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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.
It's not Shipstone, is it?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
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.
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
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!
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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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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.
(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.
No Sigs!