intelligentutility 2/15/2010

Demand response without bothering the public

The public just hasn't bought into the global warming driver for remaking the industry, as indicated by a recent PEW Research poll in which they listed global warming as last on their concern list and down from last year. And, they are showing increasing reluctance to let others tell them how much electricity they can use when.

Betting on the public to change their energy habits is a long bet - I'm with this guy. He suggests storage at the edge near the load to enable DR where the customer doesn't even know about it - call it "passive DR."

A new battery-powered system also is under development in the Northwest that has promise because it does not involve customers, but potentially can store intermittent renewable energy down to the transformer level. Called Demand Energy Network, the company already has some prototypes at Avista Utilities and a co-operative served by Bonneville Power. What is different about this system is that it doesn't try to store renewable electricity at the windmill or the large solar farm, but on a distributed network.

"We're in the early stages of putting the company together and we have a couple of prototype systems," said Doug Staker, vice president of product development. "Our goal is peak shaving. A lot of storage systems are doing frequency regulation, they ramp up and down to absorb excess generation. Our key differentiator is that we operate on a distributed network architecture -- the storage is distributed out to the end of the grid.

"Most energy storage discussions revolve around storing electricity near the generation site," he continued. "It seems to us you would locate the storage as close to the load as possible. Storage is a form of passive demand response. You keep the customer immune and they don't see the event. But from the utility side, it looks like demand response. It can be located in neighborhoods, at commercial facilities or at a substation."