Trying to figure out why your energy bill is so high?

Look no further than this post…answer…drumroll please.

How about your dehumidifier (if you have one)!  Another culprit in my ongoing Kill-a-Watt energy pig scavenger hunt (along with my phantom cable TV box).

Piggy, the Dehumidifier by Whirlpool

Now admittedly, mine is rather old.  I’d give you the model number – but there isn’t one on the unit (no really, there isn’t).  Even the owners manual doesn’t have one.  So this unit is probably circa the late 90’s.  All I can really tell you is that Whirlpool made it. 

But I can tell you how much juice this puppy uses when it’s doing its job on the “low” setting.

750 watts

That’s .75 kilowatts.  I won’t bother to discuss the high setting.  Hopefully I’ve got your attention.  Fortunately, after a few days on low the 1.5 gallon (or so) bucket fills up and the unit shuts off; so we can ratchet back the coal bonfire needed to keep this pig rooting in its trough.  Of course you can set it to perpetually “dehumidify” by attaching a hose to it.  You could also burn a pile of one dollar bills in your basement each night to dry things up a little. 

Not that we actually wanted to send any of our kids to college anyways.

So here’s the cost of owning this pig and feeding it day and night:

8760 hours (per year) x .75 kilowatts = 6,570 kilowatt hours.  Which, for our neck of the woods (Brookline, MA, NSTAR) at a rate of $.163 per kWh (July, 2010) works out to exactly $1,427.88 per year.

Now, to be fair, it doesn’t run 7×24x365, at least mine doesn’t.  There’s “wet season” and “dry season,” which pretty much sorts out to above freezing, or wet(March through November) and below freezing (the months when I don’t care because I’m off skiing and skating).  So figure 2/3’s wet, 1/3 dry.

Phew, we’re down to $942 per year.

Now in fairness again, it probably runs, or has been running, 50% of the time or so during our swampy New England spring summer and fall.  Still, I can think of a lot better things to do with $470 and I’m sure you can too.

Time to bring this little piggy to slaughter.  But the damp basement still remains.  What’s an energy farm owner to do? 

A quick trundle through cyber space tells me that calcium chloride (CaCl) is a non-electric alternative.  Damp rid type commercial formulations feature this compound prominently.   Key challenges include corrosion and a process for drying the moist crystals back out so they can be reused.  Worth it, in my book.  So off I go to find my valuable crystals. 

There’s also the old fashioned practice of increasing fresh air circulation to the basement.  Turns out, pigs like moist, damp spaces for rooting.  So a nice 20 watt fan and an open cellar door a few hours a week on dry days sure helps.  And it’s a lot cheaper.

My pigs cute and I’ve owned it longer than any of my cars.  But it’s gotta go!

My advice to you?  Ditch that dehumidifier.  Put it on the curb, cut the cord and figure out a better way.

Of course we could all heat the planet up to the point where we don’t need dehumidifiers any more. 

Nah, cut the cord!

They nailed it.

The implicit assumption behind advanced metering infrastructures (aka smart meters) and a smart grid is that consumers will change their behavior.  Demand response, critical peak pricing, time of use pricing.  These are all just internal industry catch phrases for getting consumers to change how and when they consume electricity.  Good luck.

Electricity is a commodity.  To the consumer, it’s like water.  You pull the cold faucet, out comes cold water.  You turn on the shower, out comes the hot water.  You flush the toilet…You get the picture.

It’s time to start talking about the empowered energy consumer, to make the implicit assumption explicit.  For any of this grand experiment in energy distribution to work, the consumer must become engaged.  It’s all well and good to put a few solar panels on every 100′th house, but if we want to make a meaningful impact, we must curb our energy thirst, sip electricity in moderation, as opposed to continuously drowning ourselves in electrons and the distractions they bring. 

Yesterday, BG&E filed an ammended smart grid plan, in an effort to hold onto smart grid investment grant monies, eliminating mandatory time of use plans, replacing them with peak consumption rebates (a smart smart grid plan).  This makes good business sense, people want to save money, they don’t want to worry about how they’re spending it.  They are also accelerating the rollout of a consumer energy portal – aka smart grid website.  Very smart.  If the smart grid depends on consumer participation, then maybe it should start with consumers, not drag them along as an afterthought.

The BG&E – Maryland Public Service Commission saga has yet to play out.  But hopefully it provides a wake up call to the industry.  It’s about the consumer, not the grid.  The grid is merely a conduit, it’s what happens at the other side of the plug that matters.

Thirty Day View of Hourly Wind Power Output

If you happen to be a utility forced to implement a renewable portfolio standard for renewable energy, a lot
Imagine having thirty pre-schoolers, each with a different color crayon, with one art teacher saying draw a squiggly line, this will be your wind energy output for your day…

Not only is this bad art, it’s bad energy (from a load balancing perspective that is).

Now don’t get me wrong, I love wind energy, but….

This beauty depicts the hourly output of wind energy coming onto the Ontario power grid – courtesy of Ken Kozlik, Chief Operating Officer of Indpendent Electricity System Operator, as presented at GridWeek, 2009 (conference presentation: Getting Renewables into the Home: Enabling Consumer Choice). It shows the volatile nature of electricity generation from wind. Month by month, day by day, hour by hour, even minute by minute, you can clearly see that wind energy is all over the place. This is a big problem for grid operators trying to balance power supply and energy demand – especially if they rely heavily on so-called “base load” power plants, like coal plants, hydro or nuclear. A very expensive solution is to have a fleet of expensive natural gas peaking power plants – rapid response natural gas fired turbines – standing by to kick-in on a moments notice. Another choice is to keep baseload turbines spinning (so-called “spinning reserve”) without generating electricity. But this is waste.
In reality, most utilities need to do both – in increasing amounts – as they are forced to take on more and more wind in an effort, ironically, to save the environment.
There’s another interesting twist to wind turbines – as wind velocity picks up, they come up the power generation curve relatively quickly, but suddenly cut-out when the wind blows too fast. Cut-off protects rotor motors from burning out, and blades from torsional stress. Check this beauty out, courtesy of Ali Ipakchi and Farrokh Albuyeh in their March, 2009 Grid of the Future article in Power & Energy Magazine (see page 7).  Note how power comes up a nice curve at low wind speeds, then suddenly cuts out. 

Wind Power Comes on Strong, but then Cuts Out in High Wind Conditions

Imagine that you’re the owner of a horse in the Kentucky Derby - it’s sprinting along in first place, you’re on the road to riches, then bonk, the horse just stops running right there, in the middle of the track.  Sounds kind of unlikely huh?  Not with wind.

At this point, a wind energy expert is likely to jump up, raise their hand and say, “wait a minute, that’s why we have sophisticated weather equipment (read anemometers in strategic locations in points a couple miles each direction from a wind farm).  Right, but where does that data go?  To a smart digital grid where load smoothly glides up and down thanks to a lovely power balancing algorithm that takes in data from points asunder?  This digitally enabled intelligent power grid future is just that, a future, that will take a lot of time, money, brilliant technologists and forward-thinking utilities a long time to get to.  More likely, the data will be just one more confusing source of noise for a roomful of grid operators frantically working to balance load and demand signals coming from a cacophony of inconsistent digital and analog devices, substations, commercial customers, distributed energy sources and whatnot. 

Yes, the smart grid will help, but energy storage needs to be part of the picture too. 

My point here is not to shred wind power, wind energy is a good thing.  It doesn’t pollute – at a turbine level.  The problem is that, at a system level, wind is not a panacea, it’s a challenge.  An incredibly complicated challenge – to harness in a way that actually reduces pollution and fossil fuel consumption to a significant degree.

Some would argue that putting up turbines and connecting them into the grid is the cheap part.  The expensive part is going to be integrating those assets seamlessly into an intelligent grid infrastructure that will make maximum advantage of the good clean energy that wind provides.

What it is not.  Parity Point is not about wind or solar or the smart grid.  These are all great topics and worthy of in-depth coverage, but you will find that coverage elsewhere. 

Read on, enjoy, stay and browse, comment and make suggestions.  Thank you for visiting Parity Point.