house within minutes of turning SW off
And, likely that the impact would be well less than 1%. I turn my thermostats up every day during Peak. However, based on this thread, I've decided to switch off SW within an hour of Peak demand and switch it back on an hour after peak
There must be at least 5000 PW installations in California already... if only this feature were deployed right now...
Tesla launches phase 3 of its virtual power plant, soon 4,000 homes with Powerwalls will be connected - Electrek
Tesla launches phase 3 of its virtual power plant, soon 4,000 homes with Powerwalls will be connected - Electrek
