Standby power and the grid

I was talking to my wife a week or two ago about how much standby/backup power Puerto Rico has. Many businesses, especially restaurants, have their own diesels, most in the 50-150KW range. Many homeowners have small generators in the 5KW range. Condo and office buildings, hospitals, manufacturing plants and others have generators up to a couple MW in size.

This is only partly due to the hurricane experience (last one before Maria was in 98) and more due to the unreliable power PREPA provides. 

I would not be surprised if the total backup capacity was in the 500-1000MW range.

Very little of it is grid connected. It is mostly on a transfer switch.Or, in the case of residential, wired in with extension cords as needed. 

I was thinking that it would be cool if somehow that capacity could be used instead of sitting idle. Kind of a pipe dream, interconnection and dispatch would be a nightmare.

Then I run across this:

NRG Energy and Cummins’ New Business: Backup Generators as Grid Assets

How aggregating backup power for demand response and other grid services could unlock a big new C&I distributed energy market.

Jeff St. John December 22, 2017

NRG Energy and Cummins’ New Business: Backup Generators as Grid Assets

 

The millions of backup generators installed at commercial and industrial sites across the country make up one of the largest sources of distributed energy. But most of it is fueled by diesel generators that are too dirty, noisy and inefficient to run during non-emergency times. 

 Still, a small but growing number of natural-gas-fired gensets in the market are clean enough to run outside of the strict parameters set for diesel in many U.S. jurisdictions, albeit with some big exceptions like California. 

Last week, NRG Energy and Cummins unveiled a partnership that aims to take advantage of this flexibility to offer backup generators to a whole new class of commercial-industrial customers. The press release calls it a “platform,” and it is backed up by substantial in-market software expertise from both companies.

The proposition is this: get a Cummins genset for use when the grid goes down, and shave 10 to 15 percent off your energy bills by allowing it to run as part of an aggregated fleet of a “preliminary estimated hundreds of megawatts capacity,” according to the companies’ press release. 
...
[Emph added-ED] 

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/nrg-energy-and-cummins-new-business-backup-generators-as-grid-assets#gs.t54_UPA

Pretty good idea, connecting all this capacity, distributed at the user, rather than the supplier, end of the grid. Even better, since Cummins/NRG pays for it, you get onsite standby power for free without even the hassle of managing it. 


"But", I hear you saying, "in PR only PREPA is allowed to sell electricity and isn't that what this is doing?" 

Fortunately, the Alcon decision has largely busted that monopoly if people what to take advantage of it. So, not only a great idea but legal. 

Now if they could just use it for cogeneration...