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Storing Wind Power In Cold Stores
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to Nature, a European-funded project has been launched to store electricity created from wind in refrigerated warehouses used to store food. As the production of wind energy is variable every day, it cannot easily be accommodated on the electrical grid. So the 'Night Wind' project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses and to release this energy during daytime peak hours. The first tests will be done in the Netherlands this year. And as the cold stores exist already, practically no extra cost should be incurred to store as much as 50,000 megawatt-hours of energy. Here are additional details and a picture illustrating this brilliant idea."
This has nothing to do with storing power, it's simply a transfer of usage from on-peak to off-peak.
Wow.
So the 'Night Wind' project wants to store wind energy produced at night in refrigerated warehouses
So do they release this "Night Wind" with a "Dutch Oven"?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Actually, you don't need anything quite as elaborate as what this article seems to describe. All you need is the ability for power companies to charge rates that vary in realtime based on supply/demand, and to allow customer to elect to use these rates instead of averaged-out ones.
I'm sure a lot of industrial processes work on the principle that they need to generate x quantity of some particular good in a 24 hour period, but the capacity in the plant is such that they can maybe run at less than full output for some of the day, and catch up at other times. The refrigeration in this article is just one example of this sort of thing.
If the rates varied in realtime you could design your industrial process to automatically tailor its power consumpation to the going rate. As a result you can save megabucks on your utility bill, and the utility in turn can save even more bucks on now-unneeded coal-fired plants.
The same would apply in residential situations - people could have their air conditioners fluctuate their setpoint based on the price of electricity within some limit. If during a particular hour of the day power is cheaper than average go ahead and drop the temperature an extra degree or two, and then coast through times of price-spiking. Instead of brining plants online and offline utilities would just vary the price of electricity throughout the day. If the fluctuations in price are large enough homeowners would probably buy solar-based systems or energy-storage systems of some kind (bigger water heaters that don't run during the day, storage tanks to hold cold water for cooling during the day, etc.).
Basically all you need is an electric meter with online access to the power company, and a way for power-consuming devices to find out the current rate. For cheaper devices a simple timer would at least cover general on/off-peak times.
Anything that encourages energy-users to be conscious of the realities of electrical supply/demand fluctuation will only help the environment, the supply of fuel, the general economy, etc. With the current system a kWh is a kWh and consumers have no incentive to shift their usage off-peak.
I want to know how we can harness the power created by the vast vacuum between people that grasp sarcasm and you.
I'm not sure how things are in America right now, but in Australia, they're rolling out a scheme called 'Time of Use'. Meters are automatically read every 30 minutes, or every 15 for large usage sites, and you're charged based upon the time that you use the energy. Currently it's split into 3 blocks.. Peak (business times) shoulder (evenings) and off-peak (nights, weekends) and differing rates are set for each period.
Energy Australia charge 22c/kwh for Peak, 8c/kwh for Shoulder and 4c/kwh for Off-peak.
Not as elaborate as your suggestion, but far more suitable for the average home user. It would probably benefit such 'cold stores' too, because I wouldn't imagine it would make much difference whether they're -20 or -40, so they could cool right down during the night, then use less energy during 'peak' hours. I would guess future developments might see small sites charging batteries during the night to power appliances through the day.