When Dynamic Pricing Meets Energy Storage
Will Gathright was living in New York, where he had earned a Ph.D. from Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute, when he got fired up with the idea to use storage batteries to help business customers cut their electric bills. The idea was to buy electricity when it is cheap to charge the batteries, then draw down the batteries during periods of peak demand to offset consumption when electricity is expensive. For the business model to work, he needed to find a location where there was a wide differential in the cost of electricity.
Initially, he figured he might wind up in Hawaii, California or New York, states that are putting a high priority on energy storage. But after conducting a national search to see where his value proposition would fare best, Gathright moved to Northern Virginia.
“Virginia has the winning combination of three factors not present elsewhere in the country,” he explains. First, although Virginia’s peak-demand rates aren’t the highest in the country, they are relatively high. Second, while a few states have cheaper base rates, Virginia’s are significantly lower than the national average. The spread between low base rates and high demand charges creates a bigger potential for savings.
A third factor, Gathright says, is that Virginia electric utilities belong to PJM Interconnection, which manages the electric grid and wholesale markets for 60 million people in the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic region. When his batteries aren’t helping shave a building’s peak demand charge, they can help PJM fine-tune short-term fluctuations in the supply and demand of electricity.
Welcome to the new world of electric load management. Power companies around the country are experimenting with novel rate structures that encourage customers to curtail their electricity consumption during periods of peak demand — typically summer afternoons when air conditioners are running flat-out. One of the most promising strategies for shifting electricity demand is energy storage, usually using batteries, and other states are targeting the sector as a strategic priority. California is requiring its utilities to purchase 1,325 megawatts of energy storage by 2020 and the state of New York state has invested $1.4 million in six battery and energy storage start-ups.
Gathright thinks Virginia may be the most promising location in the country to implement energy storage — not that the idea has gotten much attention here. What Virginia has done is experiment with dynamic pricing: using the price mechanism to encourage customers to shift electric consumption away from periods of peak demand when it is most costly to supply.
The results of Dominion Virginia Power’s dynamic pricing pilot program have been modest so far — positive enough to encourage Dominion to continue the project but not dramatic enough to persuade the company that a revolution in electric consumption is in the offing. But the outlook could change if entrepreneurs like Gathright figure out how to help customers capture the savings that the dynamic-pricing rate structures make possible.
With the encouragement of the State Corporation Commission, Dominion rolled out its dynamic pricing program in 2011, branding it as the Smart Pricing Plan. “The basic premise,” explains SCC spokesman Ken Schrad, “is that if customers are willing to modify behavior and use less electricity during high price periods, they will have the opportunity to save money, and the company in turn will be able to reduce the amount of energy it would otherwise have to generate or purchase during peak periods.”
