Store Your Own Juice 415
sfeinstein writes "Power companies using dynamic pricing models to charge more for electricity during hours of peak usage is nothing new. Now, however, one company has decided to take advantage of this by using technology to buy (and store) capacity when rates are low and use that capacity when rates are at their highest." From the article: "The device, called GridPoint Protect, is the size of a small file cabinet and connects to the circuitbreaker panel. (The company also offers a lower-capacity version designed for homes, which costs $10,000.) A built-in computer powered by a Pentium chip will make intelligent purchase decisions, buying when prices are low, then storing the electricity for later use. That will make it possible to run your company during the workday with cheaper electricity that you purchased at 3 A.M."
Storing juice? (Score:3, Funny)
Personally, I use Mason jars.
But that's just me.
Re:Storing juice? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Storing juice? (Score:2, Funny)
But that's just me.
Bumper Sticker seen around Santa Cruz:
Re:Storing juice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Joking aside, I think this is a great idea, especially for areas subject to brownouts or rolling blackouts. Some areas of the south have power issues during summer months due to high energy demands from thousands of businesses and homes running AC on top of their normal consumption. By storying electricity during non-peak times, this smooths the load difference between peak and non-peak hours, which reduces peak load on the energy grid.
Besides the cost, I see this being a huge benefit to reducing power load on the grid. I suppose the real question is, why don't power companies do this further up the pipe, at the generating stations?
Re:Storing juice? (Score:2)
Re:Storing juice? (Score:2)
Re:Storing juice? (Score:3, Insightful)
fixed.
Re:Storing juice? (Score:4, Interesting)
They do -- but batteries don't scale well into the megawatts or gigawatts, so they have to do things like fill water-reservoirs high in the mountains during the night and drain the water through a turbine-generator during the peak time. There are lots of other ways to do this, but none of them are trivial.
Must not scale well. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure exactly myself, but it's not so wildly out-of-the-box an idea that nobody can have thought of it before. I assume there's something wrong with the economics of doing it at the generating station. Maybe it has to do with going down from typical generation voltages to something that can be stored and then back up again? (That would be the problem using batteries...) Other large-scale forms of energy storage, things that could store real MWh's, might be impractical.
Actually, when you think about how hydroelectric power plants work, they do this already: they build water up behind the dam when demand is low, then open the gates further and produce more energy when demand is high. I know it's not the kind of "storage" we're talking about here, but most power plants have some form of output regulation; it seems like the power companies are probably trying to match demand as closely as they can, from their "top down" perspective, but can only get so close.
By putting small storage devices out at the edge, close to the points of consumption and where voltages are low, you might get a lot more effect than taking the same amount of storage and putting it all upstream.
Re:Must not scale well. (Score:3, Insightful)
They do, but for many types of large scale power generation, output regulation happens at the scale of days, not hours, so absent a technology similar to this, a power company has to generate enough power round the clock to meet the h
Re:Must not scale well. (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree with the rest of your post, but this statement, set me thinking. Not that I disagree with it out of hand, but if certain types of utilities (say nuclear) had to maintain a certain output all day, the output equalling the peak demand, shouldn't offline hour electricity be higher, since that excess electricity isn't sold, but wasted (I'm assuming).
Anyway, the statement also encapsulates
Especially nukes (Score:5, Informative)
A while back I remembered seeing proposals for storing excess electricity during off-peak hours in huge supercooled superconducting storage rings, but I haven't heard any more about it in years, and don't even know how such a scheme would work.
Re:Especially nukes (Score:5, Informative)
It's possible to bring up a gas turbine in seconds if you're prepared for it; you leave the turbine spinning but with no actual load.
There's also a special type of hydroelectric plant called a pumped storage power station. What you do is to connect two lakes at different levels via a set of turbines. When you have excess power on the grid, you pump water uphill; when you need power, you let it run downhill. They don't have a great deal of capacity, but you can bring them online from cold in only a slightly longer time than a hot gas turbine. The one I've visited, the Ben Cruachan power station [wikipedia.org], can generate 440MW for 22 hours and can come online in two minutes.
A while back I remembered seeing proposals for storing excess electricity during off-peak hours in huge supercooled superconducting storage rings, but I haven't heard any more about it in years, and don't even know how such a scheme would work.
The problem with superconducting storage rings is that if anything goes wrong all the energy gets liberated as heat... very, very suddenly. If you had a storage ring the size of the pumped storage station described above, you'd end up dissapating 6x10^11 joules of energy... about the equivalent of 150 kilotonnes. Yum!
Re:Storing juice? (Score:5, Informative)
Down here in the oven(New Orleans) our power bills skyrocket during the summer because of added cooling costs from the AC and fridge. As a consequence, the price of power is actually lowered to allow people to survive. There are even laws in place that prevent the power company from cutting off power due to unpaid bills because people can die without AC(it's a sad world we live in that people depend on this so heavily). During the winter months our power costs more because of lowered usage. This past winter, our rates actually were lowered a bit because it was such a hot winter. I know this seems counter-intuitive but it is in fact the case. Supposing that the end user had the capability to store very substantial amounts of power during the summer, when rates are lower and therefore used less power during the winter(a very hypothetical case), then the prices during the winter would increase because of the lowered usage. So this system seems highly worthless to me.
Re:Storing juice? (Score:5, Insightful)
In various ways, this is already done. But as another poster pointed out, doing it upstream requires that the distribution grid also be upsized to handle the peak loads, whereas doing it in a more distributed fashion also time-spreads the load on the grid.
With intel inside (Score:2, Funny)
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Re:With intel inside (Score:4, Insightful)
Just think about this thing for a moment... $10K for a home unit. How much power are you using to make that worthwile? Electric at that, not your gas bill for heat and hot water. My electric is about $20 a month and that includes running a fridge, computer (an hour or two a day, plus a few hours a day on weekends) and occasionally cooking up some sort of dinner (since I eat cereal for breakfast and eat lunch away from home on weekdays.)
I'm sure a family can make the meter spin, but still, that beast is going to take some serious effort to offset, particularly with it's own built in inefficiencies.
Smells like snake oil, by YMMV.
Re:With intel inside (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming it cuts my electric bill to nothing, the $10000 home model will pay for itself in...just under 25 years.
No thanks.
Re:With intel inside (Score:2, Interesting)
End result - a more fragile power net for everyone.
This post brought to you by the law of unintended consequences - just like almost everything else in life.
Re:With intel inside (Score:2, Insightful)
If EVERYONE went onto this, then the peak period would simply shift into the middle of the night and the pricing plans would change accordingly.
If half the people used it then the peak would not be as peaked and the energy companies could relax a little.
What I do see as a bigger problem however is running your entire daily usage down the wires in a couple of hours.
Electric fires could occur in none optimal dwellings.
Re:With intel inside (Score:2)
Re:With intel inside (Score:4, Informative)
I went to their web site, and your $10,000 doesn't include batteries.
All you get is a rectifier and switch, that will, if you connect enough betteries to it, give you 1 kw for 10 hours. So you can only expect to run a couple of computers off this. Nothing else. For less than $2,000 you can get a 5000 watt inverter that will put out 230 volts. Connect that to the same set of batteries. Plug your computers into it. Charge it up at night. Run your boxes off it during the day. You've now saved $8,000 + the cost of an installation into your mains box, and its a lot easier to maintain.
Re:With intel inside (Score:2)
Re:With intel inside (Score:2, Interesting)
Ah, how I remember the rolling blackouts. Our plant diesel generator would kick in shortly after we got a phone call telling us it was us on the next blackout.
Yes, I do live in California and I was working in San Jose when it was happening. You could tell the president of the US didn't give a rat's ass abo
Re:With intel inside (Score:5, Insightful)
But don't let that stop you from slinging the term "snake oil" around....
Re:With intel inside (Score:2)
Re:With intel inside (Score:2)
Company name? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Company name? (Score:2)
Here's a link [wikipedia.org]
That'd be cool :D
-WS
Savings? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Savings? (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the article is so lacking in details, based on the footprint, I would assume they have a 10kW inverter and 16-22 hours of battery run-time. This isn't bad, and I can imagine coming close to getting a payback with it, although once you replace the batteries you start the payback cycle all over again.
Also, variable pricing offers a discount at periods of low demand not becuase of the idea of supply and demand, but because the most efficient generation capacity likes nice, level loads. If the utility's demand profile was perfectly flat, they wouldn't need any of the oil-fired peaking plants which are cheap to build, but expensive to operate. There "should" be a net savings to the consumer if load profiles are flattened.
The other potential cost savings is in reducing peak demand charges. If the system can share load with the utility, it would be possible to constrain your peak demand. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like it is designed that way. Since peak demand charges are in effect for a year, being able to drop 5-10% for the peak period can translate to real savings. (Most of this is done demand-side today-- letting the Air Con setpoints drift higher, dropping lighting levels, etc.)
I would guess that most businesses would be better off putting PV panels on the roof with a net-metering agreement so they don't have the hassles of batteries. You could combine the two...
Re:Savings? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't see how you can squeeze 576 megajoules (16*3600*10000) into something the size of a filing cabinet using lead-acid batteries. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], the batteries alone would weigh 5333kg.
One other critical thing is that for every joule you pump into a lead-acid battery, you can only get about 0.7 joules out. In addition, rectifiers/inverters for that power range are usually only about 90% effic
Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
It still might not make as much sense everywhere...yet. We don't yet have power billed (residentially) by time, it is still a flat rate per/kWh. That isn't going to last and I well know it. There may well come a time where this typ eof device would help defay your bill enough to make a difference over say 3-5 years.
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
Details? I'd be really curious to know the per kw/hr rate for this area, and if it that is just a peak or a constant rate.
It seems to me that you'd need a pretty large house to consistently consume that much energy.
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
I have a 3BR apartment with electric heating. The previous occupants left it turned up relatively high (~70 Fahrenheit). The first bill I got was about $200. I can see it being much higher for a freestanding house with more space, washer/dryer, etc.
This is in Seattle, just north of downtown.
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:5, Insightful)
Any household with a monthly 2.5k$ electricity bill is probably making at least ten times this amount by selling the weed grown in the basement, so there's no need to lower the electricity bill.
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to their home page and downloaded the pdf.
Here's the deal - BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED!!!
The ten grand buys you a switch. That's it. A switch controlled by a computer, and an inverter. You still need to buy batteries (that will give you a grand total of 1 kw for 10 hours, so forget about running more than a couple of computers off this).
They're trying to sell you on buying a bunch of solar cells (NOTE - NOT INCLUDED IN THE PRICE EITHER) that you connect to the switch, and depending on their output, you either suck off the sun or the power grid.
Their big marketing scam - TAX CREDIT of $500 - $2500 for Solar Power Systems.
In other words, you can do this yourself with off-the-shelf parts - buy one of these http://www.apcc.com/resource/include/techspec_inde x.cfm?base_sku=SU5000UXINET&tab=features&ISOCountr yCode=us [apcc.com]for under 2 grand, and with the other 8 grand, buy a sh*tload of batteries for it, and you're ahead of the game cost-wise. Heck, buy two, phase-lock them, and you can run your washer and electric dryer at the same time - something you can't do with their $10,000 system (which is really a lot more after you add the batteries).
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
Ahh, yes - highly intelligent. You do know, that the reason electicity is cheaper at 3 AM is that hardly anyone is buying it, right? Guess what happens if LOTS of people start buying electricity at 3 AM? It'll get more expensive.
If you're the right type of customers, you can (well, with some providers at least) get hour by hour quotes on prices as they change. That's (well, one would think) what an intelligent buying scheme would us
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
People in the UK have been getting a large discount for buying electricity at night for at least 3 decades -- it does not seem to have stopped the system from working.
There are a number of major ways to use off-peak electricity without high tech gizmos:
1. Storage heaters: heat
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:3, Informative)
About the chip, you can use cheap p2 chips that take 10 watts. It's actually not completely stupid. Maybe have the controller monitor prices to take advantage of on-the-fly pricing. The plant I work at pays continually variable pricing. Intel even has info [intel.com] for embedded systems.
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
5-15 years to pay off? (Score:2)
If the batteries [directron.com] were:
They say that they use:
But backup batteries are rarely cycled. These s
Re:5-15 years to pay off? (Score:2)
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
Move water uphill via a screwgear to a resivoir at night, when electricity's cheap. During the day, let the water run downhill, powering a generator.
No complicated electronics, or nothin. Nice, big, user-servicable parts.
Of course, you would need pleanty of land, and a resivoir at the top of a hill.
Re:Nice idea, but the cost... (Score:2)
In Phoenix you can buy boxes that will make your appliances "smart" in an attempt to minimize the power you use during peak times. Kinda like a dishwasher you turn on when you go to work, but it comes on when the midday price drop occurs.
According to the article, time of use metering is going to be a requirement soon.
Being tired... (Score:5, Funny)
How does it know? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How does it know? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How does it know? (Score:2)
A truly smart system would be one that was variable in realtime with communications out to the consumers. If peak consumption is threatening brownouts, raise the realtime rate a little so that systems know to turn off or run on batteries for a while.
Re:How does it know? (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:How does it know? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:How does it know? (Score:5, Interesting)
?
Re:How does it know? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, that's all well and good, but ... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, wait
Greenies have had this choice for a while. (Score:5, Informative)
And of course, even if you don't have a battery-based storage system, scheduling your laundry to run in the middle of the night is smart. You get cheaper electricity (assuming your utility meters it that way), and you ease the burden on the wastewater treatment system by not dumping your effluent into it during peak demand periods.
UPS anyone (Score:2, Funny)
Re:UPS anyone (Score:2)
Why is this modded funny? Thats exactly what the device described in the article does, except they've added a computer to unplug the UPS automatically.
Mass Usage issue? (Score:4, Insightful)
The other problem which may arise is that a hydro company aware of such devices may charge a premium in order to offset "lost revenue".
These are concerns I have. That being said, this appears to be an advantage to both the producer and the consumer. Lets face it, producers want people to reduce consumption at peak hours and thereby reducing the need to import power (I realize this is contrary to my statement above, but the hydro companies are capitalist profit monsters anyways). Consumers like the advantage of saving a little money on hydro - but you will have to save a lot in order to justify the cost of the system. It was going to happen eventually, kudos to GridPoint!
Re:Mass Usage issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now imagine what happens when big industrial users start up and shut down based on spot pricing. Demand increases -> rates increase -> plants shut down -> demand drops -> rates drop -> plants start up.... Rinse, lather, repeat.
Each customer will have different profiles of price sensitivity, startup/shutdown delays, costs of production pauses and such. It's impossible to quick start/stop a refinery or chemical plant, hard to switch your manufacturing plant on and off, but if your building air conditioning uses an ice storage system (make ice when rates are cheap, melt it when costs are high) then you can flip on and off pretty much at will.
Managing the effect on the grid turns out to be a difficult problem.
But at $10,000/home, this thing isn't going into mass usage.
Re:Mass Usage issue? (Score:2)
But the peak time will shift gradually, because it'll take time for enough of these to get installed to make a difference. As the usage pattern changes, the discount periods will shift too, and people will have to reprogram their gadgets. Perhaps the utility will provide a SOAP service that the gadget can call and find out what the cheap times are.
The real problem will come whe
Re:Mass Usage issue? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, actually it would ELIMINATE peak-usage time, making it average-out over the whole day.
Re:Mass Usage issue? (Score:2)
load balancing is in the utility's interest. much cheaper, surely, then buying or building to meet peak demands,
Re:Mass Usage issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
The more energy you're pushing through the transmission lines at once, the higher the line-losses, so that works in your favor.
Electricity would be cheaper if plants could be kept running at a constant level all day and night. When you have to build a couple power-plants that only need to be operated during peak demand, that's wastes a lot of money.
It's entirely possible that this is something which will only work in a distributed fashion, and can't be centralized very well. Again, line-losses may be a factor.
100% charging efficiency? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why bother? Pump power BACK into the grid instead (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, people should be thinking about generating their own power and pumping the surplus back into the grid, running their meters backwards (a legally protected action in most states) at a cost to the power company.
These are called intertie systems, and power companies are federally mandated to allow them:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=solar+intert
Good for power companies too (Score:2, Insightful)
These devices are also (theoretically) good for power companies too. Most people use much of their electricity for a few hours in the day (right as they wake up, and after they get home from work). They have to be able to supply this amount at that time, and they can't really change that capacity easily. This means that power companies have to have a lot of extra generation capacity that goes unused during the night and (less so) during the day. (This, incidentally, is the reason behind the variable pricing
Build your own (Score:2)
It sounds no different than a whole-building UPS.
At night when the rates drop, plug it in to charge.
When the rates are high, unplug it.
If unplugged during the day and running too low, beep so someone knows to either cut usage or plug it back in ( probably on bypass so you aren't consuming and charging at the same time during peak time )
The only tricky bits would be if in addition
Re:Build your own (Score:3, Funny)
Won't work for many home users (Score:3, Insightful)
If I use 20KW during the day, and 5KW at night or the other way around, my meter will still read the the total used. So unless you can have the electric co install a new meter and agree to charge you rated on time of day, this won't help you at all.
P.S. I live in the Denver Metro area, 2.5million people, so it's not some tiny remote town in Arkansas that's 20 years out of date.
Re:Won't work for many home users (Score:2)
Good question.
I've always had the old analog rotating meter. Every once in a while someone would come out to read it, or more recently we can input the readings online (I still think they'll come out to check it, just a lot less often), and we've always been changed at different rates, for usage at different tim
I wonder how that'd work up here (Score:5, Interesting)
When your schedule agrees with the power company's (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a customer of the Los Angeles Dept. of Water & Power. They don't advertise the fact very widely but they have a three-tier time-sensitive rate structure for residences, which is optional. I signed up for it. They came out, replaced my electro-mechanical power meter with a computerized model, and I was off and running.
No one's home during the day. That's key. From 1-5pm my electric rate is about double what it is from 8pm-10am. But since no one's home then, I make out like a bandit. My electric bill fell by one-third while everyone else's was going up.
If your place is empty during the day you should see if you have such a rate where you live. No need for power-storing file cabinets if so.
Great, now please talk to me about those gel cells (Score:3, Interesting)
Not exactly a friendly way to deal with things. A better usage of the money would be to put up some solar panels and do a little cogen.
Wastes energy? (Score:3, Insightful)
But it uses more total *electricity*, since any storage system must have an efficiency less than 1.
I wonder if the off peak electricity is generated with a more efficient power source than the peak electricity.. which might make the the system as a whole (from generation to consumption) more energy efficient, thus using less energy (not less electricity) in total.
Alternatively... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, sorry, lost my head for a minute, forgot I live in the USA. Can I "upgrade" my >45MPG TDI (diesel) Beetle to a <10MPG Explorer? Uhhh... Go Yankees!
just saw this a Universal Studios Orlando (Score:3, Interesting)
I also read that the NYC subways were testing flywheels for breaking energy storage. The flywheels are to be located at the stations, this way the trains didn't have to carry the flywheels.
It is way past time we made flywheels do more work.
Exploding flywheels (Score:4, Informative)
Someone's covered that. From Wikipedia's Flywheel energy storage [wikipedia.org] article:
Won't compete with PV (Score:3, Interesting)
If I had $10,000 to throw at the problem I'd install $10,000 of photovoltaics. No batteries, just run the meter backwards during the day when power is needed most anyway. And I'd be contributing to production not just shifting my consumption.
This Article is Advertising Copy (Score:2)
There are only so many ways to store electrical power: You could pump it into batteries, drive a flywheel, work against gravity by pumping water into a tank, or top up a huge capacitor bank.
My guess is that this is simply an uninterruptable power supply system. Essentially, you have a rectifer on the input, converting alternating current to direct current. The direct current then is pumped into batteries.
Th
(Yet Another) Stupid Question (Score:2)
And if it's not economical for the power companies to carry out this kind of storage - taking advantage of far greater economies of scale - how can it be economical for the individual customer?
UPS (Score:2)
Seems to me that just having that kind of power backup would be a boon in and of itself. If it can really save money, all the better. But I'm skeptical.
-matthew
This device would be easy on the grid (Score:3, Interesting)
Power storage technology? (Score:4, Interesting)
What kind of power storage technology is used for the $10k "filing cabinet" model? How much capacity does it have? What's the round-trip efficiency?
If it uses batteries, what is the lifetime of the batteries? Many battery technologies have a severely limited charge-discharge cycle lifetime.
I answered some of my questions from Gridpoint's site:
- Gridpoint sells these in 7kw and 10kw capacity
- Price is between $9k and $19k MSRP. The 7kw model is likely the $9k model
- The batteries are VRLA (Valve Regulated Lead Acid)
- Rated capacity is 10 hours at 1kW AC Avg Load. That's 1000/120 ~= 8A load, about half of a single 15A household circuit. This unit isn't rated high enough to run a typical hair dryer.
I couldn't find details on what kind of lifetime to expect out of the batteries.
Flywheels Versus Batteries (Score:3)
The flywheels were made out of composites, spun at incredible speeds, were housed in a vacuum and supported by magnetic bearings.
The auto makers didn't pick up on it, but they said stationary power storage was another possible market.
I can references to US Flywheel Systems on google, but no site for it. Curious as to what happened to them.
Battery maintenance is a PITA. Sure would be nice to see something like this work out.
Gridpoint in a gridlock (Score:4, Informative)
What a stupid way to sell a big UPS. As they already comment you need a power bill in the thousands $ before you save money but the specs tell me that this thing can only supply 1KW for 7 - 10 hours. Therefore it is only capable to run 2 PC's (oh make that one because it already has one itself) and a few lights. I consider that nothing compared to what you normally use if you have a thousand + power bill.
Let's run some numbers:
Say you save 50% on a power unit (1 unit = 1Kwh). Assume a unit costs $0.20
The unit can store 7 Kwh which is worth in savings a massive $0.70 per day.
I am going to be generous and allow these savings to run through the weekend thus saving $4.90 per week or $255 per year.
Based on $10000 that is a return on investment of 2.5% per annum
CNN Money reported: "The company features an all-star board of advisors, including tech guru Esther Dyson and Bill Bradley, the former presidential candidate and longtime member of the Senate Energy Committee."
Whoooaaaaa ha ha ha ha, these clowns can't even count. Yeah, I'll have the stainless steel door upgrade. Ha ha ha, this thing is a stupid investment that will have no practical benefit unless you want a UPS or solar power solution in which case there are much better and cheaper alternatives.
No wonder sensible USA energy policies are non existent. What a morons.
A better option for the near future (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't be cost effective... (Score:3, Insightful)
But, funnily enough, power companies don't do that, for the very simple reason that having hydro turbines and standby gas generators are cheaper than batteries.
Other schemes, like running your washing machine in the middle of the night to smooth out demand, make sense. But at present prices batteries don't.
Nothing big. (Score:5, Interesting)
Clever bastards those swiss
What a deal! (Score:4, Funny)
Just what I need a $10,000 device that saves me $5 - $10 a month.
what in the hell??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?!?! A low speed pentium chip doesn't take much power. Maybe the cost they saved by making it used standard off the shelf equipment is so great that you wouldn't recoup the costs as a customer over the life of the product from them using that, vs. a custom extremely low power chip. Really? WTF??
You call these guys nutweeds, and manage to also attac
Well, there's a good chance he's right (Score:2)
That's why. Currently, I'm designing software for a welder for a client. 99% of the time - all you do push a single button, and off she goes.
600MHz Pentium, Windows CE, .NET. :(
if I had mod points, I mod you down. (Score:3, Insightful)
Look at it this wa
Re:The Art of Design is truly dying (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that Pentia and the software that runs on them is all commodity technology and thus cheaper to use. It may be ironic to use an energy-squandering chip in an energy-saving devic
Re:The Art of Design is truly dying (Score:2)
Re:Fool Proof ? (Score:2)
While their revenues would drop, so too would their costs. It's far cheaper for power companies to accomodate a steady power demand than one with large peaks and troughs, even when the total energy is the same. That's why they implement variable power costs in the first place - to enourage a steady demand.