Batteries take heat off strained electric grid in Con Ed AC experiment

When a heat wave hits New York City, many customers can soon expect a message from Con Ed, asking customers to conserve energy.

The reason is to protect the heat-strained electric grid, which, when taxed to the point of failure, can lead to blackouts and brownouts.

Addy Spiller, an Upper West Sider and founder of a product management business, said those messages from Con Ed drive her bananas.

“Listen, I don’t know how to use less electricity,” she said. “I already have the AC at a reasonable temperature. I don’t think I can do enough to help Con Ed on my own.”

But this summer, Spiller and her dog, Ranger, are among 65 households across the city actually doing more to help — and they don’t have to stop blasting their ACs on sweltering days. That’s because they’re participating in an experiment that connects their air conditioning units to small batteries in their homes. The batteries, about the size of a small microwave oven, plug into wall sockets.

The pilot program, called Responsible Grid, is run by the company Standard Potential in partnership with Con Ed. When demand for energy is high but the utility company needs customers to lay off, the company powers the participants’ AC units with the battery instead of the electric grid.

“There’s a class of large portable phone chargers almost, and instead of powering a whole building, they power a single device and take it off the grid,” said Andrew Wang, Standard Potential’s CEO. “Because we have the battery, it allows folks to participate in the program without having to adjust their comfort levels.”

If more New Yorkers were to connect electric appliances to batteries in their homes, this approach could make the city more resilient, add to the stability of the electric grid and keep people cool. Responsible Grid is one of about a dozen programs residential Con Ed customers can enroll in to reduce energy during key windows and get financial rewards.

Participants who have the freely provided batteries in their homes through September will also receive about $100 per air conditioning unit plugged into them from Responsible Grid, as Con Ed pays the company to reduce demand.

In Southeast Queens, participant Farudh Emiel noticed several times over the hottest days of the summer that his three air conditioning units plugged into the batteries he got through the pilot program kept pumping even as he saw lights dimming. It was likely Con Ed reduced the voltage in his neighborhood to protect the electric system but his AC units, relying on the batteries, were unaffected.

“I run my ACs 24/7, three of them at the same time,” Emiel said. “One thing I will spend money on is electricity because I don’t wanna sweat.”

Outside the individual homes of the participants, batteries have the potential to reshape the electric-supply system and protect ratepayers’ wallets.

When demand for power is high, especially in the summer, fossil fuel-fired peaker plants kick in to meet that need. Those plants, often located in and around low-income neighborhoods, can be highly polluting and costly to rely on.

“By switching your AC to a battery rather than the outlet, you’re providing a measure of relief to the grid, avoiding more expensive, dirtier power plants turning on,” said Jamie Dickerson, senior director of climate and clean energy programs at Acadia Center, a research and advocacy nonprofit.

The small batteries in participants’ homes have served as a source of back-up power in other instances.

In the midst of a heat wave in July, Emiel had just finished cooking a meal when the power went out in his neighborhood. He scurried around his home — a detached, multistory house — to connect his refrigerator, WiFi router, and TV to the batteries.

“We were the only house with electricity because of the stand-alone batteries,” said Emiel, who works as a policy manager for a clean energy advocacy organization. “We had internet still, we were charging our phones, we had a lamp connected. The air conditioning was still working.”

The blackout lasted for about four hours, he said.

Spiller, too, relied on her batteries in early June, when her pre-war apartment building had a planned electrical outage to do some upgrades. The day was hot, and she began feeling stressed as she wondered where she should bring her dog and how she’d get her work done. But then she remembered the battery.

“With the battery, I was able to continue working. My AC worked, my WiFi worked,” Spiller said. “It was such a relief to realize I had a little bit of a buffer and didn’t have to leave my house — I was able to continue just living.”

New York State is looking to deploy large batteries to help make the grid more reliable, especially as officials look to add more forms of renewable energy to replace fossil fuel sources, and as electric heating, stoves and vehicles become more common. Wind and solar projects produce power intermittently, but batteries can store extra energy and discharge it back into the grid when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine.

But connecting big batteries to the grid requires navigating lots of red tape and finding major real estate, two tough tasks in New York City that can slow down adoption.

Jesse Jenkins, a professor in energy and engineering at Princeton University, called the pilot a “compelling model and a good way to avoid the very high costs and bureaucratic headaches of trying to install a grid-connected home battery or solar system.”

But he added that eventually, getting more customers to put the batteries “comes down to the cost of these devices, and whether the value delivered exceeds that cost.”

Looking ahead, Wang said he’s looking forward to scaling up the program to include more participants next summer, and to potentially try pairing the batteries with electric heat pumps in the winter.