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

The Art of Design is truly dying

[ackthpt]

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.

Basically a PC. WTF happened to using small, simple processors which run on tiny amounts of power, rather than rely on something of this level of overkill? Oh, wait, they probably decided to program it in Microsoft .Net which requires a big processor, a fair chunk of memory and all the trappings. All this in your power saving device.

Typical of a decision driven by some nutweed director who doesn't feel empowered unless he's got an 8lb. laptop and a Blackberry.

"we'll save a bundle using off the shelf commodity hardware and having some hack put this together in .net rather than hire expensive embedded systems designers and programmers. who cares if it sucks up the savings? once we've made a sale we're golden."