Market warming for storing energy to be used as heat

Providence-based VCharge Inc. coined the term “transactive load” to describe a concept company founders believe will change the world. It’s the idea that end users of electricity can save money by determining when they buy power, taking advantage of the pre-dawn hours when demand is low and generators are pumping out far more energy than needed. To take advantage of this concept, VCharge is developing smart-grid applications, such as its Smartbricks for electric thermal-storage systems, that could potentially balance supply and demand on the electric grid and pave the way for alternative energy. Jessica Millar is VCharge’s founder and chief security officer.

PBN: What are Smartbricks?
MILLAR: Smartbricks are controls we put on electric thermal-storage heaters so we can talk to them over the Internet. The controls will learn the patterns and behaviors of the space they heat. When we send down the weather forecast, it will estimate how much energy it will need over 24 hours. Then we send it a price forecast and plan for the best hours to buy energy.

PBN: How do electric thermal-storage heaters work?
MILLAR: Electric thermal storage heaters are incredibly simple technology that started getting used in Europe after World War II when the grid was not reliable. It’s a heat tank, either ceramic or water, heated up with simple electric elements and insulated with a thermostatically controlled fan. The bricks come as room units or furnaces and get up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. An appropriately sized system can store a day-and-a-half of heat and be charged to full in four or five hours. So it is big bathtub of heat energy. You can buy the energy at one point in time and use it later in the form of heat.

PBN: And that’s transactive load, right?
MILLAR: Right. So most load, or electricity demand, doesn’t respond to the grid at all. But if you have storage, you can react to changing grid conditions – you can transact in markets and when markets change, the load changes with it. So we have two major values: first, we are able to buy energy at the lowest prices, even lower than regular off-peak, when there is the lowest demand. And second, because we are talking over the Internet, we can provide second-to-second grid balancing. The electric grid needs a balance between supply and demand. Grid operators send signals out every few seconds to generators saying they need more or less power. They run grid-balancing markets and pay very well for them. We are, like the generators, receiving signals from New England grid and the mid-Atlantic grid, saying they have this level of power and we want you to be drawing this – and we follow it by turning machines on and off.

PBN: Earlier this year you were approved as an electric-generator supplier in Pennsylvania. What is VCharge doing down there?
MILLAR: We are offering a Smartbricks upgrade to existing electric thermal-storage heaters in homes. We went there because we heard PPL Corp. was getting rid of a rate that it had in place for decades and people’s heating bills were jumping 60 percent. They had a residential thermal-storage rate in place since the 1980s and the intention at that point was to have a bunch of these heaters on at night soaking up the excess energy from nuclear plants. Then the Pennsylvania energy markets became deregulated and the rate went away.

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PBN: Where does this go beyond residential thermal heaters? MILLAR: There are a lot of different types of load that could be transactive: compressed air in commercial settings, electric cars or electric transportation, ice-based air conditioners, hot-water heaters. Any load that there is some flexibility of use. We think that this is the low-hanging fruit and there is a huge market-potential for this type of load, billions of dollars. Just in electric thermal storage, we would love to see people moving off of oil and move onto electric thermal storage, especially those who don’t have access to natural gas. We think that is a big, attractive market. We can come in with a price that is at or below natural gas.

PBN: Where do you see this technology in 10 or 20 years?
MILLAR: I think this technology is an investment in a diverse energy portfolio. With just a little bit of this transactive load on the grid, you can get a positive feedback cycle going with wind and solar. A lot of analysts now are saying wind can never catch up with natural gas because it will always be saddled with the cost of storage. This is preventative medicine for that ever happening. There are times of the year in the Midwest when you see negative energy prices because there isn’t that much demand and the wind is blowing that hard, so the turbines are turned off and that kills wind projects. This would soak that energy up when demand is low.

PBN: What is next for VCharge?
MILLAR: Right now our focus is on the upgrade market in Pennsylvania. They have a problem and we would like to be the solution. We think once we install in 10,000 homes, the people will say, “this is the killer smart-grid app we have been waiting for.” •

INTERVIEW
Jessica Millar
Position: Founder and chief scientist of VCharge Inc.
Background: A Midwestern math prodigy who took calculus in eighth grade, Millar became interested in energy storage after working on a community wind-power project in Maine. In 2009, she founded VCharge in Providence to commercialize decentralized Smart Grid technology for optimizing energy usage.
Education: Bachelor’s in mathematics from University of Chicago, 1995; Ph.D. in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001
First job: As a graduate assistant at MIT
Residence: Barrington
Age: 38

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