Another Sale. PowerBloc Plays CHESS
Another Sale. PowerBloc Plays CHESS
YouSolar sold a PowerBloc BASE™ today to CHESS Energy Solutions LLC in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. CHESS is the brilliant acronym for a Combined Heat and Electricity Storage System.
What does CHESS do, and how does it play with the PowerBloc?
Remember we want to electrify the home by replacing furnaces with heat pumps and then run it all on solar energy? There is a challenge that is rarely acknowledged.
Places like Pittsburg are at 30-40 degrees latitude. The winter sun is half of that in the summer, and winters can be pretty nippy. So, the high demand for heating meets low solar production. To make matters worse, heat pumps need more electric energy to extract heat from the air at low temperatures.
PowerBloc® uses the CHESS™ thermal storage system as a long-duration battery.
So what if we store heat in a thermal energy storage system and draw from it during cold snaps?
Instead of letting the heat pump draw in the frosty Pittsburg winter air, we feed it warm air from heat storage. In that case, the heat pump requires minimal energy and can still run on solar or stored battery energy.
Unlike a battery, which can store electricity for a day, thermal energy storage can store energy for several days, even a week.
So, CHESS adds long-duration storage. And how do we heat the storage? With excess energy from solar energy from the roof and renewable energy from the grid,
So, how do the PowerBloc and CHESS work together?
CHESS tells PowerBloc how much thermal energy it has in storage. PowerBloc tells CHESS when there is excess solar energy to charge the thermal storage and then uses the heat pump to heat the thermal storage.
CHESS adds large, cost-effective energy storage to a home, allowing it to be self-sufficient even in the winter.
Where does all the decision-making happen? Inside PowerBloc’s Energy Management System, EDISON™.
What do you have to do? You must choose which book to read while curling up on the couch on that cold, overcast winter day.
