The benefit of everyone having their own batteries is resiliency. If I have batteries I have power in an outage whether the downed wire is in my front yard or miles away.
There’s probably also some free market benefit in purchasing decisions - some people will choose to spend for more capacity while others have an incentive to save money/power usage
Redundancy could be achieved by multiple power stations run municipally, moreover buying in bulk gives the city more leverage to negotiate price than individuals.
Also supposing that the cost of the battery was fielded by individuals it’s just not feasible for the 65% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck to have an additional $20,000 expense and this is something that needs to happen now not down the road.
If the municipal government is going to foot some of that cost it’d be really inefficient to do so in each individual’s home as apposed to a centralized site and project
The benefit of everyone having their own batteries is resiliency. If I have batteries I have power in an outage whether the downed wire is in my front yard or miles away.
There’s probably also some free market benefit in purchasing decisions - some people will choose to spend for more capacity while others have an incentive to save money/power usage
Redundancy could be achieved by multiple power stations run municipally, moreover buying in bulk gives the city more leverage to negotiate price than individuals.
Also supposing that the cost of the battery was fielded by individuals it’s just not feasible for the 65% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck to have an additional $20,000 expense and this is something that needs to happen now not down the road.
If the municipal government is going to foot some of that cost it’d be really inefficient to do so in each individual’s home as apposed to a centralized site and project