It's almost as if they're planning for a 3rd-world level of grid reliability in their RE-powered future.

Considering the increased frequency of events like Hurricane Sandy, there will be a lot of interest in this.

Of course, they're only talking about ~20kWh at most, but if you're careful you could make that stretch for a couple of days and deal with essentials.

I'm thinking that offline generators that run on natural gas may be the solution as the NG infrastructure is usually buried fairly deep and not affected by these types of events.

Home batteries are just a win-win for everyone.

Home owners can buy electricity at 5 pence per kWh at the night rate (or when the wind is blowing strongly) and no longer pay for peak rate (25 pence per kWh) electricity, so saving £800 per year. Or they could go mainly off-grid and live off their own solar PV. Or they could earn money from their electricity provider by exporting at peak times.

From the nation's point of view, home batteries would add grid stability and reduce energy costs for everyone (less requirement for peaking power plants). The energy mix could also be moved almost completely over to renewables.

From the electricity producer's point of view, they can invest much more aggressively in cheap renewables without having to pay for backup power supplies. They can also dump cheap electricity to storage when they generate too much (sunny, windy days) and buy back from consumers when they don't have enough.

For storm coverage it would be hard to beat an EV or PHEV.

Either could be used to store PV power and feed it back to the house as needed. A PHEV would also serve as a very efficient generator.

Spending a lot of money on something like storage batteries that will rarely get used makes not a lot of sense. Having a vehicle that you use about every day and also gives you backup power makes a lot more sense.

Very good points BW.

I've a 20Kw emergency diesel generator which suits me just fine in case of storms. Came in handy during Sandy when we lost power for 3 days.

Please remember building codes and city regulations ie. (permits), electrical enginnering and contractor pricing when considering total cost, without these considerations the numbers posted are incomplete. Batteries are still considered as Hazardous with strict regulations on where, when and how they can be installed.
Sorry to bust any bubbles but keep it real.

Underground AC distribution causes large power and energy losses, but still should be done in housing and dense urban areas, and the users of such systems should be billed a surcharge for their portion of the losses.

Where natural gas is available, businesses and homes can be equipped with co-generation systems and grid failure versions of such units are now being sold in Japan, the US New England area and Germany.

If they could have been connected, a lot of microturbine units could have been sold off trucks in Manhattan the day after the flood, and so could have the micro-generators of Honda fueled by soldering torch cylinders; Honda could be clever enough to allow their conversion in the field to operate on natural gas with a pressure regulator or jet adjustment and hose connector.

In the future, the electrical distribution system may well disappear from some areas and all energy can be delivered by pipes as synthetic natural gas or better perhaps as synthetic liquid propane or butane and automobiles and other vehicles can be fueled quickly and easily at home or business. Polymer pipes allow the distribution of ethanol, methanol, isopropanol or n-butanol as alternatives. Many tonnes of CO2 can be obtained from various sources or captured from the air to produce the liquid fuels.

Starting about 1939, Torsten Källe went through an extended process to design and build a device that would produce fuel gas from charcoal to operate the engine in an automobile. As a very innovative measure, Källe incorporated the process of recycling nearly one quarter of the exhaust gases into the device to cool it by the economic process of converting the otherwise wasted heat, of producing carbon monoxide gas fuel from charcoal and air to fuel gas, through the conversion of heat, charcoal and exhaust CO2 to additional quantities of the fuel carbon monoxide (3C+O2+CO2=4CO). Small quantities of vegetable oil, paraffin, diesel, used oil, fats and greases can be used as fuel to save on the use of charcoal by dripping them on the charcoal after the engine been started. Small quantities of natural gas, propane or butane can also be fed as can starches, flour and sugar with proper mixing of the solids.

This was a very automatic and efficient device which required only 30 seconds to start from cold and allowed engine restarts without relighting for more than five hours. Modern insulation would save even more heat and keep the outside of the unit cool. Vast piles of charcoal could be stored without danger or loss for emergency fuel for electric generators using this gas machine if natural gas was not available. Modern materials can be used to make this device more reliable and efficient if wanted, but for emergency generators, efficiency is not a prime concern.

(http?//www;hotel;ymex;net/~s-20222/gengas/kg_eng;html)

With the nearly obvious substitution of : for ? and . for ;, you can read the Torsten Källe paper.

New coal or biomass fired electrical power stations can use a two step process of subcritical water oxidation of the coal or biomass and supercritical oxidation of the organic (and some inorganic) residues of the subcritical stage. The CO2 produced in this combustion is automatically liquified at the pressures involved. Producing the relatively pure oxygen used in this process to produce the relatively pure CO2 is not as expensive as trying to capture the CO2 and SO2 and mercury and ash by other processes.

Fuel powered emergency generators can be bought for the price of a tankful of fuel for a SUV, and there are larger and more expensive versions. Most liquid fueled engines can be run on natural gas or propane with simple modifications; as simple as tube of a low flow of the gaseous fuels into the carburetor, and this method will reduce the amount of liquid fuels needed for automobiles and other IC engines. In the US, there exist vending machines in some places for standard tanks of liquid petroleum gases.

Even with no other fuels, automobiles can be operated, at idle or more, with fuel gases, including natural gas, to charge batteries and provide light and heat. Deep discharges of automobile batteries will ruin them, but they can be replaced or marine or deep discharge batteries can be used instead or alongside regular lead batteries.

In the UK, new bipolar lead batteries will soon become more widely available from ATRAVEDA and can be made to have very long life. These bipolar batteries can also easily be made to have voltages high enough to power some ordinary CFLs directly.

The new FZ SONICK now makes a ZEBRA battery package version (110RW80) quite suitable for directly powering compact fluorescent lamps; rich people should be required to have them in their large houses as a required part of an electrical system along with large commercial buildings. The US General Electric, GE, also is in the position of building such units. Two telecom units of 48 volts can also be used (48TL80). ..HG..