My guess is that we’ll see a lot of TOU billing. Overall TOU billing should save us a lot on our power bills. By pushing some demand off peak hours we won’t have to purchase as much very expensive peaking power.

Just getting a lot more demand to late night wind would be a great benefit. It would make wind more profitable for wind farms and cause more to be built. That would mean additional cheap wind during peak hours.

Can you back up your statement?

solar panels bristol

Jay Whitacre from CMU/Aquion has his own TED talk about the development of their battery.

Their battery is 100% recyclable, can be 100% discharged with no damage, operates at room temperature and does not suffer form high heat conditions.

Aquion is currently setting up a factory in Pennsylvania and expects to be shipping in 2013. They are projecting a $300/kW price.

If they can hit $300/kW and 20k cycles then the cost of storing electricity drops to about $0.015/kWh – an extremely affordable price.

Stuff is happening….

If you check the most recent ERCOT wholesale prices you’ll see that the cost of electricity sometimes drops below zero and sometimes soars to far more than $0.40/kWh. This afternoon at 4pm the price rose to around $1.50/kWh for one 15 minute block.

Create an well priced, long lasting battery and the old pricing systems will go away.

*If prices hit $300/kW, then 5,000 100% DoD cycles means electricity can be stored for $0.06/kWh. 10,000 cycles lets electricity be stored for $0.03/kWh.*

If wind can profitably produce for $0.06/kWh and if solar drops that low then we can have clean 24/365 power for a dime or less. Prices might drop a bit lower for power used when supply is higher and rise a bit when it’s coming from storage, but it should be nothing like the huge price difference of today.

So a wind farm owner looks and says well I’ll make 30 to 40 cent more a kWh by selling during peak instead of at night. Lets say $0.33, so in one year that is about $120 per kWh “moved”.

So the market for fix location batteries (this, flow batteries, etc) is both producers and users. The cost estimate above is $300-500 per kWh, and as storage moves into mass production those will drop.

I guess the long term draw back is that the peak/non-peak spread will drop. So will be harder to make money on the spread. And all that night time wind power will be useable during the day, so “base line” coal becomes much less useful. Oh well I’ll get over the not having coal to kick around.