Don’t feel bad if OSIsoft is an unfamiliar name. We’re a 38 year old company, but we often like to remain in the background. What do we do? Think of as an infrastructure for data. We capture, clean and contextualize data from things—SCADA Systems, temperature sensors, pressure sensors, IoT gateways, vibration sensors on railroad cars, you name it—and then we serve it up to people so they can see what’s going on and then act on that data to save energy, eliminate safety hazards, improve the output on existing capital or share it with their supply chains.
Our NASCAR slide.
We’re especially prevalent in utilities. When you go into those control rooms and see those signals on the screen, that’s the PI System in the background. Cal ISO, the grid operator for California, samples over 500,000 signals a second with refreshes coming every few seconds.
Water, food, money. You can store it all.
Note It’s electricity storage. “Energy” storage is easily accomplished with natural gas or liquids. And you’re technically storying energy in a hydro dam. But they are site specific and huge. People are retrofitting far more than they are building new ones.
This is the forecast from Bloomberg, but virtually every analyst firm says the same thing: demand is escalating rapidly. At the same time, prices are dropping. J.B. Straubel of Tesla Motors a decade ago looked at prices and noted that prices dropped in half every ten years because of the complexity of the technology. Since then, larger economies of scale and technological breakthroughs mean that prices are being cut in half every five years or less.
Like solar, there have been tremendously innovative ideas that have fallen flat. Modular compressed air—but for the laws of physics a great idea. Fiberglass batteries—promising until that big fire at the wind farm. So far lithium looks like the winner, but it won’t be alone. Flow batteries, particularly from Primus Power, seems poised to carve out a niche commercially. Also keep your eye on Eos Energy Storage, which uses cheap zinc instead of lithium.
Oh, and those theories that we are near peak lithium? Don’t buy it. Lithium is not even expensive enough to bother recycling yet. There’s a lot of it to go around. The subject of my next deck.
When people think of storage, the first thing they often think about is creating power in the day, using it at night.
Doable, but it’s uneconomical. Power costs far less at night. Makes more sense to use daytime power to curb peaks.
Demand Charges. Can be 30% of a businesses bill.
California moving to TCO. So it will be part of a consumers bill too.
And it’s expensive for utilities. 10% roughly of California’s capacity used for two weeks or less.
A report published by Strategen Consulting found that electricity customers in New York City are currently spending over $268 million annually on sustaining older plants that are only turned on a few hours out of the year.
So power at night. A lot of existing gas will be used at night.
What does this mean. It means storage really isn’t big vat full of electrons. It’s a computer that’s exchanging a commodity at a rapid pace for optimal use.
People disagree on this but I don’t think people will own their own systems. Why? Batteries are a pain. If you put a solar system on your house, the chances that you will have to interact with it, or repair it, are slim. Not so with batteries. Pete Matthews of Australia built his own PowerWall. (hat tip to ABC News for the photo.) It’s a great achievement, but Pete’s system also contains 4480 batteries. It is four times the size of a Tesla PowerWall so figure one of those have 1000 cells.
Does home storage work? Yes. Will it catch fire or malfunction? Probably not. But will it take care and feeding? Yes, and if you’re not big on technology, you aren’t going to want to troubleshoot it. You might have storage at your home, but you won’t want to own it. (Besides, see misconception #1: utilities will get far more economic benefit from it than you, so make them buy it. )
Photo at:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-01/aussie-blokes-diy-tesla-powerwall-made-from-scrap/8863406
This is the most important slide. This comes from the Stefan Bird, CEO of Pacific Power speaking at PowerGen in 2017.
What the chart shows is renewable power exports and imports during a day. In the morning, California taking wind or hydro from Oregon and other western areas. Then in the middle, it’s exporting solar. And then it’s back to importing. Part of that diversification comes from Pacific Power’s membership in the Western Energy Imbalance Market. Under this system, participants import and export energy as needed on a minute-to-minute basis to keep power flow constant. For example, California exports surplus power during the day thanks to its strong solar generation, while importing power at night from windier areas that are still generating.
Bird estimated Pacific Power alone has saved $250 million in three years thanks to the arrangement.
If you had to buy batteries to store that energy it would be prohibitively expensive. But by installing software and creating a marketplace, you’re harvesting and using all of that energy. Lower hardware costs, better performance. And software is good for the storage business. Software will essentially make it possible to install smaller, less expensive storage at utilities or within large commercial buildings. These software-turbocharged storage systems will last longer too. But, while this means individual systems will cost less, it will open the market. It’s the same movie we saw with PCs, cellular and cloud computing.
Some of the leading companies in this area are Greensmith Energy, which makes an operating system for storage, and Pxise, a microgrid software company recently spun out of Sempra Renewables.
This sort of importing and exporting will increase with the western interconnect (NAME?_)
But here’s the part to remember. This is possible because we know have processors and software that allow for accurate demand predictions and fast switching. The more you can switch, the less actual physical storage you need.
So ultimately what this picture says is again is that storage really is a computing asset. But instead of trading messages you’re trading electrons.