Peak Shaving with Your Power Station: Is it Worth it?

Portable Power Stations are a great investment for power outages (I kid you not, as I type this, I am sitting in the middle of a power outage) but it can feel like a big investment to have just sitting in your garage or closet until you need it. 

Is there a way to get value from your power station when life is normal and void of emergencies?

Yes, there actually is. It is called peak shaving.

What is Peak Shaving with a Power Station?

To explain peak shaving, the first thing you have to understand is that in general, your electricity charge is split into two parts, peak hours and off-peak hours. Peak hours are during the day when everyone is using everything and off-peak generally starts in the evening and goes to early morning.

For my location, the peak is 5 am to 9 pm and I get charged $0.26 per kilowatt hour. Non-peak hours are much cheaper at $0.18 per kilowatt hour. Your location could vary significantly so check with your local power company.

 Peak Shaving is when you power your home, devices, or appliances with sources other than the main grid and then recharge during the cheaper rates. 

Is Peak Shaving Worth It?

If you have just a tiny system that only lasts a few hours, no, I wouldn’t say it's worth the fenagling unless you really want to. However, if you have a larger system that can power a significant appliance for a few hours, your savings can add up.

Let’s look at a real life example. As a note, these numbers will be rounded and generalized rather than getting lost in the weeds of exact numbers.

Real Life Example

 My little office gets very cold as it is separate from the house. During those cold months, I use a 1500W space heater for most of my 8 hour day. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say I use it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and for 4 months. 

Let’s say I get a powerful power station to supply my home with power during a black out. I am going to put it to work powering my space heater during the day and then recharge it during the night. 

To figure out how much I can save, I take my 1500W and change it to Kilowatts by dividing it by 1000. This leaves me with 1.5 kilowatts * 8 hours which is 12 kilowatts. 

Take that 12 * $.026 and you end up with $3.12 a day to power my heater. That's $15.60 a week and roughly $63 dollars a month. For the four months I use it, that's a total of nearly $250.

With peak shaving, I power my heater with my power station and then recharge it via wall outlet at night. My cost for replacing those 12 kilowatts is $2.16. So that means, in that four month period, I would save just over $96. 

If you kept that up through a year, it would save you roughly $288. Not impressive but hey, every little bit counts. 

The Solar Advantage

These numbers get a lot better the more you can work solar power into the equation since, after the purchase) solar power is free. If you have an aggressive solar array feeding into the power station while you use it, you can start recouping before the battery ever drains and if you can recharge the battery completely with solar, than it’s just straight good times.

Solar has its challenges however and, depending on needing to power, you might be able to recharge during peak sunlight. Also, you can’t count on sunny days every day.

A gas generator is not a great option here as a medium generator would cost you about $9.60 in gas to recharge the power station (assuming $4.00 a gallon). 

So is it worth it?

For the sake of the argument, let’s say your system is optimized and you are able to save about $1.50 a day through a mixture of off-peak and solar with minimal effort. This means you would save about $550 per year which is a plane ticket to somewhere fun or a guilt free purchase for your hobby…I mean spouse. 

Are there drawbacks?

The only draw back is if you lose power with a partially drained power station. That would defeat the whole purpose. In theory, instead of one big power station, you could get two medium ones and thus, always be recharging one while using the other one. 

Conclusion

I would argue that peak shaving is a smart use of your investment but not the reason for the investment. You buy the power station and solar array for peace of mind and emergency preparedness; peak shaving is an optional way to offset some of your cost. 

It really is up to you if it is worth it. If you are a person that really enjoys optimizing and it becomes a bit of a game, then sure, go for it! If this just sounds like a lot of extra work with not that big of an upside, no worries. It's there if you want to.