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."

Comments

Re:Especially nukes

[david.given]

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).

It's possible to bring up a gas turbine in seconds if you're prepared for it; you leave the turbine spinning but with no actual load.

There's also a special type of hydroelectric plant called a pumped storage power station. What you do is to connect two lakes at different levels via a set of turbines. When you have excess power on the grid, you pump water uphill; when you need power, you let it run downhill. They don't have a great deal of capacity, but you can bring them online from cold in only a slightly longer time than a hot gas turbine. The one I've visited, the Ben Cruachan power station, can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can come online in two minutes.

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.

The problem with superconducting storage rings is that if anything goes wrong all the energy gets liberated as heat... very, very suddenly. If you had a storage ring the size of the pumped storage station described above, you'd end up dissapating 6x10^11 joules of energy... about the equivalent of 150 kilotonnes. Yum!