I agree it's not common. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone with demand charges on a residential account. That's typically for large industrial and commercial ratepayers.

Where do you live, with what power company?

If the utility owns the packs, part of me wonders why not build out battery stations around substations the utility already owns, instead of managing many small batteries in individual houses.

Seems like the former would have some development costs but ultimately be cheaper to manage

Doing it that way they couldn't charge a lease to the homeowners. By leasing the batteries to the homeowners they're offsetting some of the cost through that lease, but also the selling point for the homeowner is they (presumably) now have a backup in case of a full outage

Also, you're reducing demand on the grid by having them at people's homes, not just reducing the demand on the power plants. If the batteries were centralized you'd still need to move that massive amount of power over distribution and transmission lines, which is actually just as big a problem as needing to spin up a peaker plant. In many areas the bottleneck is transmission not generation

Long term, with people moving towards charging their cars at home, storing excess solar energy at home might be the more economical option because it decreases the amount of power a substation has to send out at peak times.

I guess Vermont’s relatively low population density makes that more likely; with lower population density each service station will either service fewer homes or require more cabling towards those homes. Either way, more cabling is needed per house. Upgrading that to handle the load of charging a car can be costly.

I actually despise Marketplace compared to the Craigslist days. Unfortunately it seems to be where everyone moved.

Craigslist had no accounts or login wall. Postings were chronological with a map. Simple email for communication rather than FB messenger.

I should clarify that what I mean is that it's very useful for buying and selling. Where I live, at least, it's more active than Kijiji or Craigslist ever were.

Because the spineless cowards in Congress are somehow afraid of an 80 year old demented man nearing a 30% approval rating.

Their inability to find a backbone helps them contort to whatever Trump babbles that day, even if privately they know something is idiotic or illegal.

If you want a prime example, look at how Thom Tillis suddenly finds the ability to speak out once he lost his primary.