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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."
I just put the tissues back in the box.
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?
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.
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
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!
It's worse than that. My former roommate used to work for a company that built high-tech meters that would report use, outages, etc. in near-real-time and, conversely, the spot rates could be reported back to the meter.
Now imagine what happens when big industrial users start up and shut down based on spot pricing. Demand increases -> rates increase -> plants shut down -> demand drops -> rates drop -> plants start up.... Rinse, lather, repeat.
Each customer will have different profiles of price sensitivity, startup/shutdown delays, costs of production pauses and such. It's impossible to quick start/stop a refinery or chemical plant, hard to switch your manufacturing plant on and off, but if your building air conditioning uses an ice storage system (make ice when rates are cheap, melt it when costs are high) then you can flip on and off pretty much at will.
Managing the effect on the grid turns out to be a difficult problem.
But at $10,000/home, this thing isn't going into mass usage.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
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!
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
The more energy you're pushing through the transmission lines at once, the higher the line-losses, so that works in your favor.
Electricity would be cheaper if plants could be kept running at a constant level all day and night. When you have to build a couple power-plants that only need to be operated during peak demand, that's wastes a lot of money.
It's entirely possible that this is something which will only work in a distributed fashion, and can't be centralized very well. Again, line-losses may be a factor.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
No, actually it would ELIMINATE peak-usage time, making it average-out over the whole day.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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?
They do -- but batteries don't scale well into the megawatts or gigawatts, so they have to do things like fill water-reservoirs high in the mountains during the night and drain the water through a turbine-generator during the peak time. There are lots of other ways to do this, but none of them are trivial.
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.
The long term problems with this type of system should be obvious to everyone. The power companies have a different rate schedule for a reason. Their prices are based off of demand. If enough people start using this system, then the peak times will alter and therefore the prices will become essentially a flat-fee.
Down here in the oven(New Orleans) our power bills skyrocket during the summer because of added cooling costs from the AC and fridge. As a consequence, the price of power is actually lowered to allow people to survive. There are even laws in place that prevent the power company from cutting off power due to unpaid bills because people can die without AC(it's a sad world we live in that people depend on this so heavily). During the winter months our power costs more because of lowered usage. This past winter, our rates actually were lowered a bit because it was such a hot winter. I know this seems counter-intuitive but it is in fact the case. Supposing that the end user had the capability to store very substantial amounts of power during the summer, when rates are lower and therefore used less power during the winter(a very hypothetical case), then the prices during the winter would increase because of the lowered usage. So this system seems highly worthless to me.
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?
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.
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.