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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."
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.
The summary is wrong! The $10,000 unit is targeted at small businesses with an electricity bill of $2500 a month. Also, would this count as a UPS and surge protector as well? Then this might work well for a small data center, maybe?
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
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.
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.
I went to their web site, and your $10,000 doesn't include batteries.
All you get is a rectifier and switch, that will, if you connect enough betteries to it, give you 1 kw for 10 hours. So you can only expect to run a couple of computers off this. Nothing else. For less than $2,000 you can get a 5000 watt inverter that will put out 230 volts. Connect that to the same set of batteries. Plug your computers into it. Charge it up at night. Run your boxes off it during the day. You've now saved $8,000 + the cost of an installation into your mains box, and its a lot easier to maintain.
Someone's covered that. From Wikipedia's Flywheel energy storage article:
The long term problems with this type of system should be obvious to everyone. The power companies have a different rate schedule for a reason. Their prices are based off of demand. If enough people start using this system, then the peak times will alter and therefore the prices will become essentially a flat-fee.
Down here in the oven(New Orleans) our power bills skyrocket during the summer because of added cooling costs from the AC and fridge. As a consequence, the price of power is actually lowered to allow people to survive. There are even laws in place that prevent the power company from cutting off power due to unpaid bills because people can die without AC(it's a sad world we live in that people depend on this so heavily). During the winter months our power costs more because of lowered usage. This past winter, our rates actually were lowered a bit because it was such a hot winter. I know this seems counter-intuitive but it is in fact the case. Supposing that the end user had the capability to store very substantial amounts of power during the summer, when rates are lower and therefore used less power during the winter(a very hypothetical case), then the prices during the winter would increase because of the lowered usage. So this system seems highly worthless to me.
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.