For most commercial users, and probably eventually everyone, electricity is monetized with three components: infrastructure (fixed fee), usage, and demand. It is this last item with which this project is concerned. Demand charges are the price you pay to the electrical supplier that ensures that they have enough supply in reserve to meet your highest instantaneous demand. In Texas, your highest 15 minutes of usage is multiplied by four (to get a watt-hour peak demand) and your demand fee is a factor of that. Doubling the demand doubles the fee. In the 11 months that follow that peak demand, the customer is charged 80% of the peak demand unless another peak is reached. This is known as the “ratchet”. For some customers, the demand fee can far exceed their electrical usage fee. The work presented here is concerned with minimizing this fee with power management using energy storage cells with managed charge and discharge which should turn this

[insert graphic]

into this:

[insert graphic]