Friday, May 24, 2013

Answering Variability with Vanilla

Imagine if you had a single 200 watt solar panel on your roof and your minimum usage was 200 watts. In this arbitrary circumstance your minimum usage is driven by the standby requirements of all your gadgets - VCRs, record players and such. This 200 watt solar panel would never backfeed any power to the grid because your production would never exceed your minimum usage by default.

Imagine if you had two panels on your roof. In this situation you'll backfeed sometimes because your minimum usage is only 200 watts and sometimes your two panels will be producing more than 200 watts. Now what if you had a fancy refrigerator that knew when your panels were producing more than 200 watts and what if this fancy pants refrigerator had a logic circuit that told it to run when there was excess power available from the solar panels. What if your two panels only produced more than 200 Watts for 100 hours a year and what if your refrigerator could run in all of those hours? If that was the case you'd never backfeed because your usage would always be above your production. FNA... check...

Imagine 5 panels producing 1000 watts. You'll back feed right? Well... What if your refrigerator, dish washer, clothes dryer and water heater all knew when your panels were producing. Imagine these appliances powering up when power was available.

Imagine X panels producing Y watts. Imagine a collection of appliances starting and stopping to consume the Y watts.

What people don't get is that this thought problem is important. If solar households and businesses start coordinating power production and power use the whole way we run the grid changes. The fascinating thing here is that consumers who manage consumption actually make managing the grid easier. Variability of supply is cancelled by flexible variability of demand. It's just that easy. It really is.

Few see this. Energy geeks want Rocky Road solutions but the solution is plain Vanilla. Vanilla is plenty good. Get used to it Geeks.

Hi... I'm gay... Looking for a pirate to jump on this caboose.

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