today we're heading out to an old golf
course on long island since 2018 it's
been the shorem solar farm an array of
almost 125 000 solar panels operated by
utility company duke energy
today it supplies the grid with about 25
megawatts of electricity which duke says
could power around 6 000 homes
solar power is getting cheaper and more
efficient so big farms are only getting
more attractive this one is a part of
new york's goal to reach 6 000 megawatts
of solar by 2025.
but as modern as this farm is in a way
it's sort of old school it's one big
centralized plant power is generated on
mass here and shot through high voltage
lines out to the grid
this is how the u.s energy grid mostly
works lots of customers relying on a few
big plants but as we've seen in the past
year alone that's not the most resilient
setup power outages in manhattan the
power appears to be out throughout much
of the community here hundreds of
thousands of people across the gulf
coast most of lafayette is without power
this morning so how do you keep the
lights on as more extreme weather looms
one solution is solar just not solar
that looks like this
to see what that means we have to break
the idea of a solar farm into tiny
pieces and stitch it back together with
a new kind of network one that supplies
real power from an imaginary power plant
the glory of solar technology is how
modular it is each of these photovoltaic
cells does the same thing as every other
so each piece of this array is a power
source itself that's why there aren't
just solar panels on abandoned golf
courses like the one in shorum they're
popping up all over for example a
rooftop in brooklyn
okay
oh wow okay
cool so
this is the basic unit of community
solar just a couple of panels on the
roof of a home or a business
today lots of homeowners are adding
on-site batteries too they allow owners
to store excess energy to use in a
blackout or to sell back to the power
company
this is the piecemeal solar revolution
that's been happening alongside big
farms like shoreham
so i grew up in california and when i go
back home i see solar just popping up
everywhere justine kalma covers all
things environment and energy for the
verge there's just so
many opportunities to turn unused space
into
something that's going to generate
energy so affordable now the the price
uh for solar has dropped dramatically
from 30
a watt in 1980 to less than then a
dollar a watch in 2019.
by themselves a small smattering of
panels like these only does so much for
a community a big storm or some other
hiccup is still disruptive for anyone
who doesn't have solar it's not enough
to sort of save you from the larger
problems that are are plaguing our our
aging grid here in the us
but as more and more solar owners
install batteries new opportunities open
up all those batteries are little
reservoirs of power and if they all work
together they could become a power plant
just like the one at shoreham
this gets pretty abstract so we're going
to visualize it with some retro help a
copy of simcity 2000 the classic city
building game
so first we plan our little town you
need some land for industrial and
commercial and residential then you add
utilities plumbing this actually becomes
kind of a chore and then we bring it to
life
okay so we're going to start with these
three little neighborhoods all in a row
this coal-fired plant here is our base
load power it's the default power source
for our city the three neighborhoods are
the same except for one variable the
first one has no solar at all it relies
on the coal plant for all of its power
in this one some homeowners have rooftop
solar for their own use and maybe a few
have batteries as well and yes we added
the solar panels in post because this
game came out in 1993. neighborhood
number three is the fanciest each
building is wired up with solar plus a
battery
all the systems are networked together
and a portion of the power in each
battery is usable by the power company
so say i'm doing some landscaping over
by my power alliance and
whoops there's a service interruption
between the power plant and the
neighborhoods what happens now well
neighborhood one loses power immediately
say goodbye to all the food in the
fridge neighborhood two is patchy the
homes with solar and batteries are okay
for now but everyone else is out of luck
and neighborhood three has power because
every building has a backup battery but
there's more energy in those batteries
than the neighborhood needs and thanks
to the networking the utility can pull
power from lots of those batteries all
at once neighborhood 3 has become a
virtual power plant and can restore
power to all of the other homes until
the lines from the coal plant are
restored
now that's an extreme example but
virtual power plants can also make a
difference day-to-day there's an ebb and
flow to community power usage it rises
every day when people commute home from
work flip on the lights and appliances
and settle in for the evening
if usage spikes high enough a utility
might have to call on a peaker plant an
on-demand power plant that can quickly
kick out enough energy to meet peak
demand but no one likes peaker plants
they're inefficient and expensive and
they're often extremely dirty gas or
sometimes coal but in this case the
utility can again activate our virtual
power plant instead the utility gets its
peak energy and the homeowners get some
cash for their extra power
if enough systems like this are
installed we could end up retiring a lot
of paper plants
in the real world network solar can
create sizeable banks of energy
this summer energy providers in northern
california announced a plan to build a
virtual power plant by outfitting 6 000
homes and businesses with solar systems
their combined battery output could
reach 20 megawatts that's not far off
from the shorerm facility
now fossil fuel plants have the
advantage of running indefinitely you
can keep feeding gas into a peaker plant
for as long as the peak lasts whereas a
battery network will eventually drain
but while it lasts it's clean energy
without the headache of dealing with
individual solar owners virtual power
plants are also a pretty package for
utilities because they tie together
a lot of residential solar so they don't
have to necessarily go and knock on
everyone's doors it's like crowdsourcing
a solar farm
there are still a lot of wrinkles to
iron out a bank of solar panels and a
battery for the average home can easily
cost between twenty five thousand and
thirty thousand dollars that means
residents will most likely rely on cash
incentives and subsidies to participate
and that will take buy-in from policy
makers and utility companies alike
and then there's the reality of our old
tired confused grid so there's a long
way to go to upgrade our infrastructure
because
what we have now was built for fossil
fuels the grid was really built for
energy to flow in one direction
and so there's going to need to be
really big investment in upgrading our
grids so that it can accommodate more
renewable energy but every day more
household batteries are added to the
grid and in the near future a whole new
network of batteries could come online
thanks to electric cars these electric
vehicles can do a lot more than drive
you know they are essentially batteries
on wheels they can drive 200 or even 400
miles on a single charge but who's
driving 200 or 400 miles in a day right
and so
what do you do with that excess energy
well you could sell it to the grid in
some ways these technologies are
arriving when they're needed most
california is ahead of the curve in
solar but the state is also suffering
through some of the scariest climate
emergencies south australia is also
investing heavily in solar and they know
the stakes as well
for what it's worth we don't need to
choose between big solar farms and
smaller networks with the right upgrades
to the grid they can work in tandem just
like other base load and peaker plants
do the truth is we will need all the
different permutations of solar in the
years to come it's not so much just that
i'm excited about it but that we need to
we need to to go that route
there's no choice scientists believe
that we need to essentially cut out our
reliance on fossil fuels and slash
greenhouse gases pretty much completely
by 2050 and we can't do that without
solar it's just going to be a part of
life and our economies and our homes
moving forward
oh no
aliens
oh
i did not build enough fire
stations oh