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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."
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?
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.
Just think about this thing for a moment... $10K for a home unit. How much power are you using to make that worthwile? Electric at that, not your gas bill for heat and hot water. My electric is about $20 a month and that includes running a fridge, computer (an hour or two a day, plus a few hours a day on weekends) and occasionally cooking up some sort of dinner (since I eat cereal for breakfast and eat lunch away from home on weekdays.)
I'm sure a family can make the meter spin, but still, that beast is going to take some serious effort to offset, particularly with it's own built in inefficiencies.
Smells like snake oil, by YMMV.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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!
Joking aside, I think this is a great idea, especially for areas subject to brownouts or rolling blackouts. Some areas of the south have power issues during summer months due to high energy demands from thousands of businesses and homes running AC on top of their normal consumption. By storying electricity during non-peak times, this smooths the load difference between peak and non-peak hours, which reduces peak load on the energy grid.
Besides the cost, I see this being a huge benefit to reducing power load on the grid. I suppose the real question is, why don't power companies do this further up the pipe, at the generating stations?
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
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)
Um, the thing is, THIS ISN'T FOR HOME USERS! I'm sure if you wanted to use it in your home they wouldn't stop you, but you aren't their target market. Their target is businesses, ie the ones who are using power during the day which is why the power companies charge them peak rates. Businesses have to run lots of computers and lots of lights etc. Their power bills are much bigger than yours and could get a ROI much quicker than a single user ever could.....
But don't let that stop you from slinging the term "snake oil" around....
Monstar L
They are using VRLA batteries, so if they last through four years of deep-cycling you would be lucky.
Since the article is so lacking in details, based on the footprint, I would assume they have a 10kW inverter and 16-22 hours of battery run-time. This isn't bad, and I can imagine coming close to getting a payback with it, although once you replace the batteries you start the payback cycle all over again.
Also, variable pricing offers a discount at periods of low demand not becuase of the idea of supply and demand, but because the most efficient generation capacity likes nice, level loads. If the utility's demand profile was perfectly flat, they wouldn't need any of the oil-fired peaking plants which are cheap to build, but expensive to operate. There "should" be a net savings to the consumer if load profiles are flattened.
The other potential cost savings is in reducing peak demand charges. If the system can share load with the utility, it would be possible to constrain your peak demand. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like it is designed that way. Since peak demand charges are in effect for a year, being able to drop 5-10% for the peak period can translate to real savings. (Most of this is done demand-side today-- letting the Air Con setpoints drift higher, dropping lighting levels, etc.)
I would guess that most businesses would be better off putting PV panels on the roof with a net-metering agreement so they don't have the hassles of batteries. You could combine the two...
In various ways, this is already done. But as another poster pointed out, doing it upstream requires that the distribution grid also be upsized to handle the peak loads, whereas doing it in a more distributed fashion also time-spreads the load on the grid.