pce opportunity for power arbitrage

According to todays announcement VRB in Canada is looking forward to offshore manufacture and local distribution. This sounds like lower prices=much greater market=more profit on lower margin & higher barriers to entry for new manufacturers when the patents run out.

PCE is presently a distributor/installer of both VRB and Sumitomo systems.

Good stuff.

Down in the windy south of Australia the wind power companies are going gangbusters both on grid (Victoria, Vic, SA, WA) and local small grid (mainly WA).

In WA renewable power can be sold onto the grid at about 15 cent/kWhr (some restrictions). Remote power from diesels costs about 30-40cents/kWhr.

It seems to me that I could make money installing a big vrb on a local small grid, claim the 50% renewables and energy storage capital offset available as part of Australia's Greenhouse reduction programme, store power at high production, low use periods and sell it back at times of high consumption, low generation.

Alternatively I could contract to supply up to say 10MW of power for up to say 1hr to improve the load factor from a renewable wind power generator and allow time for cheaper baseload power to be brought on stream with a lower spinning reserve. Worth big $.

Let's see;
10MWhr battery and BOS $6.5M (and likely to get a lot cheaper in the next two years)
50% capital discount for greenhouse abatement --> $3.5M
10MWhr @15cents/kWhr=$1500, cycled daily when attached to solar, possibly several times daily when matched to windturbines
300 days availability per year
-->$450000 per year less operating costs (warranty cover would hold this to a minimum after the first year)
Gives a gross return of around 10% pa. Beats real estate over 10 years and roughly equals equity market.
A good diversity play.

The AGM is tomorrow. Perhaps we'll hear something about how PCE could fit into this market, backed by data from KI?