Windy winter weather tends to bring trees down on power lines, cutting off your power supply as many people in Victoria have discovered recently. During the storm that crossed Victoria on 13th February 2024 over 500,000 people lost power and a week later many people in Gippsland and the Dandenong’s are still without power and some have been told it may be some time before their power is restored.
One of the main advantages of decentralised power supplies is that you are not so reliant on things that are happening in the main power grid and can keep a power supply when other areas no longer have one.
There are many flow-on effects when the power grid fails, other than the lack of electricity to power your house or business that may not be immediately obvious if you haven’t experienced extended grid failures before.
When there is no power for many people that also means no water as pumps no longer work.
Now we live in a mainly cashless society when there is no power there is no money flow as ATM’s and electronic transactions are no longer possible. In our area, nearly all the shops had to close for this reason as they couldn’t do any transactions.
In our area also, as there was no power the local petrol station couldn’t operate which meant there was no fuel available for the generators that many people were surviving on, even if they had had the cash to make payments.
The other critical issue is the lack of ability to charge phones / laptops or other communication equipment. This makes it difficult to be aware of emergency service information pertinent to your area.
For many people the need to protect themselves from power outages is becoming a more and more common occurrence and it is not unusual for it to take days for the power to be reconnected, particularly if you are not on a main line and other lines take priority.
Sometimes people lose power due to storm damage to power lines but it can also be your power being cut off by power companies so that they can do maintenance on the lines
We have our own solar and battery installation and although people in surrounding areas have been told their power won’t be reconnected for several more days at least, we have not been affected by the power outage at all, even though we have a completely electric home, including cooking and hot water.
This is an example of a home-based power supply where the power is generated and used on the same site.
Another example of a decentralised power supply is a community battery or local micro-grid. If you have one of these operating in your local area you may be able to keep a number of houses and businesses operating even if the main grid is down. Community batteries can be scaled to provide power to a few houses or to whole neighbourhoods. They can provide benefit both the local communities they are built in and the wider energy system even if not being used during power outages.
Local microgrids are designed to cover a limited area and may consist of a number of individual battery installations or a centralised battery system and power supply. Usually, these systems are charged by solar PV but can also incorporate wind, bioenergy units or hydro depending on the local conditions. All energy generation can be stored locally and distributed according to individual house or community building needs using software programs.
This also highlights the need for resilient local microgrids that are designed to withstand the possibility of power outages. Lithium-ion batteries and lead acid batteries may not be suitable in these situations as they may catch fire and explode themselves when subjected to water or high temperatures which only makes the power situation worse.
Many people purchase solar arrays and /or add energy storage batteries to an existing system in the belief that this will protect themselves against power outages.
However solar arrays on their own won’t do this as they are disconnected when the power goes out to make sure no power inadvertently gets transferred back into the grid to cause problems with anyone working on the lines.
The same applies to some batteries. To continue to have power when the grid goes down you need to have a battery that is “capable of” and “configured to” be able to work independently from the grid.
Also to preserve power when the grid goes down you need a battery that won’t be impacted by water or fire. Recent floods and fires brought this into awareness as many lithium-ion batteries can explode if still having charge when they are subjected to water damage or even heat after the fire threat has passed.
When people look at purchasing a battery storage system one of the reasons is to provide power when the grid fails as often happens in extreme weather events (which are becoming more frequent). These power outages can last from a few minutes to several days or even weeks and may only happen occasionally or can be a fairly frequent occurrence depending on where you live.
What appliances you want to cover and for how long will have a bearing on the type and capacity of any battery system you purchase.
At one end of the spectrum, you may only want to cover a critical circuit of refrigeration and lights and maybe one power point for charging phones etc. for a couple of hours. The other end of the spectrum is to cover all loads of the house for several days. If you want to cover all loads of the house you will need more battery capacity and also large enough inverter capacity to cover running several appliances at once.
Some battery systems can be programmed to always keep a percentage of your battery in reserve in case of a power failure (the SoNick energy storage system will do this). Again, this can determine how much battery capacity you need to cover daily running loads as well as a predetermined reserve battery capacity.
With a SoNick or molten salt battery you can guarantee power supply, even if grid power goes down and the switchover is instantaneous so you may not even realise the switch to battery power has occurred.
If you would like to know more about getting safe, reliable and recyclable battery storage for your own home or business visit us at https://gridedge.com.au/