The article makes the assumption that Tesla and EcoFlow are the leaders. They're not. They're the expensive US targeted systems. For anyone wanting to learn more about other systems Will Prowse on YT [0] is an amazing resource for best of breed.
Will is so awesome. I chuckle every time I see his name as a supporter of police activity vids. And the ongoing battle born saga vids are hilarious and terrifying
Will is a true reviewer and one of the few, in the power space, worth even watching. He did a rare reaction video to some guy who gave all incorrect information for configuring a high voltage system [0] about 5 months ago which does an amazing job of showcasing his domain expertise.
Will does a great job distilling a ton of useful information without any sort of agenda. I've purchased his books simply to support him. I'm glad to have watched him go from his early days to a lot of success just by being himself and staying honest to his reviews. Brilliant young guy.
Random thought: Why don’t we have a server rack that runs at home but is managed by a company, then people or businesses rent them? Th important use case is that the heat generated can be used for home. Like property managers, business maintaining them are heat managers for home.
I feel like this idea would work better at a somewhat larger scale, like a small to medium datacenter heating an apartment or office building. The downside is for any of these systems is that when it's too hot outside that heat becomes a liability so you'd have to have the infrastructure to divert heat as well. The other downside is that you'd be replacing a very well understood technology with minimal maintenance requirements with a relatively complex technology with more extensive and complex maintenance requirements.
All the problems you mentioned can be reframed as positive feedback for the economy we’re evolving into. Let me dream the arguments for each of your bullet points:
1. Power fail-over (battery + generator backup) in every house?
- I recently listened to a Planet Money episode about how DC/AI infrastructure needs are driving up electricity prices in Ohio. Ordinary households end up paying higher bills while big entities plan/build for reliable power.
- Maybe household-level infrastructure could be improved as part of making this kind of model viable. This applies to networking infrastructure too
3. Could get expensive flying a technician to every household to upgrade hardware in the racks
- People with enough education can be trained, and with the incentive of being paid, households themselves could become the technicians.
4. Probably don’t want everyone at home having physical access to storage devices
- Same idea: if households are being paid and it’s “their role” to manage, the access concern gets reframed as operational responsibility.
5. Massive theft risk
- Theft risk already exists today (even in good neighborhoods). The incremental risk might be negligible.
6. Homeowner’s insurance would probably…
- If we squint hard enough, there are arguments here too (e.g., payments not missed, additional compensation).
I don't have the full data on hand, but there are three companies in the UK working on this problem. Feel free to go down that rabbit hole.
from google AI, YSRMV (Your Search Results May Vary).
Heata: Attaches servers to your hot water tank, providing free hot water during trials, saving users money on bills.
Thermify (SHIELD Project): Installs "HeatHubs" (often with Raspberry Pis) in sheds or homes, running remote data centers and using the heat for homes, aiming for low-cost heating for tenants.
Carno: Offers devices like the QB1 (digital boiler) and QH1 (computer heater) that integrate microprocessors into heating systems, reimbursing electricity costs.
The value doesn't line up for anyone. From my perspective as a homeowner, gas heating is cheap, and replacing my gas furnace with someone else's server rack is of significantly more negative value than my current cost of heating.
I don’t heat my office, the reason being, when I run ablations for personal LLM research, it is enough for heating my office during winter. Given our move from just searching for links or website content to well-summarized content, maybe enthusiasts can have a private inference cloud where GPU sitting idle can be used for heating and generate cents with inference. But yes, all those points are valid, and that could be a moat for the business.
I had a similar random thought: Why don't we have a cloud company that does something opposite to what a Cloud company usually does. Instead of renting out resources from a data center, they help company setting up local resources and sell/rent out the unused capacity to other companies/individuals?
Probably a bit of a nightmare to oversight all the resources and ensure consistency and privacy but hey why can't we dream?
If you put a rack in a datacenter, and it's a decent datacenter, you'll probably have at least 2x10G connectivity off the rack; if you need more, you can get more. If you put it at someone's home, good luck.
A lot of us live in older homes without good insulation. Somewhere in the mid 1900s we simply forgot that "plaster interior wall directly on brick exterior wall" does not provide insulation.
1920s era homes are even worse, single hung windows in wooden frames, no insulation, no conception of managing airflow.
Modern homes are much more efficient, but they're a bit impractical to buy these days, and are increasingly built so shitty that their lifespan is less than their inhabitants.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit... - This shows a breakdown. HVAC is not the most [edit: as in majority, it has the largest share though], but it is a significant amount. Also my household is apparently well below average (though still higher than you) for the US and our region in the US.
I think it would just about break even on an economy 7 night rate saving about 17p/kWh shifting load to the overnight rate. (Might save more on a smarter tariff.)
A 12kWh system costs £5880 including VAT. Assume 95% round trip efficiency and 80% cycle each night gives savings of £565 annually.
That's about the same as the cost of a loan at 5% for the total amount paid back over an estimated useful life of 15 years.
This assumes it doesn't need servicing in that time and you can DIY install.
I don't know whether home systems like this will get much cheaper as the batteries themselves probably only make up about 20% of the system cost.
There are huge economies of scale for utility scale storage with all in project costs now down to $125/kWh meaning 12kWh would cost just $1500 rather than $6600 for this home system. So I wouldn't be confident the price differentials between day and night rates will remain as high over its expected lifetime.
My night tariff is 6.67p/kWh compared to 28.36p/kWh for daytime.
I don’t think these differentials will last either but I do like the idea of smart charging when there is too much wind. I suspect these grid storage systems currently being built won’t handle these peaks and will be designed for the average case so there will still be periods of cheap electricity.
My supplier already controls my car this way and charges it on a schedule it defines each night and also ad-hoc during low demand.
There is also some benefit to have a backup system for when the power goes out which happens a few times a year.
I pretty much agree. There seems a clear economic case to install enough grid storage to smooth out within day variations but that will fill up during multi-day windy periods so there will certainly still be periods of cheap electricity just not every day.
That likely means you'll still be able to charge your car cheaply most of the time but it probably makes home battery investments less attractive since you might only get 100-200 opportunities a year to charge it cheaply instead of 365, halving the annual savings.
But then given so much of the cost of a home system is in the inverter and control unit maybe it will become economic to buy several days consumption worth of batteries.
30 kWh per day sounds about right. I have resistive heating and holy heck is it expensive in the winter months, which are short and mild. I plan to replace it soon.
But yes, most of that would be heating and cooling single family homes. Many built during a time when insulation was an afterthought. Now homes are well insulated, but they are larger.
Yes. Its mild enough here that none of the typical concerns even matter. The house has natural gas connected, which is exceedingly cheap, but why would I.
House heating is often a big part of that. But even without that most would use more than you are using. Based on the site you link in your profile and the links there it looks like you are in Germany?
If so, it should be noted that the average German household uses in the 3000-3500 kWh range per year, and even the average one person household uses around 2000 kWh per year.
In the US we are more likely to to use electricity for a couple of things than Germans are. For example in the US around 80% of households use a clothes dryer, and about 80% of those are electric. In Germany only around 40% of households use a clothes dryer.
4 loads a week for a year would would be around 600 kWh, so we are already up to 40% of your usage just from that.
Water heating in the US is split pretty evenly between electric and natural gas, with a smaller number using propane or oil. The energy use label on my water heater says it should take about 350 kWh a year for a typical household. Google is telling me electric water heating is much much less common in Germany.
I think those are the major non-HVAC things where Americans and Germans significantly differ on whether they use electricity or some other form of energy to accomplish the task.
Take those out though and it is still hard to get down to your 1500 kWh a year. I'm the only person in my household, don't have air conditioning, and in those parts of the year where I don't need to use heating and it is not so hot that I need to keep a fan running to not feel uncomfortable, and it is not a laundry day (so no use of the dryer nor use of hot water for the washing machine) and I don't use the dishwasher (another user of hot water) the lowest 24 hour use I've seen has been maybe 7.2 kWh. If I could keep that up all year that would be ~2600 kWh. Add in a load of laundry a week and 2 or 3 uses of the dishwasher a week that would probably be close to 3000 kWh.
Your 1500 kWh a year would be 4.1 kWh per day average, so 3 kWh a day less than my minimum days. I suspect that a significant part of that difference is due to my water heating, from one or two hot showers a day.
One thing I've got that you almost certain do not is a well with an electric pump. I don't have a meter on my water, but I'm pretty sure it is under 100 gallons a day. One shower and a few toilet flushes with both an efficient shower head and an efficient toilet should be way under that, and drinking/hand washing/teeth brushing is not more than a few gallons. I don't know the actual power used by the pump, but if it used the maximum power circuit it is on is rated for it would only use around 0.3 kWh a day.
My fridge is just average on efficiency, but it is only using about 0.4 kWh a day. I assume you too have a fridge, so I doubt the fridge accounts for a significant difference.
My computer stuff (M2 Mac Studio, 27" 5k monitor, 24" second monitor, powered speakers, powered USB hub, 4 bay Thunderbolt drive enclosure with 4 SSDs, network switch) is using 1.78 kWh per day. The cable internet gateway is another 0.35 kWh per day. I assume you also have a decent computer setup so not sure if there is much difference here.
Oh, I just remembered one thing I had that was using more power than I expected in those summers when I saw usage as low as 7.2 kWh a day. I was not putting my A/V receiver in standby. I had assumed that when it was not actually playing the power usage would be very low, but apparently that's not the way these things work. It turns out it was using about 50 W all the time. That's 1.2 kWh a day! I only actually play stuff an hour or two a day, so that was about 1.1 kWh a day of wasted energy. No I have it on standby when not in use (0.07 kWh per day) so I may get down to 6.2 kWh on non-laundry/non-dishwashing days in 2026.
I actually only use a laptop that maybe draws 50W peak. The FritzBox uses maybe 10W peak and I turn it off when I sleep. Warm water is probably the main difference between my household and the average German, since I get it via district heating not electricity.
Does this system allow local control and monitoring, ie without a cloud service? Ecoflow does not, although someone has reverse engineered the bluetooth protocol for some models.
Is it UL9540(UL energy storage system safety standard) certified? I didn't see it listed in the specs but several of the ecoflow models are.
I'm always curious why homes in the US need energy storage systems, basically UPS for the house? I live in China, and the only times my UPS for the home server tripped in the last 5 years were scheduled maintenance that lasted for no more than 30 minutes, and even that was rare...
We live in a big city now (though not exactly close to hospital or government), but my wife's hometown is a smallish rural town, and power outage is also extremely rare (less than once per year?) in the past decade or so. If you need e.g. oxygen ventilation at home, probably safer to have a backup generator or UPS, but I don't think anyone I know would need one at home.
I don't know about "remote rural". But in those places, I don't think anyone could afford an energy storage system even if needed......
UPS is as much about smoothing through "glitches" (lights flickering isn't a power outage but it will shutdown a desktop computer / NAS) as it is about power for a 20 minute outage.
Which prompts a question- do you run a server / destop / NAS type system, or are you one of the many phone / tablet / other device users that are already somewhat independant of the power grid being fully on 24/7?
Asking about "remote rural" wasn't about whether people there could afford off grid power of their own, rather it was about the grid quality and delivery for people that live there and rely on it.
Where I am we get relatively few "outages" (minutes without power) but glitches and 20 second outages are common enough in lightning season ( we get a lot of ground strikes compared to other ares of the world ) and the power lines and transformers are surge protected which is seen as glitching on the long arms of the delivery network.
That makes sense. I am running a desktop PC as server, and a NAS for backup. Only the PC is protected by a UPS, and the NAS is directly connected to the socket. I can't recall experiencing any glitches actually...it was a bit more common ~20 years ago. Most of the outages were things like maintenance, or some guy at a construction site did something stupid.
As for the remote rural argument, I totally agree with you: it's just that I don't know about those places. What I said about affordability was regarding the article: I don't think Anker would be able to sell those in China, since those who might want one probably couldn't afford it.
I'm in Australia, typically I work remote areas, in the past globally (geophysical exploration) so I see power outages as "the norm" that you plan for.
Our cities (we only have a few big ones) all have pretty solid power delivery - as do most US large cities.
The US has "two" major grids, \1 most of the USofA, and 2\ Texas (which traditionally had minimal connection to elsewhere)
The \1 grid is most robust in the north east, patches into Canada (IIRC), and has some long connections to the West Coast.
Texas had some major outages in severe winter conditions, there's a whole story about that
Elsewhere in the US it's a function (by my guess) of how far some people are from major centres, whether there are major wildfires (california, and other parts), and if they're bridged across via "private" operators that have poor standards.
The US doesn't have uniform federal / state capital infrastructure (roads, rail, powerlines, telecomms, sewerage, water, etc) which is a strength / weakness depending on how people view these things.
American regional grids aren’t strongly connected, you aren’t getting much electricity between America west (eg Washington state) and the mountain west grid (eg utah). There is one big connection between a coal plant in Utah and LA, everything else is just connected by lines with very small capacity. If the west coast somehow tripped…we have better chance of getting help from BC than Wyoming or Utah.
Fair comment, my apologies if I conveyed that they were.
There's enough weak connection to accomadate some slosh that helps to smooth things and enough long connections to have potential issues in geomagnetic storms - although these should be well and truly mitigated by now.
I just wanted to point out that while Texas is completely disconnected, the regional grids are still only partially connected, but I guess this is only relevant for the west where areas of sparse population densities make strong connections very difficult. This is relevant when someone complains about EVs on the west coast using coal powered electricity rather than hydro and renewables that makes up much of the west coast's energy mix. Technically kind of true since Utah is connected via socal (they are changing this to a renewable link though), but not really since the other connections are pretty small.
Unfortunately, many of these system don't offer any kind of local control, like the ability to monitor and set charge level. You have to use a cloud service with Ecoflow systems, for example.
[0] https://youtube.com/@willprowse?si=j8oOreUXUSKfI8iO
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