In nearly all regions of the United States, peak annual electricity demand comes in the afternoon on the hottest days of the year, when air conditioners in homes and offices are cranked to the maximum. It’s one of the main technical challenge for utilities and grid operators, which must sign contracts with power plants to ensure that they have sufficient capacity on hand to meet only a few hours of demand, and it can be hard to predict just how much they will need.
In Southern California, one company has come up with a solution to marry peak electric demand with cheap overnight electricity prices. And in an field where interconnected software and high-tech chemical batteries dominate, their solution is both simple and oddly tangible: making ice.
Earlier this month Ice Energy completed the first phase of project to deploy over 1,200 ice-making and cooling machines at businesses and industrial facilities across the territory of utility Southern California Edison (SCE).
And while there have been larger single-site thermal storage projects, such as the molten salt system at the 300 MW Solana Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plant in Arizona, Ice Energy says that when complete this will be the largest distributed thermal energy storage system in the nation.
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