If you did not know what negative watts or Negawatts, it is very simple to explain and understand. They are megawatts that is not used.Consider an stadium with 1000 one megawatt lamps, so in normal operation, this stadium will use 1000 megawatts to light up what ever they are playing. So a concerned engineer looks at this and does an experiment, he switch off lamps in a pre planned and assessed method until people or players notice the difference. So if the engineer managed to eliminate 10 lamps without hindering the game, he/she saves 10 megawatts of electricity. So now he goes around and does the same thing to 1000 stadiums and what do we get, 10,000 megawatts of electricity saved. And all these are Negawatts, Negative watts or watts never used!. If we do this at peak hours all the more value.
So this is how a companies like EnerNoc serves to prevent global warming without having to install and maintain solar panels or wind turbines. But they do save a lot more that megawatts, now negawatts during the peak hours.
During the peak usage, most dirtiest (like coal) or most expensive electricity plants are brought up to satisfy the demand. They are known as peaking power plants or peaker plants. So in addition to higher usage, we might be spewing dirty particles in to atmosphere, making them even worse.
So EnerNoc has signed up with large corporations and they manage the power usage during peak hours, like turning off a row of lights in a supermarket, or turning down air conditioning a notch. But as simple as it seems, EnerNoc has 1500 megawatts under it's management. That is about 15 Peaker plants not operating!
You can read a Q&A session with EnerNoc CEO Tim Healy at C|NET and EnerNoc is here.
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