Cloudbased Powerstorage

Photo by Kevin Hutchinson cc2.0

In order to facilitate the true exchange of power, it needs to become available at the time and place of demand. When a user generates power locally, part of it will be used immediately at their location, but if the user wants to share some of the excess power, it currently must be shared immediately as well.

Because of the way the grid is historically set up, there is plenty of demand, so feed in of extra power is generally welcome and immediately redistributed locally so that less power needs to be provided from the utility’s central locations. That’s fine as long as there is sufficient demand locally and as long as feed in tariffs exist to compensate the end user for generating additional power.

But suppose you want to manage local supply and demand in a more granular fashion, so that you can actually match separate individual local suppliers with different potential purchasers. Then it obviously becomes important to switch between these connections. If power is fed in to the system and used immediately it wouldn’t be possible to match suppliers with purchasers other than in the most rudimentary way.

This problem can be solved relatively easily by adding a large powerbuffer as a marketplace for supply and demand. Suppliers provide kWh to the storage which is administrated thru their account, and they can then decide the terms under which their account will be deducted. Clearly, at what point their particular power is actually stored or used is irrelevant, but the storage facilities allow the payloads to be matched, technically as well as financially.

Obviously, by separating technicalities from financials, it also becomes location independent. However, the final goal of the entire grid construction with power exchange hubs should eventually be a more efficient match between supply and demand. This is one of the advantages to be gained from the smart grid, as opposed to our current setup where supply is predetermined to at least cover demand reliably with excess unused power as a result.