An interesting followup to my post on the electricity pricing API, Washington-based GridPoint just announced $21M backing from Goldman Sachs for their energy storage appliances - devices that draw and store electricity during off-peak hours for use during peak hours. The VentureWire article talks about how Gridpoint is changing their focus from consumer devices to working directly with the utilities allowing the utilities to draw from the households’ stored capacity - up to 500 megawatts from 100,000 households.

The focus could easily be shifted back to savings for the consumer by integrating a Gridpoint device with the ‘current rate’ API allowing the Gridpoint device to store electricity during off-peak hours and kicking in either during peak hours (saving the consumer money) or during critical peaks. The downside to this approach, of course, is that consumer behaviour isn’t affected as there’s no incentive to conserve electricity during peak hours unless they go over over their Gridpoint device’s capacity.

I’m sure there must be some technical issue with this thought, but I was thinking these GridPoint devices could be outfitted with some form of input whereby they could also be used to charge the device by other means (windmills on farms, solar, whatnot) which could then be drawn upon by the utility as it would be under high loads but rather than being charged entirely by the grid, it could draw upon offgrid power, crediting the consumer for their contribution.