I'm doing some work for a hedge fund at the moment that is placing diesel-based power generators at locations across the southwest. These generators are equipped with cellular MODBUS controllers that can be written to via a REST API and get the power generators started within 4 to 5 seconds. The goal is to take advantage emergency peak load demand on the grid and profit from short-term spike in electricity spot prices.
I'd love to see the spreadsheet on that one, that must be incredibly well thought out to be profitable. How often those 'emergency peak loads' exist, their duration and the write-off on equipment and fuel costs must have kept the designers of that system up for many long nights.
For areas such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, they happen very often during the summer. In Houston, last year we almost experienced load shedding (rolling blackouts) several times. ERCOT (the Texas ISO) forced large industrial customers to scale back demand to keep from imposing residential blackouts.
ERCOT sends out Emergency Response Service (ERS) notifications to QSEs (Qualified Service Entities) during these periods via a WS-Notification. The hedge fund predicts that during these events they can make several tens of thousands of dollars a minute with the diesel generators that they have deployed across the state. I think they believe that they can because they're having me write the code to start the units based on ERS notifications.
Wow, that is a whole lot cooler than building a CSP plant in the Mojave to feed the California grid on peak days. Back when I was looking at power usage inside of Google the diesel backups at the data centers didn't seem to provide very economical power. Especially when you took into account generator runtime vs maintenance required (there was something like 1 hour's worth of maintenance for each single digit hours of run time).
Given the efficiency of the Bloom boxes [1] it seems like you could print money with them if you could get a fast start version.
This is awesome -- a hedge fund is exploiting financial/market inefficiency and creating positive externalities (more efficient/reliable power grid). And hopefully making a lot of money doing it.
