California Utilities to Store Off-Peak Power In Blocks of Ice
It seems like a perennial story in the Golden State: the temperatures go up, air conditioners across the state kick into high gear and power utilities simply can't keep up. Now, a group of Southern California utilities plans to combat the state's searing summers with ice, building a 53-megawatt distributed energy storage project that will lock away off-peak cooling power for use during the sweltering mid-day peak. During those peak consumption hours -- generally from noon to 6 p.m. -- the albatross around the neck of power utilities is air conditioning units, which all tend to kick on more or less at the same time as daytime temperatures rise. To keep these consumption spikes from overpowering the generators and transmission lines, the utilities will deploy Ice Energy's Ice Bear -- winner of a PopSci Best Of What's New award in 2007 -- across a 7,000-square-mile service area, attaching the units to...