According to the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, the electricity industry uses much of its generation and transmission capacity only a small fraction of the time. Over the calendar year 2006, 15% of the generation capacity in the Pennsylvania - New Jersey - Maryland (PJM) territory ran only 1.1% or fewer hours, and 20% of capacity ran only 2.3% or fewer hours. [1]
1. The result is tens of billions of dollars invested in generation, but high generation cost and life cycle social cost.1 The report further states that shifting of as little as 3% of peak electricity load from peak to off-peak hours can result in a reduction of peak load costs by 30% and overall savings approaching $2 billion per year at today’s prices.
A solution is to shift peak demand through distributed energy storage systems (DESS) to level energy use and decrease costs for the utilities and the end consumer.
- Storage devices located at structures that use electricity
- Does not require consumer behavior changes
- Charge storage devices during off peak and discharge during peak
- Centrally monitored and managed
- Reduces need for some additional generation plants
- Reduces greenhouse gas emissions through more efficient use of existing generation
- Reduces need to shed transmission load during off-peak
