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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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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I did the same thing for an automated welder in the 80's. You would enter the weld type code on a keypad and it displayed various status on an LCD, adjusted the feed rate for autofed welding rod and flow-rate of the gasses, had a temp sensor and even auto-ignited.
68HC05 @ ~2MHz (IIRC), no o/s or kernel, about 50 k of ram.
The OP's sentiment is right.
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.
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.
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.
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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.)
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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.
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Someone's covered that. From Wikipedia's Flywheel energy storage article:
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?
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.
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.
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(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.
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