I like this idea too. But it just may not turn out to be economic.
Firstly, a lot of high electricity users just do not have the option of turning on and off on a whim. An aluminium smelter or electric arc furnace is going to have problems if it is powered down at the wrong time.
Secondly, most processes are not going to be profitable if they are not running to capacity. Having outlaid a huge amount of capital for an industrial plant you are going to want a pretty serious discount on your electricity costs to offset the loss in production due to periodic shutdowns. For most processes, electricity use is only a fraction of total expenses. For industries where electricity use is really high you run into problem#1.
It looks like for the meantime pumping water uphill where geography allows it is the best option.
Then there is always this hot liquid metal battery concept, but I am not holding my breath (interesting as it is.)
That’s been a common practice for industrial customers with the size to negotiate their own rates, and the flexibility to implement it, for some time.
I know something about that industry. Their main advantage is ultrafast response to fluctuations, making them a good choice for grid stabilization problems. They’re much faster than batteries, and don’t have the same chemical reaction entropy problems, either. For handling longer-term variations, as in day to night, the numbers still point to putting more generation capacity online during the day, though.
Only to themselves at present. Beacon is an owner/operator of two 200MW plants, one in New York and one in Pennsylvania, at present, as well as the designer/manufacturer/integrator. Their initial target market, uninterruptible power supplies for the telcom market, did not appear as expected, driving the company into reorganization from which it has now emerged.
They are not understanding the risk of diminishing returns.
Economics and philosophers call it the “law of diminishing returns”… or “too much of anything is a bad thing”.
The Canada solar opinion piece is just propaganda… I don’t think that he let his opinion driven propaganda get pollute by a single fact.
Not absurd. Most of the existing generating capacity is coal, and coal plants needs some time to start up and shut down. A coal plant can’t practically respond quickly enough to the wind dying down. So if you’re going to build a significant number of windmills, if you want to take advantage of them, you’re going to also need to build something that can respond quickly enough, such as natural gas plants.
That is true of nearly every energy source. Commonweath Edison had jet engines at their nuclear plants as very fast start generators to handle peak requirements.
Yes, to some degree, but demand is more predictable than wind or clouds. You mostly know what the demand curve is going to look like on any given day, and if it takes you two hours to fire up a plant, you can start the process two hours before peak time.
Nuclear plants do have long ramp-up times, but the jet engines associated with nuclear plants are usually emergency power systems intended to deploy in the event of a nuclear shutdown, and not AFAIK for routine operation. Ordinary peak power requirements are usually handled through conventional grid switching technology and peaker plants, as with most other generating systems.
I recognize it’s not the best article ever written on the Ontario power problem; to be honest, I decided at the last minute I needed a link to explain why I’m so interested in the problem, since the Teeming Millions might not be familiar with Ontario; and just picked one of the top few from Google.
However, the rest of the Auditor General’s report illustrates the point I was attempting to illustrate - that Ontario electricity bills have skyrocketed due to the introduction of solar (and other renewable) power.
I don’t know if that would fly. People - in general - hate being directly exposed to commodity prices. There’s always lots of complaints about gasoline prices. I think that, politically speaking, it would be better for the utilities to act as buffers, even if that makes it more expensive for consumers in the long run.
I was sent a link to a US DoE study titled Grid Energy Storage which has a wealth of information:
As an aside, I must tell you Americans (most of you are Americans, I think) how much I admire your institutional expertise and reporting. The quality of the information the US government generates (with things like Congressional hearings and staff reports) and publishes (such as the linked report) are phenomenal, particularly when compared to the garbage we are grudgingly served in Canada. Most of my experience is with financial market reports - from the SEC and from their comment letters - but I see it all the time.
Although many times, when all this top-notch expertise gets put through the Congressional mill and turned into legislation, you don’t seem to get much better results out of it than the rest of us!
Smart meters are being trialled in the UK. It’s not so much about varying the price, as about smoothing demand. If people can be persuaded to run their washing machines and tumble dryers at night, that would have a significant effect. Industry already has the mechanism in place - it remains to be seen whether the ordinary consumer will accept the idea.
As a matter of interest, I used just over 4000 kwh of electricity over the last 12 months. How does that compare with others here?
You wouldn’t need to make it very hard for the user. I’m imagining an electric car that comes with a charger device, which just asks the user what time they need the car to be ready in the morning, and then does all of the commodity and cost-benefit calculations itself and uses power accordingly. People would warm to something like that, if they knew it could save them money.
There are also crude forms of smart metering already implemented in some places (I think I heard Australia) that are somewhat successful: The house wiring includes an extra line, and power on that line is always cheaper than the main line, with the trade-off that the power company can turn that line on and off when they choose. People hook up, for instance, a water heater to that circuit, and let it run when the cheap line is turned on.
It is not a matter of the consumer accepting it. I personally, would be very happy to run my washing machine at night, but it is a condition of my rental agreement that I do NOT do so, the reason being that it would disturb the neighbours’ sleep. Like a large proportion of British people, I live in a terraced house (and, in my particular case, an upstairs flat in one). A large proportion of those who do not live in flats and/or terraces, live in semis. As so often, this “money saving” measure only works for rich people.
Electric cars are a whole nuther problem. Transformers in use today aren’t designed to run 7/24: they use the night-time to cool down. There will be massive infrastructure costs to pay if electric cars ever become popular.
You wouldn’t be taking too many vacations with your electricity savings anyway. An Ontario Energy Board study of the impacts of the billion-dollar smart meter installation programme found that on-peak summer demand fell 3.3% and annual savings per customer due to load shifting came to a whopping $12.00.
Maybe because of the outrageous way that rates were mismanaged. It makes perfect sense in principle to charge less for off-peak power, and that’s the way the wholesale market has always worked. It makes a whole lot less sense to deal with TOU billing by basically just jacking up the peak rates. There are good things and bad things about the Ontario power system. The good is the large amount of it that is clean – nuclear and hydro, and a small but growing wind-power component. The bad is the overall structural and fiscal mismanagement.
I then note that the Ontario report on smart meters states:
So I can then generate approximate numbers. Let’s say we don’t install smart meters at a cost of $1-billion. Let’s say we build a 200MW gas plant (preferably in downtown Oakville) instead, and run it full blast for five hours a day, every day.
Capital Cost = 200 [MW] x 1000 [MW/kw] x 1,000 [$/kW] = 200-million
Fixed O&M = 200 [MW] x 1000 [MW/kw] x 13.17 [/kW-yr] = 3-million per year
Variable O&M = 200 [MW] x 5 [hours/day] x 365 [days/year] x 4 [/MWh] = $1,5-million per year
So basically, we can either spend $1-billion on smart meters (ignoring maintenance) or spend $200-million + $5-million annually on a gas plant and get the same effect. I recognize I’m a bit out of my depth here, so any corrections will be cheerfully accepted.
In other words, while Time of Use billing may make sense in principle, it doesn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense in practice, since it costs so much to collect. It’s like a city taking sidewalks out of the general budget and charging a user fee per step.
Perhaps somewhere there is a thorough (and more authoritative!) cost-benefit analysis for smart meters?
Their main advantage is ultrafast response to fluctuations, making them a good choice for grid stabilization problems. They’re much faster than batteries, and don’t have the same chemical reaction entropy problems, either. For handling longer-term variations, as in day to night, the numbers still point to putting more generation capacity online during the day, though.