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| Event Notification From Portland General Electric(PGE) Smart Battery Program |
We joined our local utility's Virtual Power Plant (VPP). If you want to know more about what a VPP is, we've covered that here. In short, the utility can turn on (discharge) hundreds of home batteries like mine when needed to supply additional power to the grid. It's a dispatchable distributed (cloud) energy storage system.
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| A VPP is like Energy from The Cloud |
This is a list of all the times this year (so far), that PGE has tapped our battery to support the grid.
That's 13 events this year. The early events seemed to be testing out the system. These events were lower power and shorter events. The real use cases started in July. There were 8 of these hot summer day events, where our batteries worked in cooperation with all the other home batteries in VPP to provide energy and frequency stabilization.
I can't help but notice that the energy use total for this year is 90kWhs. Our Tesla Model X is a 90D, which means that the battery capacity is about 90kWhs. So these events used the same amount of energy as one fully charged Tesla Model S/X 90D.
Opt-out
One final note, each of these event notifications comes with a simple opt-out link that you can click if you don't want your home battery to participate. I'm not sure why you'd opt-out if you're signed up for the program, but if you do have a reason to want your battery all to yourself, they make it easy to keep your stored energy for your own purposes.
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