The $100,000 Battery That Could Help Hotels Save Bundles of Money

So it seems that our government has succeeded in shifting consumer energy usage to off-peak hours, and has now decided to penalize those people by charging them more by closing the gap between peak and off-peak hours.

I think it's pretty outrageous and goes to show that peak demand charges are just a gouging technique and a scam.

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/10/19/cancellation-of-onta...

/source: I work in the Industry.

Also, I'm not sure natural gas is all that cheap from a power generation perspective. Combining page one of this: http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/monthly/pdf/table_03.pdf and page 25 of this: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34746.pdf suggest that natural gas is still 2x more expensive than coal per BTU.

Power companies just pass through market rates, they are mostly ambivalent to driving down rates as they just tax tolls on each transaction.

In the meantime, nimbler companies can make a lot of money filling a market need while taking a little more risk.

Looking at what I think is the right PG&E tariff for them [1], I can't quite figure out what it means. However, I found a helpful guide [2] that includes an actual hotel electrical bill.

Reading that, their summer difference is $0.07/kWh, so the box only could save them $3.50 a day on cheaper energy. There they are paying $13/kW for peak capacity, $8.58 for off-peak, and $2.99 for "partial peak", whatever that is.

So it sounds like being able to level peaks in your power consumption could be a big win. Even if you level it within peak, therefore saving nothing on a kWh basis, a little curve smoothing could pay big dividends.

The interesting question for me is how much this is incentive gaming versus solving a real problem for generators.

[1] http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_A-10.pdf [2] https://sites.google.com/site/greenwrenco/san-francisco-bay-...

What they're doing is to smooth out the spikes in the day to day energy usage. Their software will learn the usage pattern over time, and try to predict when spikes will occur. The battery will then discharge during spikes to prevent triggering additional peak demand charges.

Perhaps the operative bit is "California state incentives cover about 60 percent of that price."

I wonder whether it would be environmentally sustainable if every home or business in the world started using batteries for power storage and electric vehicles. For example, how much environmental damage would be incurred from mining lithium on a massive scale? Are there even enough known lithium deposits in the world to make this practical on a large scale?

* Greater energy density, which means you need to carve less space out of your existing floor plan to make room for batteries.

* About twice the cycle life, so batteries need replacement less often.

* Can discharge more deeply without harming cycle life, so for applications where discharging happens frequently that means either the effective energy density or the effective cycle life is even greater.

* Better efficiency for <24h charge-discharge cycles.

These are all things that are more advantageous in this kind of application, where you can expect to see a lot of repeated cycling during hot summer months. For a telco application, where you're presumably only expecting infrequent use during occasional power outages, they'd be of negligible value.

Keep on reading to figures 5 and 6, where they look in more detail at cycle life, and the lead acid batteries start to look like a straight-up bad choice for this kind of application.

I did my own solar installation for about $1000, and it's enough for me to live lightly on (no AC, no microwave, no electric heater, but laptop and phone and hotspot stay charged, and fans can run indefinitely). Fridge runs on propane, when I'm off-the-grid. I'd need to quadruple that to turn on the AC or electric heat for any length of time, and would need a lot more batteries (I have three group 27 deep cycle batteries and a 3000 watt inverter).

Anyway, I got sidetracked a bit. We're currently at the point where a DIY installation can pay for itself in under 9 years. Maybe even as little as 7. Professionally installed systems, with subsidies, are probably around the 10 year repayment mark. And, the panels get cheaper every time I look into it. The batteries stay pricey, though.

https://www.google.com/search?q=utility+death+spiral

Building a power plant is a multi-decade bet. The people who put up the money for that expected a certain rate of return. That gives them an incentive to cry, cry, cry at anything that would reduce their expected rate of return.

I think they'd be happy to build a lot of industrial-scale solar plants, but not before they've paid off and worn out their existing plants. It'd be sort of like the government mandating that everybody buy a hybrid. If it's just that all new cars are hybrids, people will deal with it. But if everybody has to go out and pay to replace a perfectly fine existing car, people will be pissed.