Flattening the Curve: Bringing Predictability to Pandemic Response and Distributed Energy

“Flattening the curve” is not a new concept. In fact, it’s something that we in the energy industry work on every single day.

Surely you are no stranger to the term “flatten the curve,” embedded in our lexicon by the current COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, I’ve been struck by the similarities between reducing the risk of spreading disease and what we at muGrid do every day: mitigating energy costs.

By now, we all know the protocol to reduce the spread of the virus: self-isolate, #stayhome, take responsibility for your own contact and your personal risk of contracting the virus, all in order to minimize the instantaneous risk of everyone showing up at the hospital on the same day and overwhelming the system.

This brings down the terrifyingly high projections of the number of people getting infected, which is good for the individual because you don’t want to get sick (or die.) It’s also good for the collective because it reduces the demand on hospitals and medical staff, it keeps our grandparents safe, and it reduces the load and the demand on our economy as a whole.

In that same vein, “flattening the curve” of power consumption and demand is exactly what we try to accomplish when we pair a battery system with solar power for economic benefit at a site. In fact, it’s nearly a perfect analogy.

Energy customers are charged in three different ways, (fixed charges, total energy usage [per kWh], and demand [per kW]). Demand charges are the most pertinent to our conversation today.

Demand charges are based on peak usage in any given moment. Imagine having all the lights on in your office while your computer, router, and other electronics are all running at once. Say this adds up to about 1000 watts. Now, you’re hungry, so you go into the kitchen, line up the delicious pizza rolls on your plate, and push the start button on your microwave, which uses an additional 1200 watts of energy. Suddenly, your office is using over 2 kilowatts from the power grid. But since it was only for 2 minutes- the energy usage was small – only 0.073 kWh. Not a big deal, right? At $0.10/kWh energy charge, that’s less than a cent of energy.

Regardless, your peak demand in that moment was 2 kilowatts. And if you are paying a demand charge of $20/kW, you’ll pay $40 for the privilege of heating your food. “No fair,” I hear you cry.

Yet, your power company must be able to supply your demand instantaneously, as soon as you turn on the light switch or hit the start button on the microwave. Since they have to have this capacity standing by to serve the instantaneous spike in load, they will charge commercial and industrial users a demand charge based on that peak.

So you see, it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement if you, as a consumer, are incentivized to reduce that demand. If your load was completely flat all the time, with no ups or downs at all, it would be the most efficient (and least expensive) way to pay your demand charge. The utility wants you to get to that – as flat as possible. Then it’s easy for them to predict what you will need and to anticipate which combination of assets they need to serve the collective energy load. This reduces the utility’s volatility, which is difficult to manage. And that’s why the utilities exist – to manage the volatility of the collective. These energy usage charges also cover the production of the power, like fuel and manpower. It’s why we gladly pay them money and why the utility company has value to consumers.

Additionally, if everyone in the network wanted power at the same time, the energy company has a capability of standby capacity, which is why those demand charges are expensive. “Peaker plants” basically sit either idle or off until the utility sees the demand coming up and then they fire them up. They’re extremely expensive to run and some only operate for a few hours each year, but they’re our last line of defense to simply running out of power.

That’s the emergency we are trying to avoid in energy – running out of “juice” and leaving everyone in the dark, without Netflix or the internet, without air conditioning, life-saving equipment, or the networks that connect us all.

So we introduce the solution: When we install a battery system to manage that peak, it’s flattening the curve by asking the grid for less energy at peak times. This benefits both the individual owner, who is going to pay less on their bill, as well as the collective since the utility has less volatility and less required standby capacity.

In pandemic preparedness, the hospitals offer critical infrastructure that must maintain sufficient capacity to handle a surge. In normal times, it wouldn’t make sense for the hospitals to maintain such a high standby capacity that they have empty beds. That would be extremely expensive. Most ICUs run at a mostly-full capacity on a regular basis with the typical emergencies that happen to the general population. So here we are, trying to reduce the peak demand on the system during the COVID-19 crisis by “flattening the curve.”

Similarly, the utility wants to have some standby generation capacity. Yet, if they have too much, it’s expensive for them. So they have to figure out what that sweet spot is with enough standby generation capacity, but not so much that it costs a huge amount of money to maintain an infrastructure that is never used.

And in the virus’ case as well as in the energy case, this is exactly what we want to do when we “flatten the curve;” we reduce the peak demand on the system for the good of the individual and the good of the collective.

The stakes are high in both cases. If we don’t mitigate the risk in energy costs and energy usage, then people could experience lengthy power outages, like after natural disasters such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires. In the sweltering heat of summer or the deep cold of winter, lives are at stake. If we don’t “flatten the curve” for the virus, hospitals could be overburdened, reducing their ability to treat the overload of patients, and then people die unnecessarily, because they weren’t able to be treated… not because they were untreatable.

Pandemic response and energy security are both emergency preparedness issues. Let’s work together for the good of individuals, the collective, and the planet.

*What we do here at muGrid is we see patterns, especially patterns in data. We can see the connections in areas that seem very dissimilar but are actually the underpinnings of the same. This is the foundation of my book Spiral.