I’ve posted on one of the critical “problems” of booming renewable energy deployment in Germany – negative pricing – utilities forced to give away power due to torrents of renewable energy. Now negawatts are coming to America, and one of the solutions (besides new transmission lines) will be yet another energy storage option you read about here.

NYTimes:

For decades, electric companies have swung into emergency mode when demand soars on blistering hot days, appealing to households to use less power. But with the rise of wind energy, utilities in thePacific Northwest are sometimes dealing with the opposite: moments when there is too much electricity for the grid to soak up.

So in a novel pilot project, they have recruited consumers to draw in excess electricity when that happens, storing it in a basement water heater or a space heater outfitted by the utility. The effort is rooted in some brushes with danger.

In June 2010, for example, a violent storm in the Northwest caused a simultaneous surge in wind power and in traditional hydropower, creating an oversupply that threatened to overwhelm the grid and cause a blackout.

As a result, the Bonneville Power Administration, the wholesale supplier to a broad swath of the region, turned this year to a strategy common to regions with hot summers: adjusting volunteers’ home appliances by remote control to balance supply and demand.

When excess supply threatens Bonneville’s grid, an operator in a control room hundreds of miles away will now dial up a volunteer’s water heater, raising the thermostat by 60 more degrees. Ceramic bricks in a nearby electric space heater can be warmed to hundreds of degrees.

For Bonneville, the full dangers of excess supply first hit home during the June 2010 emergency, when a severe storm whipped through the region. The transmission network had so much power that the agency turned off all its fossil fuel generation, gave electricity away to neighboring networks and even told the system’s only nuclear plant to slash its production by 78 percent, a highly unusual step.

The region squeaked through, but the agency was stretching its resources “to their limits,” said Doug Johnson, a spokesman for Bonneville. At one point the system was running almost entirely on renewable energy.