Occupy Your Side of the Meter
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Occupy Your Side of the Meter By Heart Akerson, CEO, Heart Transverter We continually hear about global warming, peak oil and environmental concerns while we watch our power bills continue to increase and it can feel that it is all happening out of our control. Many people want to do something, now, to take control of their own energy profile and their own energy future as well as do their part to create a sustainable future for everyone. Getting involved with grid interaction, permits, regulations and everything else makes it complicated and confusing and many people are putting off acting. The grid was created to supply power and has really only been able to absorb solar power effectively as long as the solar power was insignificant. However, grid tied solar has caught on significantly and with it has come stability and profitability issues for the grid companies. Now, in many areas, it is a lengthy and expensive process to get the permits to connect grid tied solar and, in some areas, there are additional monthly charges to connect solar. It is really time to rethink the home energy system and the Transverter solution gives you new tools that create new possibilities. The issue with the grid company comes from you pushing power back through their meter so the idea is to create a system that gives the home maximum benefits without involving the grid company and any of its permissions, standards or policies. The idea is to occupy your side of the power meter in the privacy and freedom of your own home. What would a system like this look like? Here is an example. We take the typical American home, which has an average load of 1.7 kW, and provide it with 8 solar panels, 6 batteries and 4 kW of Transverter UPS power modules. This will provide 1/3 of the home’s total energy automatically and provide continuous power to the critical loads like the refrigerator, lights, fans and electronics, even in the event of a sustained grid blackout. The large non-critical loads are monitored and controlled by the Transverter T13X demand response module. This system can be configured so that it never pushes power back through the power meter and into the grid so it needs no permitting at all. In fact, the grid doesn’t even have to know about it. Rather than have a few houses do large expensive hard to control systems it is far more effective, from a community standpoint, to do large numbers of houses with moderate systems like this. These eliminate the stability issues that the grid is complaining about. This entire system can be installed for under $13,000. One way to think of it is building a system, piece by piece. You start with a UPS battery backup system. No one expects you to contact the grid when you install a UPS system. Then, use a Transverter UPS system that allows you to connect solar panels directly to the UPS system so that, in the day, the solar is providing energy directly to your UPS critical loads. Now, the Transverter power module could receive enough solar sometimes so that it exceeded the critical loads and could feed this into the grid for all of the other, non-critical, loads in the house. However, if all of the loads ever dropped low enough and there was enough solar available then the possibility would exist to put power back into the grid which is exactly what we do not want to do here because then we would have to comply with their permissions and standards. The Transverter T13X ties in with the whole system and monitors the entire grid service and also monitors and controls six circuits which are usually large non-critical loads (like air- conditioning). So when the T13X sees that the power coming in from the grid is getting close to zero then it communicates with the Transverter power module so that it cuts back on the solar being inserted into the house system so that no power actually ever goes back into the grid. This can all happen very quickly (within one 60 Hz wave shape) so the grid never feels violated. In addition, some of the circuits on the T13X can be set up so they only turn on when there is excess solar so you never have wasted solar capability. Some of the circuits on the T13X can also be connected to legacy solar systems (grid tied solar inverters or even micro inverters) and disconnect these when there is a chance of pushing solar back into the grid. The main difference is that the legacy solar circuits are on and off where the Transverter power module can control the solar continuously. The secret to making this a reality is that your quickly fluctuating loads and intermittent solar can be compensated with the batteries so that what the house (and grid) sees is a smooth system. These load fluctuations are in a fast time scale so the actual energy, taken out of or put back into your batteries, is small. However, the daily solar cycle and daily load cycle involve larger amounts of energy. This is a graph of one day with the blue line for the loads, with all of the quick fluctuations averaged out. The red line is the output of the solar and the green line represents the difference between the solar and the loads. The green line is what the grid sees. This blue line load profile is the average for the US with an average load of 1.7 kW. As long as the red solar line never exceeds the blue load line then you will always be able to use all of the available solar power with never pushing anything back through the meter. If you increase the solar to where it was substantially larger than the blue load line in the middle of the day you could still accommodate it but you would need to store energy into your batteries on a daily basis. If this daily charge/discharge was over 20% of the battery capacity then you would want to go to Li-ion batteries which drives the installed cost up but gives longer life and greater battery round trip efficiency. Eventually, this will be integrated into electric vehicle batteries. You can see, on this graph that you could increase the solar to about 2.5 kW without using the batteries for storage and this would be 45% of the total energy. However, if you altered your life style (this can be automated with the T13X) so that the load line matched the solar line then you would only need the batteries for the fast load and solar fluctuations and for backup power in a grid failure and could provide almost 100% of the energy from solar. A school already has a load profile that almost matches the solar output. This makes for an interesting situation where you can balance your energy needs and energy impact to the community and environment with altering your life style. You can even use the T13X to automatically reduce running time and energy consumption of your large non-critical loads and dial in how much energy you want to consume. This system is set up to automatically upgrade itself so it never becomes obsolete. The Transverter power modules already have all the listings and approvals needed to qualify for grid tie net metering or feed in tariffs if you decided to implement that later and it would just be a simple configuration change to activate that. In fact, the automatic upgrades would automatically adapt to changes in rules and regulations for participating with the grid tie programs. The idea here is that there is no reason to wait at all to act. The time to take control of your own energy profile and your own energy future as well as do your part to create a sustainable future for everyone is right now. Now, everyone can take control of their own energy future by controlling everything on their side of the meter, in the privacy and freedom of their own home. Occupy your side of the meter today! When faced with huge ideas like global warming it is easy to think the impact of one family’s actions is insignificant and why bother doing anything. Think again. Energy Security. When there are storms, earthquakes, tsunamis. wars or anything else that disrupts the grid it creates energy emergencies and the government spends enormous amounts of money and resources dealing with that. With these small systems the critical loads can be maintained indefinitely so there are no energy emergencies, only energy inconveniences and the government spends nothing on energy inconveniences. Self sustaining energy systems, like this, make sense for mission critical situations, like your own home. Expanded versions of this fit perfectly in schools and clinics and they become self power emergency centers in extended blackouts. Peaker Plants and Fracking. When simple grid tied solar is fed into the grid it creates an intermittent energy source. As clouds flow over it can turn off the solar for an entire community in unison, very quickly, and when the cloud blows away it can all turn back on in unison. The normal grid cannot adjust itself that quickly so they generally deal with this by adding more spinning reserves which is more generators actually already up and running (spinning). These are called peaker plants and a typical peaker plant is 50 MW and cost $75 million to install.