Our electricity needs are set to boom in the near-term, thanks in large part to the expected shift to electric vehicles in need of regular charging. The Biden administration also has aggressive clean-energy goals, ones that the Department of Energy in October said would require America's network of transmission lines grow by at least two-thirds by 2035, at a cost in the hundreds of billions, reports the New York Times. But as WBUR reports, a Massachusetts pilot program seeks to find out whether there's a way to better time the use of the energy we draw from the grid—potentially reducing the scope of that predicted infrastructure expansion.
It involves putting small batteries and heat pumps, which use electricity to heat and cool air, in about 2,000 homes; it will reportedly be the biggest such test of its size. The idea is that when the pull on the electrical grid spikes—particularly in the winter, when electricity is needed to heat homes—software will point the homes' appliances to the battery. They'll run off it until demand subsides, at which point they'll again source power from the grid while the battery recharges.
The 18 kilowatt-hour batteries that Wisconsin-based Generac will provide as part of a $50 million grant from the US Department of Energy can keep everything running in an average sized home for up to five hours during peak winter demand, per WBUR. One of the questions they'll be looking to answer is whether the battery approach could actually end up being cheaper than building out the grid.
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"Pilots like this are critical because they help inform what the [electrification] road map looks like, which, to be honest, no one has totally figured out," one clean energy advocate tells WBUR. The twist to this pilot is that the heat pumps and batteries will go to low- and moderate-income homes that likely wouldn't have been able to foot the bill for the technology otherwise. Installation is expected to begin in about a year. (More electrical grid stories.)
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