How to safely turn your home into a power plant
The latest advances in intelligent technology gives your home the opportunity to become a small power plant. The innovative combination of a battery energy storage solution, solar panels and an electric vehicle (EV) enable consumers to generate and store energy. Your home could soon be producing its own electricity, and it's about more than putting solar panels on the roof of a house.
The house gets smart
It is possible to access new time-of-use tariffs by adding a smart meter, which accurately monitors your energy and tells you how much it costs in real-time. These can see you paid to use power when there is an excess supply of energy, enabling you to charge your EV or home battery for free.
With new technology, a computer system is able to control the house and hook up to a smart meter. Combining knowledge of what tariff supplies to the house with artificial intelligence makes it possible for the system to make smart decisions.
The system constantly learns, intending to make the most intelligent decisions by evaluating what works best. This smart house system is a collaboration with other devices such as heat pumps. The computer's learning process means knowing when and how you use electricity, looking ahead, and trying to find the cheapest electricity rate. It's designed to manage your energy consumption and keep your bills as low as possible.
How the EV can be a part of your home power plant
To take advantage of the electric car when the price of electricity is lowest, it has gradually become common to charge at night. It's cheaper to charge your car during the middle of the night than in the early evening. It also takes a load away from that peak period for the mains supply and fills in some of the troughs in the network.
One of the more intriguing ideas is that you could run your home off an EV battery when electricity prices are high, which then could charge itself off the grid overnight when energy prices are much lower.
A power wall is a home battery designed to store energy from solar or the grid. It could play a massive role in helping homeowners become savvier about their energy use because they don't require driveways or proximity to charging units. You can use it anytime you want, at night or during an outage.
3-phase power is a high-end power system mostly used for extensive equipment. When battery storage solutions become common for home use, is this to be considered large equipment. Even though three-phase cables are not needed right now, it is forward-looking as battery storage solutions and Evs will be more common.
The type of current that is supplied from the electricity grid is Alternating Current (AC). The benefit a three-phase connection provides is giving the flexibility to divide the load in a setup into three different phases.
A single alternating current supplies through a single wire in a single-phase supply, making the weakest bit of the network between the mains in the street and the customer meter in the home.
Meeting today's requirements
The introduction and realization of virtual power plants that aggregate the capacities of heterogeneous distributed energy resources to enhance power generation are decisive for assisting an already congested power grid.
Building a network meeting today's peak capacity requirements would cost too much and take too long.
The network built for the current peak usage can instead be used to start filling in the space at times of lower usage at night and away from the early evening peak. The best way to fill in those gaps is by using battery storage in the home to help store energy at low usage points and use it at peak times.
We already use several hundreds of kilowatts more than the power plants were initially intended and built for. Upscaling the existing power plants is a slow process making the need for alternative solutions crucial.
Photovoltaics on the roof of your power plant
With an increase in the availability of residential solar panels and government support for renewable energy sources, more people are finding photovoltaics to be a great way to permanently reduce the energy costs and be more independent from the supplier.
As the battery energy storage system market rapidly expands, solar energy is becoming an essential aspect of the overall market.
When storing energy in a battery solution, producing more energy than you consume during the day is no longer a problem.
A home power plant adds resiliency
When your home, and all of its ever-improving digital equipment, is safely turned into a power plant, it is no longer vulnerable to electrical blackouts.
A battery energy storage solution which receives its power from different sources adds resiliency to the electric power system. It will prepare you for addressing emergencies such as severe storms and earthquakes and becomes a perfect foundation for a home power plant.
