The Pitch:

From the book: The law of energy for sustainable development
By Adrian J. Bradbrook, IUCN Academy of Environmental Law
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Demand-side participation yields environmental benefits in reducing emissions and the need for the construction of new power plants and transmission lines. It also yields benefits in system reliability ( especially during emergency conditions ), market efficiency, risk management ( reducing exposure to price spikes ), customer choice in managing their power use, mitigation of the market power of generator companies, and –of course- lower costs.
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This neatly summarises the benefits of demand response but when you look even closer at the industry numbers you quickly see that almost all the value of demand response is associated with price spikes.

So my idea is this. Lets focus on the low-hanging fruit of price spikes first.

Electricity spot-price spikes exist because demand for electricity exceeds the supply of readily available generation. This happens for many reasons, it could be a hot day, or a super cold day, the world cup could be on and everyone is boiling their water at half time, lightning could take out a transmission line or.. the wind might not be blowing.. think about that one.

So spikes tend to be short lived, usually only an hour or so. But the consequences can be harsh, electricity can’t be stored so if even a little more demand is needed than is readily available then high priced power must be quickly started up and the price sky-rockets and I mean rockets. Its like saying, ok you can have a large fries for $2 but if want an extra large it will cost you $200 but only during unhappy hour. If this were McDonalds *no-one would ever* by extra large fries during unhappy hour but we do it all the time with electricity we just don’t know it!

SpotFuzz simply wants to tell you when it is unhappy hour so you can switch something off if you can.

We want to use your existing social networking channels, twitter, google gadgets, linked in or facebook applications to let you know its unhappy hour. This way you don’t need to log onto yet another source information it just comes to you as part of your daily routine.

But what a difference you can make, demand side response can make the whole market operate more efficiently saving on carbon, saving on your power bill but perhaps most importantly making it less risky to invest in and operate renewables like wind and thus changing the energy mix all together and more.

Managing spikes is important to what the future mix of energy will look like.. don’t believe me?

http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/12072009/323/wind-nuclear-uk-energy-future-cbi.html
http://www.planetark.com/enviro-news/item/53596

This is the definition I think of societal response, we all work together for mutual benefit.

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