Off the Grid turned 1 today!

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Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

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@alisontisza
Off the Grid turned 1 today!
Last month I used 54kWh less electricity than my average neighbors, but 274kWh more than my most efficient. Approximately 75kWh of my usage went to running appliances. I wonder how the rest of the usage breaks down.
When zombie growls drown out the washer/dryer buzzer, @WhirlpoolCorp #smartappliance notifications save the day. #TiszaSmarthome @Comed
https://twitter.com/viewsocruel/status/443398414907097089
@Nest thermostat is constantly watching. And waiting. And watching @ComEd real times energy prices to help save me money.
https://twitter.com/viewsocruel/status/451090111589928961
ComEd has begun its massive electric grid infrastructure upgrade. Here I am filming a promo clip for why smartmeters are kinda awesome.
My @Nest thermostat gives me quantitative proof that a clean air filter = less work for the furnace = saving money.
https://twitter.com/viewsocruel/status/438791938800484352
.@BelkinWeMo turns anything with a plug into a WiFi enabled device. Energy management on the go + RRTP alerts = win!
https://twitter.com/viewsocruel/status/438105015689818112
Excess wind power = negative real time energy prices. Should've cranked the space heater @ 3am. #TiszaSmarthome
Would
https://twitter.com/viewsocruel/status/425369139583021056
After the horrendous real time energy rates we had just over a week ago, I am relieved to see that the bill ended up being just shy of $25 over what it would have been at a fixed rate.
Oh goodness - my Smart Home promo video debut. Better keep my day job...
OMG OMG what?!? Real time pricing for energy peaked at almost $2 per kWH?!?
That's right. I bought some new age Clappers from Belkin. And it has IFTTT integration!
Thanks to my new backup battery my lights should never go out, but just in case they do or I ever find myself in the dark, dark woods ComEd has provided me with this amazing inflatable, solar charged LED lantern by LuminAID.
City inspector came out today and the backup battery is now online! The fridge notified me of the power blip, possibly for the last time ever.
Didn't get solar panels on the house, so I bought myself a portable one for all my USB charged doodads instead. I leave this shockproof, waterproof gizmo parked on the dashboard of my car. It even comes with a carabiner!
The Yu Solar Charger by A-solar is available at http://www.a-solar.eu/EN/yu_solar_charger.htm.
The good, the battery, and the ugly
The battery installation is well underway. Even though the equipment and support are being provided to me through ComEd’s Smarthome Showcase, I still found myself questioning the benefit. If it is purely a backup battery, is it worth the thousands of dollars in equipment, energy costs to keep the battery charged, and not to mention inevitable emotional toll so that my fridge never skips a beat in the event of a blackout? The battery would keep critical loads afloat for a few hours, but if it can’t sustain me through an apocalypse do I really need or even want it?
I am one of the single digit percentage of households on real time energy pricing which, by the way, is projected to save me between 10% and 20% on my electric bill without any habitual changes (*knock on wood*). Initially I was under the impression that the batteries would allow me to run off the grid when real time prices were high and charge when prices dropped. You know, the sort of outcome that you hope for when dealing with any sort of open market. After a chat with Marc Thrum from Intelligent Generation I learned (amongst many other things), that the mental model that was so firmly implanted in my brain has a name: energy arbitrage. Sounds insidious, doesn’t it?
While the model in isolation makes perfect sense, what I failed to take into account was that batteries have a finite life, which is dictated by the number of charge/discharge cycles. Ah! Now I understand why energy arbitrage would come into play not for the day to day fluctuation of pennies per kWh, but when prices experience a drastic peak! What if it was suddenly $0.30 per kWh? Or $1.00?
The real savings comes from a line item on the real time pricing bill known as “capacity charge.” The more I learned about this the more sinister it sounded. When a household has a fixed kWh rate, the capacity charge is rolled into the price. For those of us being charged real time, this rate is determined by a random audit.
There's a company called PJM and, for all intents and purposes, they control the grid. This company brings together different providers of energy to create a wholesale energy market. When there is a particularly high demand on the grid, power begins to be provided by less efficient and more expensive energy sources. Twice a year random audits are conducted to determine how much energy the consumer is using relative to some - at least to me - ambiguous benchmark. If you happen to be using a lot of energy during the audit which occurs in the midst of, say, a heatwave, then you're penalized for the next six months. Sinister and punitive!
So how does the backup battery help? Well, Intelligent Generation uses whatever vast amount of data they have at their disposal to try to predict when these audits will occur (psssst - I've been told that they always happen in the late afternoon hours) to lessen the load being drawn from the grid. Then, badda bing badda boom, the audit shows a lower level of energy consumption.
Sure, it sounds a little like gaming the system, but how the capacity charge is determined doesn't make much sense to me. It seems that with the fast networks and faster processors at our disposal they would be able to do some sort of real time analysis to determine what the charge is. I've missed the cutoff for the last audit, so I'll have to wait until the Spring 2014 to see if they claims are true and hopefully they will be, especially since Intelligent Generation's entire business model is built around this proposition.