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Store Your Own Juice
sfeinstein writes "Power companies using dynamic pricing models to charge more for electricity during hours of peak usage is nothing new. Now, however, one company has decided to take advantage of this by using technology to buy (and store) capacity when rates are low and use that capacity when rates are at their highest." From the article: "The device, called GridPoint Protect, is the size of a small file cabinet and connects to the circuitbreaker panel. (The company also offers a lower-capacity version designed for homes, which costs $10,000.) A built-in computer powered by a Pentium chip will make intelligent purchase decisions, buying when prices are low, then storing the electricity for later use. That will make it possible to run your company during the workday with cheaper electricity that you purchased at 3 A.M."
Store Your Own Juice
Personally, I use Mason jars.
But that's just me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
--
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10K for the home version? Even if it made the electricity free instead of just cheaper, that wouldn't be worth it. If you have a 200 dollar bill per month, that would still take 5 years to pay off. And thats not counting loss due to inefficiency in storage and running a frigging pentium to control it! (On a side note- this type of app does not need a pentium. This should be a simple microcontroller. All you need is a clock, a schedule of when to store power and when not to. A simple app that a much slower chip can do). I wouldn't be surprised if the true repayment time at that price is 10-15 years.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
and possessing a dirty mind isn't the best thing to have when reading a title like "Store your own juice."
How does it know when prices are "low"? Does it have a hardcoded database that will be inaccurate in a few months, or does it observe-and-compare prices?
I think a better service would be one that makes intelligent decisions and tops off my car when gasoline is cheaper.
... it's not getting cheaper. My mistake.
Oh, wait
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This seems like a good idea but it's definitely an investment. At $20K (or $10K for the smaller one), you've got to use a lot of electricity for this to make up for itself, and it'll take time as prices change. This is definitely not something that will appeal to anyone outside a large facility that uses a lot of power consistently.
This message will self-destruct in 5, 4, 3...
Windows? I'd balk if they put LINUX on there!
Anyone running a grid-intertied home power system[PDF] (typically photovoltaic, but wind and hydro also apply) with battery storage has had this ability for years. If they're not producing enough of their own power to meet demand, they buy from the grid. Since the process of rectifying, storing, retrieving, and reinverting the power has some efficiency losses, buying power at off-peak times isn't always a no-brainer, but it's frequently economical to do so.
And of course, even if you don't have a battery-based storage system, scheduling your laundry to run in the middle of the night is smart. You get cheaper electricity (assuming your utility meters it that way), and you ease the burden on the wastewater treatment system by not dumping your effluent into it during peak demand periods.
Why not just unplug your UPS on your PC during the peak hours?
Wouldn't the mass adoption of this product just shift the peak usage time - therefore negating some of the benefits of using it?
The other problem which may arise is that a hydro company aware of such devices may charge a premium in order to offset "lost revenue".
These are concerns I have. That being said, this appears to be an advantage to both the producer and the consumer. Lets face it, producers want people to reduce consumption at peak hours and thereby reducing the need to import power (I realize this is contrary to my statement above, but the hydro companies are capitalist profit monsters anyways). Consumers like the advantage of saving a little money on hydro - but you will have to save a lot in order to justify the cost of the system. It was going to happen eventually, kudos to GridPoint!
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Doesn't this assume that the device can store power with 100% efficiency? Seems like a 15% cost savings would be lost upfront unless the charging efficiency is at least 85%. And this doesn't even take into account the capital investment in the device itself.
In the off-peak time, when it is recharging the batteries, does the cost of recharging the batteries make up for the off-grid use during peak time? If the system takes 2 hours of off-peak time to charge the batteries, wouldn't it cost the same as 2 peak hours, or would the cost difference between peak and off-peak still help?
There are various small embedded operating systems, depending upon what's needed. But I still buy stuff with tiny 8bit CPUs chugging through complex code with plenty of D/A and A/D conversion and such. Why does this thing need something a big as a Pentium unless it's got large code to chew, i.e. Windows.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Why even bother offering a home product at $10k?
i e
Besides, people should be thinking about generating their own power and pumping the surplus back into the grid, running their meters backwards (a legally protected action in most states) at a cost to the power company.
These are called intertie systems, and power companies are federally mandated to allow them:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=solar+intert
Wow! This must be a PERSONAL letter, just for me!
These devices are also (theoretically) good for power companies too. Most people use much of their electricity for a few hours in the day (right as they wake up, and after they get home from work). They have to be able to supply this amount at that time, and they can't really change that capacity easily. This means that power companies have to have a lot of extra generation capacity that goes unused during the night and (less so) during the day. (This, incidentally, is the reason behind the variable pricing scheme, and why you pay more for electricity at home than you do at work.)
By allowing the user to store up electricity during non-peak hours, this device not only saves the customer money but also relieves the power company of some of that spike when you get up and when you go home, meaning less extra capacity that needs to be kept in place to handle the peaks, and therefore more efficient power generation. It's a win–win situation.
This sig is certified free of self-referential humour!
Just like building your own "Tivo", if these guys come up with a scheme that works, way too many people will just build their own.
It sounds no different than a whole-building UPS.
At night when the rates drop, plug it in to charge.
When the rates are high, unplug it.
If unplugged during the day and running too low, beep so someone knows to either cut usage or plug it back in ( probably on bypass so you aren't consuming and charging at the same time during peak time )
The only tricky bits would be if in addition to time of day billing you were billed on a scale that increased if your peak consumption crossed a line. In that case you'd want to share the load between the UPS and the incoming power. But rather than doing something fancy to actually share the load you could probably just have a portion of your equipment running on the UPS and the rest on incoming power.
If your consumption was primarily with PCs, an integrated UPS/PC Power Supply might do the trick. Charge it at night, run directly off the battery ( no re-conversion to AC) during the day. Bascially a laptop with a really big battery that you only plug in when you leave the office at night.
My electric bill was $12.34 last month. Not much to save there.
I don't know about other people, but my electric meter is still the old analog standby that rotates. Unless you have something newer digital model with a clock, how could they charge different rates?
If I use 20KW during the day, and 5KW at night or the other way around, my meter will still read the the total used. So unless you can have the electric co install a new meter and agree to charge you rated on time of day, this won't help you at all.
P.S. I live in the Denver Metro area, 2.5million people, so it's not some tiny remote town in Arkansas that's 20 years out of date.
Here in NH, our power company, PSNH.com, is overburden by its customer base. Lately they have been doing free energy audits to locate places people are losing money on heating and cooling. Both my residence, a 200 year old mill building, and my employer, a large interoperability lab, were audited by PSNH for heating and cooling, and in the case of the lab, other weird places we waste power. At my residence, they paid 80% of the replacement costs for new windows, in an effort to avoid new infrastructure. They simply can't afford to build anything new that generates power. And the overages that they have to supply all come from Canada, which costs them enough that it isn't worth it for them. So I would have to suspect that they would love it if people in their customer base were to install these, as it would just put their peak output down and give them some breathing room. I have to admit I don't know what it's like elsewhere in the world, but maybe some other people would share too.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
It's nice when your own schedule coincides with the power company's.
I'm a customer of the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power. They don't advertise the fact very widely but they have a three-tier time-sensitive rate structure for residences, which is optional. I signed up for it. They came out, replaced my electro-mechanical power meter with a computerized model, and I was off and running.
No one's home during the day. That's key. From 1-5pm my electric rate is about double what it is from 8pm-10am. But since no one's home then, I make out like a bandit. My electric bill fell by one-third while everyone else's was going up.
If your place is empty during the day you should see if you have such a rate where you live. No need for power-storing file cabinets if so.
Real good for the environment. The impact on digging up the lead is real small and the problem with disposing of them afterwards is real low. (Yeah, right) Oh, by the way, you gotta use a lot of lead in a deep cycle battery like that. This is not something that you float along and do backup off of every once in a while. This is the kind of stuff you have to use in a golf cart. Better known as marine batteries, these things need real thick plates or they warp under the charge/discharge cycles. And while you are at it, please remember that your number of charge/discharge cycles even on a wet cell (and a gel cell is a wet cell in the end) is reasonably limited.
Not exactly a friendly way to deal with things. A better usage of the money would be to put up some solar panels and do a little cogen.
But it uses more total *electricity*, since any storage system must have an efficiency less than 1.
I wonder if the off peak electricity is generated with a more efficient power source than the peak electricity.. which might make the the system as a whole (from generation to consumption) more energy efficient, thus using less energy (not less electricity) in total.
Here in Argentina I've been to at least a few hydroelectric plants that already do this. Besides working as a "normal" hydroelectric plant, and because the artificial lakes that power them are small, they pump water up during the "cheap" hours and let it go through the turbines on the "expensive" ones, selling power back to the grid and making a profit. A neat way of speculation if you ask me :)
My english is sow-sow. Sowhat?
Instead of playing games with the power company, you can buy small-scale wind turbines for roughly $1/W. That also pays off after about three years, except unlike a battery bank, it actually reduces the real load on the electric grid, and will keep working for 20-30 years rather than 5-10.
Oh, sorry, lost my head for a minute, forgot I live in the USA. Can I "upgrade" my >45MPG TDI (diesel) Beetle to a <10MPG Explorer? Uhhh... Go Yankees!
What the hell? Why is it on slashdot that people feel the need to randomly attack *EVERYTHING* that is posted?!?!?!
.net in your post as well! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? Do you attack any idea that comes along regardless of how much you know about it??? You are the kind of person that randomly attacks any idea that comes along, just because. You are the kind of person that attacks any kind of new technology for any reason they can regardless of if it makes any sense or is based on fact.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?!?! A low speed pentium chip doesn't take much power. Maybe the cost they saved by making it used standard off the shelf equipment is so great that you wouldn't recoup the costs as a customer over the life of the product from them using that, vs. a custom extremely low power chip. Really? WTF??
You call these guys nutweeds, and manage to also attack microsoft
What is even sadder is that this got modded up as INSIGHTFUL! God, that is so frelling sad. News flash: it isn't insightful to randomly attack something you know very little about.
The fact is, this is a very neat idea. Taking the utility companies' exploitation and turning it around on them! AND YOU ATTACK IT! Seriously! Go get laid.
I'm posting this logged in, and with +karma, I know I'll get modded down as a troll, but by god...I don't care.
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
I chaperoned my daughter's 5th grade class field trip there. The HULK roller coaster uses 2 15,000lb flywheels to store energy and then blasts out electricty when a coaster is launched. This keeps their peak value lower than it would be otherwise. Best part is we got to go to the front of the line after the back lot tour.
I also read that the NYC subways were testing flywheels for breaking energy storage. The flywheels are to be located at the stations, this way the trains didn't have to carry the flywheels.
It is way past time we made flywheels do more work.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
For $10,000 they offer a marginal reduction in rates. (Hell, if borrowing money were free and this thing saved 100% and needed no maintenance and was 100% efficient it would still take me a decade to recover the cost.)
If I had $10,000 to throw at the problem I'd install $10,000 of photovoltaics. No batteries, just run the meter backwards during the day when power is needed most anyway. And I'd be contributing to production not just shifting my consumption.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
A P5 isn't "big." They're small, relatively low-power, and provide sufficient fpu performance to solve diffeqs. You're just a whiny shitbag talking out of his ass.
Alright, so when we strip away the breathless excitement of this advertising copy, what do we have?
There are only so many ways to store electrical power: You could pump it into batteries, drive a flywheel, work against gravity by pumping water into a tank, or top up a huge capacitor bank.
My guess is that this is simply an uninterruptable power supply system. Essentially, you have a rectifer on the input, converting alternating current to direct current. The direct current then is pumped into batteries.
Then, to get power out, there's an inverter that's also connected to the batteries. When the algorithm governing the invertor decides to run on batteries, power will be drawn from them instead of from the mains.
Most modern inverters are always on. They switch from the mains to the batteries and back again when the AC crosses at zero volts, with both inputs perfectly in phase. Even your most demanding loads (like the switch-mode power supplies that run a typical PC) will never notice the difference.
So, in summary:
AC Mains --> Rectifier --> Batteries --> Inverter --> AC Output
nt
If the batteries were:
They say that they use:
But backup batteries are rarely cycled. These suckers are just going to die before you get a chance to repay your investment.
That's why. Currently, I'm designing software for a welder for a client. 99% of the time - all you do push a single button, and off she goes.
600MHz Pentium, Windows CE, .NET. :(
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Hmm, Seems to me lots of operating systems use a pretty good chunk of processing power. Even ones with small footprints. I would blame laziness on the part of the developer rather than blaming microsoft at every farking chance. Hell for all we know, he's running qnx, built the prototype on a pc, and just rushed to development without bothering to have custom hardware built, and only using a very tiny fraction of his processing power. And "PENTIUM" could mean a recycled pentium 75, or 100, in that case, I'd give him kudos.
... what did you expect, something profound?
And if it's not economical for the power companies to carry out this kind of storage - taking advantage of far greater economies of scale - how can it be economical for the individual customer?
So it is basically a big UPS which simulates a power outage every day. Hmm, I dunno. I can barely get a UPS setup for a couple racks of servers for under a few thousand dollars. And that only runs for like 30 minutes, forget about a whole business for a day.
Seems to me that just having that kind of power backup would be a boon in and of itself. If it can really save money, all the better. But I'm skeptical.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Here's an idea: Pull energy off the grid during peak hours and store it, then pump it back onto the grid during peak hours.
Be your own power company, without actually producing power!
The idea of this is pretty old. There are actually pumped storage reservoirs in production that will pump water up a hill during non-peak hours, and generated electricity during peak hours by letting the water flow back down.
Here's an example:
http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/pumped.htm
This article is just talking about making that kind of technology accessible on a smaller scale. I'm skeptical of being able to do this at good enough efficiency for small-scale use. If it does, though, that would be fantastic!
Power plants can't generally speed up or slow down production quickly enough to handle electrical use variations. Thus, plants burn more energy than they need to, to account for the maximum possible demand. If this kind of research can make this technology more accessible, that we can get more energy-efficient electricity.
Just as fool proof as investing in the stock market right ?
How long do you think it's going to be before power companies notice they're not making as much as they used to & shuffle things around a bit ? Hopefully after you've saved $10,000 on your electric bill.
I don't see theese being residentially viable. (other than maybe condos)
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
The company gives the spec for the 'Big' commecial version at 7kWh. The rate difference here in San Jose,CA is ($.31-.$17)kWh or $0.14/kWh, so the device can store $0.98 woth of electricity. The battery is not likely to survive much more than 200 charge cycles, and even at 2000 recharge cycles the bill would only be reduced with $1960. Much less than the >$10000 price tag. So, you waste money, and create quite a bit of pollution in the form of lead, a toxic heavy metal.
"Fix it"
Now, err, I might be missing something here, but then you could charge your GridPoint during off-peak hours, and get charged off-peak prices. You could then discharge it during peak hours, ang get refunded peak prices. Depending on efficiency, you could make money that way. Capacity is 7 or 10 kwh. How much does a kwh cost, anyway?
Only part of the cost for this POS have been discussed. The first real fly in the soup is that Batteries have a 3 to 5 Year life time, and they are not your car batteries. These unit cost anywhere from $250 to $375 each. Did you want them installed. My guess is that there are atleast 40 of the jewels in the box. Do not forget the 10K dollar fine for each of the little gems that is not disposed of properly. these guy's have a chain of custody document with them the serial number will follow you to your grave. Then there are the contactor, associated with the static switch, they don't last long when they are switch under load, and they are not cheap to replace either. This little jew is designed to suck all the ben's out of your wallet, and you get a pentium, what fun. This is why I read Slashdot, so that I can find some really stupid applications of technology, being offered by individuals that should not be allowed to see the light of day. But the really dumb individuals associated with this offering at the individual who put up the venture capital.
Umm, how about a timer that turns the unit into "storage mode" at 3AM? why does this require a program?
We are all just people.
I work at a company which manages the power grid for all or parts of thirteen states. This device would work to even out the load curve. I know the dispatchers in the control room wouldn't mind a flatter load curve during traditionally high load periods. That said, I don't see this being very useful for single family homes at the price points mentioned. Multi-tenant units could benefit if they would be willing to aggregate their metering.
Both comments had valid points. Unfortunately, both comments were slightly biased. Unfortunately, both comments also got personal.
This is the Internet, kids. Everyone... plays... nice.... Oh. Yeah.
Troll on.
My little site.
I recall hearing that if you have your own power source (such as a windmill generator) power companies in some states are obliged to purchase your excess power at the current market rates. Seems like someone could just program one of these to buy low, sell high.
You mean like a VIA CPU ? ... It's x86 compatible (for the most part), it's very low power (15W at idle), and it comes in form factors (Mini-ITX) that are reasonable for embedded work. And it runs Windows/CE/.NET should you choose to (albiet slowly). A nice selection is here: http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=2#p1601
I scanned through the article, but didn't see this mentioned:
What kind of power storage technology is used for the $10k "filing cabinet" model? How much capacity does it have? What's the round-trip efficiency?
If it uses batteries, what is the lifetime of the batteries? Many battery technologies have a severely limited charge-discharge cycle lifetime.
I answered some of my questions from Gridpoint's site:
- Gridpoint sells these in 7kw and 10kw capacity
- Price is between $9k and $19k MSRP. The 7kw model is likely the $9k model
- The batteries are VRLA (Valve Regulated Lead Acid)
- Rated capacity is 10 hours at 1kW AC Avg Load. That's 1000/120 ~= 8A load, about half of a single 15A household circuit. This unit isn't rated high enough to run a typical hair dryer.
I couldn't find details on what kind of lifetime to expect out of the batteries.
What are you talking about? The pentium *IS* a "small, simple processor". Do you remember the first pentiums? 60mhz? Thats probably what they are using.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
They make these things you can stick on your roof that will generate electriciy for you from sunlight! What would the savings be if every office park roof was covered in solar panels? Not just $$$ but energy resources as well(oil,coal,urainium,etc)
We are all just people.
The flywheels were made out of composites, spun at incredible speeds, were housed in a vacuum and supported by magnetic bearings.
The auto makers didn't pick up on it, but they said stationary power storage was another possible market.
I can references to US Flywheel Systems on google, but no site for it. Curious as to what happened to them.
Battery maintenance is a PITA. Sure would be nice to see something like this work out.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
PBS pundit Robert X. Cringely wrote about such devices years ago and presented a reasonable argument that they are a solution to the California energy crisis, but that it won't happen. Basically, he said that the cost to California to equip 10x more houses than the rolling blackouts consume would be less than the cost of building new powerplants. I haven't checked his math, but it seems reasonable that last-mile caching (this is effectively similiar to other caching-type solutions) would really help solve this problem.
I wonder if there are appropriate points in the traditional power grid system where power-storage systems could be used to buffer enough stuff over 24 hours to solve this problem. Gigantic flywheels near your block, poised to clobber through the neighborhood, anyone? I suppose this problem has already been studied.
Installation can be expensive.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You couldn't save very much money if you had to hold on to each $0.10 kilowatt hour for weeks before you could discharge it to save $0.20. Fortunately most electric company prices change by a factor of two every day, predictably, since supplying additional peak capacity during high-demand hours is much more expensive than providing a constant base power load 24/7.
Of course, designing these battery packs for home and business users is a risky business. If battery technology is too expensive or inefficient, it's more economical to just pay for the power company's peak rates, and you won't get any customers. If battery technology gets too cheap and efficient, the power companies are themselves going to start replacing peak capacity with more base capacity plus batteries, so their peak prices will fall until home user batteries become uneconomical, and (except for people worried about blackouts) you won't get any customers.
What a stupid way to sell a big UPS. As they already comment you need a power bill in the thousands $ before you save money but the specs tell me that this thing can only supply 1KW for 7 - 10 hours. Therefore it is only capable to run 2 PC's (oh make that one because it already has one itself) and a few lights. I consider that nothing compared to what you normally use if you have a thousand + power bill.
Let's run some numbers:
Say you save 50% on a power unit (1 unit = 1Kwh). Assume a unit costs $0.20
The unit can store 7 Kwh which is worth in savings a massive $0.70 per day.
I am going to be generous and allow these savings to run through the weekend thus saving $4.90 per week or $255 per year.
Based on $10000 that is a return on investment of 2.5% per annum
CNN Money reported: "The company features an all-star board of advisors, including tech guru Esther Dyson and Bill Bradley, the former presidential candidate and longtime member of the Senate Energy Committee."
Whoooaaaaa ha ha ha ha, these clowns can't even count. Yeah, I'll have the stainless steel door upgrade. Ha ha ha, this thing is a stupid investment that will have no practical benefit unless you want a UPS or solar power solution in which case there are much better and cheaper alternatives.
No wonder sensible USA energy policies are non existent. What a morons.
Is a microprocessor (let alone a Pentium) really needed for something like this? An older (mechanical) oven timer would work great.
Until recently they were using an 8-bit 6510 processor (same as the Commodore 64) in BMW cars.
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If everyone load balanced then the system would be sized for maximum efficency. You'd still have to peanalize people for going over the limits to keep them doing their own load balancing.
I'm not explaining this well. I used to understand it better.
-- ac at home
Sounds great. Can I buy one that sells the electricity it has stored back to the utility when the price is high? Hell, I'll take a couple...
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Do they still produce 60 MHz Pentiums? Or do they get them off eBay (2nd hand, can broke in a month, no replacement parts etc)?
The XScale PXA-255 dissipates ~600mW.
e chdocs.htm
:-)
http://www.intel.com/design/pca/products/pxa255/t
Believe it or not, sometimes the marketing message trails what engineering does, especially when there is less whining to be had. The prototype used a less efficient 486 core. But it was still embedded.
Incredibly enough I own a Latitude that is about 8lbs and 7510t BB. Good call.
Enjoy utility deregulation.
Even if they wanted to, the DHS and the customs delays would mean the power'ed get there too late to do any good.
Yes, balancing usage is a Good Thing. It is, in fact, the whole point of this exercise. That still doesn't eliminate the problem of how you give people a discount for off-peak usage when there's no peak to be off!
Maybe the technology doesn't scale well?
I'm not sure exactly myself, but it's not so wildly out-of-the-box an idea that nobody can have thought of it before. I assume there's something wrong with the economics of doing it at the generating station. Maybe it has to do with going down from typical generation voltages to something that can be stored and then back up again? (That would be the problem using batteries...) Other large-scale forms of energy storage, things that could store real MWh's, might be impractical.
Actually, when you think about how hydroelectric power plants work, they do this already: they build water up behind the dam when demand is low, then open the gates further and produce more energy when demand is high. I know it's not the kind of "storage" we're talking about here, but most power plants have some form of output regulation; it seems like the power companies are probably trying to match demand as closely as they can, from their "top down" perspective, but can only get so close.
By putting small storage devices out at the edge, close to the points of consumption and where voltages are low, you might get a lot more effect than taking the same amount of storage and putting it all upstream.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I can't believe there's someone so pretentious. I'm sure you wrote that entire post just so you could say "pentia".
Le français vous intéresse?
It might not be obvious, but you make a HGUE assumption: That generation capacity is going to be permanently lowered to some new 'avg' level.
FYI - Lowering the peaks means a bigger buffer for spikes. Not less.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Batteries may make sense in a hybrid car because that extra shot of oomph at the right time may replace power generated at much higher cost than 12 cents/kWHr -- a gas engine may be very inefficient under part load, and the hybrid drive may allow downsizing the gas engine in exchange for a small amount of expensive power out of the battery. I just don't see the plug hybrid amounting to much right now because there you are counting on straight kilowatts charged into the battery and then taken out.
The claim is that if you don't deep cycle the battery (as in hybrid car operations) you get much better battery lifetime. But I haven't seen any data to suggest that the total juice you can pass through a battery increases -- you get more cycles because each cycle passes less. And I haven't seen any data to suggest that when you take battery replacement into account, you can get better than 30 cents a kWHr.
Have you tested the so-called "laws" of thermodynamics for every conceivable energy storage system?
;)
*chuckles*
How can you state with any degree of confidence that any storage system must have an efficiency less than 1?
I'm not advocating the "free-energy nuts" position by any means. But sometimes both sides (ie. the free energy nuts, and the educated people) of the energy debate look rather ridiculous to those of us just want to sift through the garbage.
It becomes much more economic if you already have the batteries sitting around for other purposes - i.e. in your hybrid car. Plug your car into the mains when you're at home, and let the computer decide when to charge and discharge the batteries. (This isn't an original idea - it is from a recent Scientific American article.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
I'm in southeastern Pennsylvania in the US. I have two meters on my house and I'm currently purchasing electric from PECO. One meter is full price (which was around $0.12/kWhour a few years ago)-- most of my house is connected to that. The other meter is off-peak price (which was around $0.07/kWhour during that same time)-- only my hot water heater is connected to that currently.
The catch is the off-peak meter receives electric at all times except certain daytime hours of the week during autumn, winter, and spring. These time tables are posted over at PECO. I'm sure many other places have similar set-ups.
I've mumbled to myself many times that if I had a microprocessor set up to switch between the two meters, I could get off-peak rates during off-peak hours all the time. I would save a lot from just that. This is one better. With such a system, I could get off-peak rates during all of off-peak time and some of on-peak time.
Sounds great... except for the high price tag. I'm not to thrilled about the choice of a pentium either-- a high power chip when your trying to minimize power costs? There are many low-power microcontrollers out there that are also cheap.
--Dave Romig, Jr.
The gridlock calculation (Oops sorry, Gridpoint) is based on the fact that the batteries are fully cycled (Charged and discharged) every day. Good batteries can handle this only about 2000 times and lose capacity over that time. Under normal use they last between 1 to 5 years depending on the environment in which they are stored. At the end of that period you can expect about 60% of their starting capacity. The calculation I made assumes the batteries never wear out and the investment will never be written off! My calculation also ignored the fact that the build in pentium computer uses power and thus reduces the amount of "savings" by 20 to 25% Basically if these guys want to save their face they need to remove all references regarding cost savings from their marketing plans and start selling this thing as a boxed solution for solar power installations or as a UPS. There is no way anyone can save money with this device.
The grid probably wouldn't want domestic power.
Unless you've got a nice synchronous generator producing steady power (ie. with biogas or biodiesel) then you're most likely going to have to export power back to the grid with an inverter. Most wind turbines use induction generators where the generated AC power is rectified to DC then inverted back to AC. Same goes with solar, which has to be inverted to AC.
Exporting power with inverters, especially large ones, injects harmonics into the grid and not the clean, sine waves you get from conventional synchronous generators. You can filter out the large harmonics, but these filters are at your own expense and they're quite expensive. Harmonics aren't good for power quality, for example third harmonics are known to cause overheating in transformers.
I won't even get into synchronisation issues, but its not as simple as just pumping power back into the grid. Power authorities are usually very nervy about this kind of thing.
At work, we've just installed a reasonably small (5MW) steam turbine generator that doesn't even export to the grid, but the power authority gave us a big list of safety measures they needed to see before they even let us power up.
..without the solar PV panels part! 10 to 15 grand! It's a charger/inverter and a few gel cell batteries. Charge at night, run during the day. You might have to flip one switch twice daily to do this. And that's it! Stuck in a cabinet. You are paying thousand$ for the box and an on off blade switch! How many batts can they fit in there, three maybe?? Most of the newer charger/inverters ARE programmable, got nice screens to look at, nice buttons to mash, nifty little engrish handbooks for instructions, they HAVE a "magical" "CPU" chip thingee in there, and are designed to be grid tied. Save yourself well over half what these things cost and get thee to your nearest solar dealer, they will fix you right up, if that is all you want. For the same thing these guys charge you can have BOTH what they offer PLUS the ability to get some additional juice from the sun, later pon if you want to, you DON'T need to add the solar panels to the initial installation. BUT, if you do it right (and cheaper) the first time you CAN add the panels and the charge controller later on if you feel like it. You can get a spiffy new programmable Xantrex (old Trace brand) programmable charger/inverter for ~ 2500 clams. this is considered industry standard top shelf. "Good enough" brand 6 volt gel cell storage batteries are around 150$. top of the line amazing brand (like rolls/surrettes) are 300$, last 20 years.
Not trying to really rain on what these guys have,I think everyone should have a setup like this (I have a small one, neat), but this is serious wheel reinventing here, for a lot of money.
I guess for the technically disinclined with some spare change to burn, it would be OK. You would still most likely and legally need an electrician to do the installation to the panel or sub panel, and *maybe* the local e inspector "permit-ission"
It's still better to give your local alternative energy guy the business, and you will wind up with a lot more stored amps for the buck, and will be lots more easier to upgrade the set up.
Price discrimination -- such as between daytime and nighttime users -- requires prevention of arbitrage (buying low and selling high), which is essentially what this device executes. Therefore, widespread adoption of something like this will just bring up night rates and maybe bring day rates down a bit, eliminating much of the benefit.
But, funnily enough, power companies don't do that, for the very simple reason that having hydro turbines and standby gas generators are cheaper than batteries.
Other schemes, like running your washing machine in the middle of the night to smooth out demand, make sense. But at present prices batteries don't.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The cheapest Pentium-compatible CPU I see on Newegg is $43.00. That's just for the CPU - no motherboard, memory, etc., which are needed to actually make a working computer. Now consider that you can build a complete 8-bit microcontroller-based system that will probably perform this task just as efficiently as the Pentium-based solution for less than 25% of the quoted CPU cost, with a total power draw of less than a watt when it's running full-out. Development costs shouldn't really factor greatly into it, as there are LOTS of engineers out there that can bang out PIC, 8051, Z80, and similar designs in no time, and there is no shortage of reference designs for those chips either. Pentiums aren't the only commodity technology out there - there are literally billions of microcontrollers sold each year, so I have to think that they're either doing something ridiculously complex with the programmable hardware, or it was designed by some folks that don't really know what's out there in the hardware world and are needlessly giving up a couple hundred dollars or so of profit per unit.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
once everyone gets the same idea, the rates will go up during that time too. Damn.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
Someone's covered that. From Wikipedia's Flywheel energy storage article:
Wouldn't this have the net effect of stabilizing prices over the very short term, as in the span of hours?
Therefore, widespread adoption of something like this will just bring up night rates and maybe bring day rates down a bit, eliminating much of the benefit.
This is a market based solution which can help make the energy market more efficient at the consumption end.
Ideally the person making this investment benefits enough to justify their investment with a small but reasonable profit. While the rest of us get the benefits of more stable energy demand.
If we can shift prime time consumption to off peak hours it can reduce cost for everyone. If I don't have to pay for it, even better.
Most homeowners who have monumental energy bills are those who have electric heat.
When I lived in Britain, we had a system of "Storage Heaters" which were electric heaters with concrete blocks in them. They'd power on for 8 hours a day at the power company's convenience and by heating up the concrete they'd be able to store enough heat to run warm all day.
Scottish HydroElectric had a better way of doing this. Rather than reducing your billing rate between say 11pm and 7am, you'd have two meters. A black meter that runs 24/7 and runs all your lights/outlets, and a White meter that is toggled by radio and runs for about 8 hours a day (I think they provided longer runtime in the winter).
That way they had a lot more adaptability to peaks and troughs in demand as they could switch on and off the white meters in each different geographic region.
This is nothing big -- the Swiss have been doing it for years. They simply buy power off the French grid at night from the nuclear plants, and then use it to pipe water up a mountain. Once the peak hits, they let it down to power hydroelectric plants, selling energy back to the French -- for profit.
;)
Clever bastards those swiss
DYWYPI?
In theory - if this becomes popular enough, the power companies are likely to adjust their pricing schedules. Or they could change the schedule for any other random reason. Having an appliance that is able to pick up on this by itself is quite cool. Still overkill, as it takes a person a few minutes to do themselves, but at least it has a purpose.
In the 80s, everybody knew about 8-bit chips because everybody cut their teeth programming them. Those chips are still around, and still good for this kind of project. But nowadays, software engineers cut their teeth on Pentium-based systems, and mostly don't need to know as much about the underling hardware as 80s engineers did. So yeah, you're right, a certain kind of design is dying.
I always put something pretentious in the first sentence so dweebs like you know to stop reading. I'd hate to tax your brain!
This would have the same effect day traders have had on the stock market. The big players will loose money as the small players eat up the margin.
On the surface a power company would be pleased by this as it is still their power and allows them to effectively sell more. But I suspect power companies are not balancing cost with demand but gouging and making more profit during peak hours. This type of device will reduce this quite a bit. Part of that peak hour profit take will go to the owners of these devices.
Contrary to the FP, how you make this device is not significant. Its not being sold or even marketed as an energy saving device. Its being sold as a money making device. This the managers he is spouting on about are in the right and he is not.
Energy storage is a bank of "gel cells" (valve-regulated lead acid batteries). The bank is rated 310Ahr at 48V, which would sell for about US $1000-$1500 (based on 12 each 12V, 105Ahr batteries at $80-$125 each). The system capacity is 10kWhr. With proper charging and care, battery manufacturers claim they will last 700-1000 cycles at 70% depth-of-discharge; call that 2-3 years of daily use. So that's 7000-10000kWhr before buying a new battery bank. You will pay $0.10 to $0.20 per kWhr just for replacement batteries, excluding installation labor and disposal fees for the old ones. This is in addition to the costs of system inefficiencies that others have noted. If your peak/off-peak differential is less than the amortized battery replacement cost, you never break even--even if the unit is free and 100% efficient.
The article's claim of $375/month savings (15% of $2500) is not likely to occur for one 10kWhr unit. Thirty daily cycles would be 300kWhr per month, requiring peak/off-peak savings of $1.25/kWhr above and beyond the cost of internal power losses and battery replacement.
There are good reasons for using battery energy storage: avoiding down-time and having power at off-grid locations are two major ones. But actual cost savings are rare. The off-peak price discount seldom will pay for battery replacement and system power losses.
Posted anonymously, for professional reasons (I need to keep my job!)
If this product did everything it says and went mainstream peak hours would flatten out leaving no savings for anyone.
Yeah, except there are low voltage, low power versions of the Pentium family specifically for embedded use. You can get whole systems that use 25 watts or less. Google for it.
So, the OP is still a retard, and the respondant complaining about the bad slashdot attitude is still right.
if you own a lake and a hydro plant, this scheme has been pulled for years.
generate electricity at peak times,
then in the middle of the night pump your water back into the pond.
of course, a $10,000 mechanism that does the same can only do one thing...
further the divide between the rich and poor people.
cause poor people can't afford tax breaks, attorneys, or now, cheap power savers.
we just don't look and say, if we save money in one area, someone's gonna have to pick up the tab! it's the natural law of equilibriums, vacumns get filled, holes get poles, and the poor get poorer. forgive my mis spellings, but no mac rests beneath my fingertips
Nah, once loaded they get through a few percent if that. They'd increase RAM usage but not CPU.
Also, isn't water pumping and sewage treatment the biggest consumer of power by far in most communities anyway?
I think that's a little hard to justify for a home user. Given that peak usage is during daylight hours; I think homeowners would be better served with $10,000 solar panels that sell to the grid during the day.
Besides, electric companies already do this kind of thing. About 11 years ago I took a tour of a power plant that's buried inside a mountain, under a man-made lake. At night, when power's cheap, it pumps water from a river into the lake. During the day, when power's expensive, it runs as a traditional hydo-electric plant. http://www.berkshireweb.com/sports/comp/bearswamp. html
No, I will not work for your startup
I was just wondering, how much the batteries for such a device would cost. Are these the same type of batteries that are being used for wind/solar energy sources? How long would such a battery keeps its charge?
the VAST majority of a worn out Lead-acid battery is recycled and does not cause pollution unless some dipshit just tosses it in the trash.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I agree with one of the oher posters. After rebates etc, my 3.8KW max PV system was around 12K. So I get free energy (about 24KW on sunny days in the spring/fall) for about the same price as their system, except the juice is free. Its also generating the juice in the afternoon when the power company demand is the highest. When the A/C isn't running, I'm feeding juice back to the power company.
So, what's the payback time on your PV system? (I'll assume that's PhotoVoltaic, or solar cells)
If you're ever in the neighborhood of Ludington MI, you should check this monster out, it's pretty much the same idea but a tad bit larger than the ones in the article http://www.consumersenergy.com/content/hiermenugri d.aspx?id=31
It is my understanding that 60 and 66mhz pentiums are still made for embeded systems. I have been wrong before however
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Although, leveling out the peak-rate-usage would have many other benefits for the power companies (although a LOT of these would have to be sold to make any significant difference). Whilst the average/total amount of energy used would go up (storage isn't going to be 100% efficient), the maximum amount of energy needed to be provided would drop, and the minimum would rise, making the line more level, which means less turning things on-and-off, and so if everyone had one (would need a live feed from the power companies then, so they kind of take in turns pulling the power), potentially less power plants would be needed.
Of cause, this isn't likely.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
A company could of course do this more cheaply and pass the profits on to the consumers.
But this way they make more money!
Sucks to be anyone with privatized Electricity and Water, it's not really diffrent from the diffrent companies and they get to spend money advertising and competing instead of having high salaries.
Well good with that super electricity, and those brownouts, and those soaring electrity costs....
Gee I hope we privatize here too!
Still, I suspect this (and a lot of other projects) get done a certain way simply because it's the way the people involved knew how to do it.
You've pretty much hit the nail on the head, but I don't think microcontroller-based system design is in any danger of dying out. It's just that it's mostly electrical engineers that are familiar with the huge variety of logic replacement packages that's out there, and most software types don't get very much exposure to it unless they enjoy banging on hardware too. The problem, as you correctly point out, is that there are a lot of software guys out there that just don't know what kinds of neat (and cheap!) toys are out there. It's a great example of, "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
They're not 8-bit microcontrollers, but these devices are great fun to play with, not terribly expensive, and provide something to bang around on that's not a PC but is similar enough for most software guys to do something useful with.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
This would be a great tool for making money. You would buy the power when it is cheap and then sell back to the grid as prices rise. Obviously once everybody does it you won't be able to make money, but until that happens you should be able to profit from the spread.
Monica Lewinsky lies to drink the juice.
She even keeps the leftovers.
For 10,000USD you could generate your own power vs store power you bought at reduced cost. 10K can buy a very large wind turbine or serveral small 400 to 1200 watt ones with enough left over for batteries and invertors. Some small 800watt wind generators can be had for under $500 $10,000 USD can buy enough of those you'd be selling power vs buying it. That money also can purchase nearly 3KW worth of 80 - 160watt solar panels these would likely out last the power storage device serveral times over plus offset green house gasses.
The pentium-embedded is probably what they are using. The current draw is roughly 4W at full load. To put that in prospective a P4 can draw up to 120W. While the pentium embedded is not terribly frugal for its performance, other chips such as VIA's and the Geode's which a highly integrated (chipset components on the die) using smaller dies and there are very effiecent risc designs are much better per watt. The chips power comsumption is basically nil when compared to the size of the system. There is probably a 60w light bulb over your head, this system will run a whole house of them for hours so 4W is relatively insignificant. This system was probably several years in devolopment, it appears to origonally been design to control banks of solar panels so the peak off peak storage was just a bonus, the pentium may have been the best option then. Intel guarantees product and platform available for a very long time. As for running .net and windows I highly doubt it , it is much likely to run linux, pure machine code, or a RTOS.
I don't know what's the situation in USA, but in Finand a similar system is used with heating. Basically there are lots of homes being heated with electricity. And many (a 40% maybe) use this kind of setup. Tey use the electricity to heat a tank of water if off-peak hours, and the water stores the heat. During the day, the water is circulated around the house, heating it up.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
What is silly is that often all that is needed is a simple piece of circuitry which detects when the electric company sends the 1050Hz signal down the line to activate your offpeak meters becuase they are often not always at the same time e.g. not always 3am etc.
will it run Linux?
It is way past time we made flywheels do more work.
Definitely - those bastards haven't been carrying their weight!
Nuclear power plants are the hardest to throttle back when the demand is lower. It takes days to ramp a nuke up to its rated output, therefore, once up, they are left running full blast year round as a baseline energy load. They are usually shut down during the spring or fall for maintenance and refueling because the electricity demand for heating or cooling is less. Fossil fired steam electric plants can be brought up and down quicker, but it still takes the better part of a day to bring one online. Gas turbines are the quickest to bring online, taking only minutes to spool up, and are often used for peak load times (i.e. the afternoons of hot sunny days).
A while back I remembered seeing proposals for storing excess electricity during off-peak hours in huge supercooled superconducting storage rings, but I haven't heard any more about it in years, and don't even know how such a scheme would work.
Those systems have an advantage, that is they are effective. But they won't fit in a file cabinet.
The system described in the article is stupid.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Instead, I'll mention you cannot store shit for power in a file cabinet. And batteries are a terrible way to store large amounts of power. You could store 7KWh of power in this thing. That's about $1.00 worth of power, at the highest rates. And lets say you can get it for $0.10 at night. So you can save a whopping $0.90 per day. To pay back the $10K cost, it'd take 11,000 days, or 30 years. And that doesn't count batteries which aren't included in the price and will go out every 2-3 years.
e lectricity
Look at it this way:
The utilities like to make money. If they could effectively store their power at night when it isn't worth as much and sell it the next day when it is worth more, they'd do it.
They don't, because it is not effective to do this. There are only a few ways to do this, and none of them fit in a file cabinet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydro
Your blind defense of a stupid idea is worthless. This is being attacked because it doesn't make any sense. By defending it, you fail to make sense also.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
People think of the 2 inch ceramic square sitting in a box of junk in the closet and not the classic design reinvented into a low power solution.
(The company also offers a lower-capacity version designed for homes, which costs $10,000.)
Reality check: How many kWh of electricity does 10k$ buy ? Lots. Several years' worth for most households.
A built-in computer powered by a Pentium chip will make intelligent purchase decisions,
Ugh. Wonder why they need a Pentium chip for that. Either it's an expensive low-power thingy (which still eats more power than some real embedded processor), or it's something that will eat a lot of power itself (as it is always on).
Do they really need a PC processor for an algorithm that could probably be easily implemented on some microcontroller, which would be much better suited for the task ? Or does it need to run some fancy operating system and colorful user interface ?
buying when prices are low, then storing the electricity for later use.
NEWS FLASH: Electrical energy is notoriously difficult to store efficiently. Basically any way of doing so has an efficiency significantly below 1. I think it says a lot about the "technology" if they aren't even telling _how_ they intend to store several kWh of electricity.
I have a fairly standard slashdotter's residence. Mum, Dad, a couple of chickens, and a 200 Meg Seti Farm.
I use a couple of 10 Meg reversible turbines to pump water up to a lake I built on top of the house during the night, and then let it run down to the basement during the day to provide power. Renting sailing and fishing rights there offsets some of the original construction costs.
During the winter, I also use some of the basement water to provide heating, since I circulate it through the rocket-testing facility I have in an outdoor shed and use it there to cool the exhaust deflectors....
(The company also offers a lower-capacity version designed for homes, which costs $10,000.)
Just what I need a $10,000 device that saves me $5 - $10 a month.
No Sigs!
So, assuming you lose 10% (being very generous here) of your energy on each conversion, you're going to end up with only 81% of the energy that you bought. You'll lose 10% of what you buy on conversion to storage, and another 10% on conversion to live energy. This is going to do nothing except smooth the demands for power companies that don't want to spend the money to comply with the law (that says they must provide sufficient electricity to meet demand) at the expense of using 20% more energy in the long run.
Considering the world's energy crisis, this isn't just irresponsible. This borders on the insane.
I don't see why this was modded a troll.. seeing them say they used a Pentium really shows how lame the design is..
Of course, as long as you save power overall, it's a benefit, but the device itself would not need the Power Of A Pentium (tm) to do what it does, which will likely just be monitor power usage during the day and alter its storage patterns accordingly. These devices are quite a good idea, and will save you a lot of money if you use them for a few years.
which is totally what she said
Relatively? Relative to what? Relative to a mainframe? Relatively, the Pentium is taking up a lot more power than is needed to perform the calculations required by this system, which wont need advanced floating point calculation or 64 bit extensions.. you're just a troll who doesn't know anything about electronics o_0
which is totally what she said
Using those assumptions, slet's see what we get:
A typical lead-acid car battery might be good for 50 amp-hours, that's 600 watt-hours, let's assume 20% conversion loss each way, so it's about 0.4 kilowatt-hour per car battery.
Let's say you have TWENTY FIVE car batteries in this device, mighty heavy, but doable. That means you can store 10 kilowatt-hours. At typical electricity rates, 8 cents off-peak, that's about 80 cents you can buy, which will displace $1.60 of peak-time power. If we assume one peak/off-peak cycle per day, we're saving 80 cents a day. Over a year, that's about $300 saved per year. Hmmm, not too shabby...
EXCEPT you're already out $10 grand. If you'd kept that in a bank, getting interest, you'd have made $300 to $400.
AND in the real-world, batteries can only stand a few hundred charge-discharge cycles. Typically you'd have to replace the batteries every year, at a cost of $1000 to $2000 for twenty-five of them.
So this idea isnt terribly practical. You're tying up $10 grand and still losing money every day.
The grid regulator, such as PJM, even in a privatized structure, can order generators to be brought online in order to bring spot power prices down to a manageable level.
This is my sig.
Of course there will be an efficiency-loss in storing the energy. The amount of energy used will be higher then without this system, other things being equal. As usual, a short-term economic trick is taken for a short-term gain and the actual consequences for the planet are ignored....
For $10K, instead of storing juice, you can put up a 2-3kw solar system and MAKE it and sell it back to the power companies.
If these guys store electricity at night, the peak period will shift to the night.
After all, it doesn't matter if you are using your blender or charging batteries, for the power company, you are using the energy!!!
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken
You can get some cheap ARM based processors theses days, e.g. with 64K of flash for a few bucks -
http://www.olimex.com/dev/sam7-p64.html
Thumb code is pretty dense, and the core is pretty high performance at 60Mhz.
Plus you can put the core in an ASIC with a hardcore if you have the volumes. And it's damn small too. The downside is that you don't have the resources to run a real OS.
ARM7s are probably overkill for some stuff, so you can get a microcontrollers down to a PIC at a few Mhz with a few hundred bytes of code space and integrated A-Ds.
Or if you want a TCP/IP stack, you're better off with a bigger procesor. We don't know what this box needs to do. Maybe it needs a TCP/IP stack for example. The point at which I'd switch to a BSD or uClinux kernel is fairly low, and that needs a more FLASH/RAM than you can fit on a microcontroller. At which point, you're in a very different price class.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Zonk must be new here. When I submitted my post I called attention to the best part: "A built-in computer powered by a Pentium chip will make intelligent purchase decisions".
;-)
Pentium? And Intelligent? In the same sentence? My blood turned cold and I new I had to submit the story.
If that isn't -1 Un-funny enough for you, let's just move on to the next most predictable comment: So, can I power Linux computers on this thing or will the Pentium-based "intelligent optimization" features stop them from working
"Whether or not you believe me, I'm right" -RWF
Around 10 years probably, assuming no change to electric rates. Rates here are pretty reasonable at around 10c/kwh. Of course, if rates go up, payback goes down. Of course, simple stuff like buying a 16SEER A/C or higher when the old one dies makes the most sense. PV is still a long payback.
...running your dishwasher and laundry machines at night, turning off lights, using low wattage bulbs, turning off the A/C while you are at work, and not letting your TV blare inane push marketing to an empty room.
Hell I could probably beat the savings this thing provides simply by throwing away my toaster.
In the workplace... along with some of the above ideas: have employees power down their PC's at night, turn off their lights, and lower the shades on sunny sides of the building during the day.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
During off peak times they use excess electrical capacity to pump water out of the river into a reservoir. During peak periods they let the water flow back into the river, using the pumps as generators. The reservoir is the "battery".
Simply hold a jar upside down in the water while taking a bath. Fart and catch the bubbles in it, then close the lid and put it back in the fridge. Be sure to use a jar of something your roommates use frequently. Hilarity ensues.
Down here in the oven(New Orleans) our power bills skyrocket during the summer because of added cooling costs from the AC and fridge.
Huh. I'd heard recently that New Orleans had switched to water-cooling, creating lakes in the city to absorb the heat.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Here's a "power-user" trying to explain technology to the masses: "Think of it as a kind of TiVo for electricity."
I use the term "power-user" pejoratively.
Where I live, the temperature in summer hits mid 40's every day, all week, and nobody dies.
I read about european "heatwaves" of mid 30's and people end up in hospital.
I don't know where you live, but it could also be a matter of humidities. In a very arid environment, the human body does a fairly efficient job of cooling by sweating because the sweat can evaporate into the air immediately. If your body is truly being efficient, the sweat evaporates practically upon air contact. In a more humid system, more sweat has to be generated because the air won't absorb as much water from evaporation. More sweat means more dehydration and often, the sweat isn't even serving to cool you much.
That said, I suspect that surviving high temperature conditions over a long period of time will help train your body as to when sweating is a good idea and when it's not, and in what amounts. *wry grin* And common sense will hopefully develop for people knowing when to get into the shade or to rehydrate.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I am selling my home, so it is vacant. No one lives there. There is no fridge or freezer. The only electricity that gets used is an answering machine and wireless phone. About 1-2 weekends a month, a TV and an Xbox gets plugged in, and a few lights get used for 2 days. So, about 3 days of lights, TV and Xbox a month.
I am still topping $35 a month! When we lived here, it was always over $100 a month. I think I pissed off someone at PG&E.
More manipulation of the power triangle!
--
Adobe's anti-counterfeiting softw
The amount of power used by an embedded Pentium is tiny compared to the amount of power wasted by storing it in a battery and recovering it.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
That's nice, but I also know that a Pentium is going to use more power than say the electronics in a watch, which is about the level of sophistication needed to control a system like this. I Am Not An Electrician, and I dont know much about battery technology, but a lot of noise has been made of performance per watt in the IT media recently, and having a normal general purpose PC processor running something that's meant to help save money, is stupid.
which is totally what she said
Honestly, people. You see the tagline up there? 'News for Nerds'? Maybe you should get a little basic technical knowledge before posting a technical comment, like the fact that a hell of a lot of embedded systems uses Pentiums nowadays, and in fact that's basically the reason Intel still makes them. (They did the same thing with the 386 for a while.)
These embedded Pentiums are built using fairly current tech, you know, the tech that's getting the pathways as small as possible to reduce heat so you can run your P4 at 3.5Ghz? Except, of course, these chips are running at around 350Mhz instead, and hence use almost no power at all, or generate any heat, which means no CPU fan, or in fact any fans at all.(1) (Of course, a gigantic battery might need fans for other reasons.)
The advantages of this over other, lower-power solutions like ARM is that it's cheaper, they can take off-the shelf parts (The motherboards have PCI slots), the assemble programmers are easier to find, it's trivial to test the software on their own system, and they have modern memory protection. (Some custom embedded chips don't have MMUs.)
What the hell did you fools think this company was doing? Buying old Pentium computers and sticking them inside their stuff? No. They are using an embedded solution that happens to consist of chips that are decended from Pentiums.
1) Hell, some original Pentiums got along fine without CPU fans, just a big heatsink.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
"Since when are governments interested in anything besides acquiring more money and more power?"
1776-1999. Things kind of broke down after that.
If you think this, you're an idiot. Maybe 1776-1899, but even that's pushing it. Maybe 1776-1799, but that's probably pushing it too.
The OP is a rude, immature bozo, but he's still right. Using a low-voltage version of the Pentium requires special design skills that you don't need when you use an off-the-shelf PC motherboard.
Energy is on everyone's mind right now, especially since gas prices are going up, yadda yadda yadda. You really do need to be critical of panaceas in a time of need. Buying this product is like buying candles and stocking up on non-perishable food in preperation for the doom of the Y2K bug. After doing a quick search, I didn't see any topic that had been modded enough to be exposed on the top level stating the obvious: To store electricity you need to convert from AC to DC, and then to use it it must be converted back to AC. There is significant energy loss, in terms of price and scale, in this process to make this product useless, and it could possibly even cost you more in the long run.
It's modded as troll because the Anti-Anti-Anti(fill in a few more) Something Brigade has lept to action with the ruthless efficiency of the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition with about the same results.
Even one poster tossed out some VIA x86 compatible chip which only idles at 15W which could be considered. Think about that. 15W is still a lot of power, particularly after you have already gone through all the inefficiencies of turning household current into the voltage necessary for the thing -- which is exacerbated if the thing is running off your stored power, which you know is going to have a degree of inefficiency.
Reminds me of how blind people are regarding the costs of things. How much does a $1 candy bar cost you? Not $1, unless someone gave that $1 to you, gratis. It costs you the gross income necessary to have that $1. Depending upon taxes and various deductions it could have been $2 of income to net that $1.
Similar to this example, say 1000KVA of power comes in, 700KVA is stored, 15KVA is used to run your little monitoring device, then the stored power has leakage depending upon how much time it has been in storage, finally there's the loss of converting the remainder to output your house runs on.
I think it's hooey. More sucker bait for witless public. Simply use less power and use it in off-peak periods.
There's one last thing to consider. Several years back the automakers jumped on the badwagon of building diesel cars, because diesel fuel was cheaper than regular petrol. The increased demand drove up diesel prices (also impacting transportation industries) thus negating the percieved benefit (besides, many of these cars were utter disasters as most manufactures had little experience in small diesels and understanding the different demands between two classes of vehicles.) If enough were to buy these things the power companies would simply change the pricing structure again and people would be stuck with white elephants.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ba-dum dum TSSSHHHHHH!!!!
I think my points are valid. And criticism is a good thing in discussing the perceived merits. You'd prefer nothing but positive feedback on everything? And why do you generalise "*EVERYTHING*"? Talk about flying off the handle.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?!?! A low speed pentium chip doesn't take much power. Maybe the cost they saved by making it used standard off the shelf equipment is so great that you wouldn't recoup the costs as a customer over the life of the product from them using that, vs. a custom extremely low power chip. Really? WTF??
Seriously, do you think? Even the lowest power pentium is a considerable draw in the scope of the built-in inefficiencies of a power storage device. Especially when the power is flowing the other direction and it's still running on your lossy stored power. I've got a watch which runs code to do a vast array of functions and runs for 9 months on a 2032 3v lithium battery. The savings of off-the-shelf pentium hardware is to be believed? Gimme a break.
You call these guys nutweeds,
And I believe rightly so.
and manage to also attack microsoft .net in your post as well!
Where did I attack Microsoft .Net? Well? Go on, point it out. I'll be waiting. As far as I can recall I used it as an example of an off-the-shelf commodity developing tool and to further parody the idea of the application of a Pentium.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?
Not a thing, what's wrong with you?
Do you attack any idea that comes along regardless of how much you know about it???
No. Do you attack every critical post with the same fervor and colourful language? You must have wowwed them on the debate team at prep school.
You are the kind of person that randomly attacks any idea that comes along, just because. You are the kind of person that attacks any kind of new technology for any reason they can regardless of if it makes any sense or is based on fact.
Talk about flaming nut. Such accusations. Don't take up law practice.
What is even sadder is that this got modded up as INSIGHTFUL! God, that is so frelling sad.
What does frelling mean?
News flash: it isn't insightful to randomly attack something you know very little about.
I certainly thought it was and apparently I wasn't alone. I applaud those who read past the first few words before bursting into flame. Obviously you immediately adopted a very rigid contrary stance, read what you wanted to, saw what you wanted to and went on the attack. Though where you draw these extreme views is beyond me. Prozac might help.
The fact is, this is a very neat idea. Taking the utility companies' exploitation and turning it around on them! AND YOU ATTACK IT! Seriously! Go get laid.
It would be a neat idea IF it wasn't such a transparent attempt to save people $1 at the cost of $5. I think it's rubbish. I didn't simply attack it in a rage of vitriol, either. I realised there is something inherently seedy in using a high consumption device to cut power bills. Go to the garden department of a DIY store and look at the marvelous timers for automated watering systems which can run for months on a nine volt battery. Built in timers, etc. Very neat little embedded systems and inexpensive, too.
I'm posting this logged in, and with +karma, I know I'll get modded down as a troll, but by god...I don't care.
You should be, more as flamebait than troll, but both elements are there. You should read, and if you disagree, read again and think through your response. All I see is someone in a flaming rage railing away with unfounded assumptions and personal attacks.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You'd get one.
In theory - if this becomes popular enough, the power companies are likely to adjust their pricing schedules. Or they could change the schedule for any other random reason. Having an appliance that is able to pick up on this by itself is quite cool. Still overkill, as it takes a person a few minutes to do themselves, but at least it has a purpose.
I wrote this in another post somewhere in this thread.
Anyone wishing to look further should consider the example of the diesel automobiles the Big Three made to take advantage of inexpensive diesel fuel, back in the late 70's IIRC. Shift the demand the prices will adjust. People who don't get it never had Macro Economics.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No idea about the US, but in Germany, this has been done for years. At night, they are pumping water into reservoirs uphill and during the day, they let the water go through a turbine back into a reservoir downhill. I learned about this system in primary school, so it must have been in use for ages..
I don't even remember where, it was back in the '70s... what we refer to as a micro hydro electric set up now. But he had some wind and solar too and one of things that he was doing when he had a surplus from the wind/solar was to pump water up into a tank so that he could use it to generate with on those calm dark nights. I don't think that those turbines would work well backwards as a pump, but what do i know
Oh, grow up. Computer technology is a big topic. I'm sure there's lots of stuff you don't know that would cause other peole to say, "and he think's a technerd (snicker)".
I grew up in Yucatan (in Mexico), where is hot as hell (40-43C is normal for about 6 months) and really humid; but we build our houses so they are cooler inside. It is usually 10 degrees cooler inside your house that outside (which means we are 'freezing' during our terrible winter temperatures of about 10C :)
:), the houses are build so they are warmer in cold weather, which means they really such in summer :) the houses are about 10 degrees hotter in summer unless you use AC.
When I lived in New Orleans (USA