Friday, February 11, 2011

Transpower and outages

The New Zealand Herald had an article with Transpower talking about power outages

The first point that the article (and the referenced report) make is that consumers could start ensuring less outages in their electricity. 

What the proposal is that consumers will essentially start putting big electric batteries on their houses so that in short outages this battery could feed (some) of the house.  It's an old idea but new technology is bringing down this cost of this.  Certain things already do this (such as UPS for computers). 

It's often been the size that the electricity battery (and the cost of producing it).  Several years ago to do this you would need a box almost the size of a car motor to run your house for five minutes. 

Hopefully in 10-20 years it will reduce the size of this to a small box able to run the house for 15-30 minutes. 

If you think your power company will install these you're probably dreaming.  In fact Transpower says

"It is often more cost-effective for the customer to bear the cost of very infrequent outages or take other measures to compensate for the grid's temporary unavailability."

The problem (in some ways) is that NZ has a very geographically sparce population.  There is more Km of line per person (particularly in farming communities) than other countries.  This means that there are more lines to maintain and the cost of doing this is large. 

We'll talk about the cost in another post, but it's interesting that the cost of electric batteries is substantially reducing.

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