My two cents, for whatever it’s worth: That’s a very rosy puff piece on what I think deserves much more critical attention.
The resulting story had a lot about Wildpoldsried and made only a brief mention of sonnen. But the company made an impression on me because of its entrepreneurial nature and its vision of how batteries can reduce the need for conventional power plants.
“Entrepreneurial nature.” 🙄 Here’s how these virtual power plants work in action, according to this puff piece:
Rocky Mountain Power, the utility serving parts of Idaho, Utah and Wyoming, is working with sonnen on a virtual power plant in which the utility provides a rebate to encourage customers to participate. A pie chart showing types of virtual power plants. Inside Climate News
So far, about 3,500 customers have signed up. They have purchased a sonnen battery system, which starts at about $10,000, and received rebates that start at $1,920.
This is a profoundly neoliberal vision of how to produce energy during the climate crisis. It is privatizing both the power grid’s supply chain and its actual production by incentivizing the “correct” market conditions. This is a plan in which the government, aka the only entity we have that has any public accountability, is reduced to never doing anything. Instead, it simply “incentivizes.”
What is the long term plan here? What are we going to do in 20 years, when a hundred million American homes with rooftop panels and batteries have reached the end of their shelf life? They’ll all be running different proprietary “virtual power plant” software, on different kinds of solar panels. This sounds like a logistical nightmare that will turn into a wasteful environmental disaster.
The market is terrible at these kinds of long-term planning problems – that’s how we got into this mess in the first place. That’s why we continue to burn fossil fuels today, despite everything. We need clear, long-term, democratic and centrally-planned infrastructure projects.
All these incentive schemes to gently guide market forces away from their natural behavior of environmental devastation seem doomed to fail. Government incentive schemes will transfer public funds to private companies; shareholders will make out like bandits, and the rest of us will be left holding the bag.
