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Smarter Electric Grid Could Save Power
Wired has a timely story about putting more of the automated and non-automated decisions behind the use of electrical power into and around households. From the summary: "If the electric grid stops being just a passive supplier of juice, consumers could make choices about how and when to consume power. Power providers and tech companies are working to redesign the grid so you can switch off your house when high demand strains the system, or program your house or appliances to make that move."
A similar story is featured right now on PhysOrg, highlighting a particular pilot project involving "smart meters" in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania.
I guess the US electric companies always found they could get reimbursed for expensive peak load plants so they had no incentive to apply intelligence to load management.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Of course it is important to only control the right loads. Water heating is a good candidate, so might be charging electric vehicles overnight. Basically loads that need juice but not necessarily constantly.
Probably a good idea not to do this to TV sets or medical equipment.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
You wouldn't want to come home and find that all your Cherry Garcia has melted and your arugula has wilted because your "smart" house decided to take itself off the grid. You need to have some sort of backup power for quite a few appliances. A way to do this is to produce your own power with solar panels or wind turbines, and in fact a lot of people are already doing that (and pushing electricity back into the system as a net supplier!).
But really, the way to avoid the crunch is to make the systems we use more efficient. If we can't live without air conditioning, maybe we can take steps to make it cheaper and less energy-consuming than our current HVACs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_lake_water_cooling
Of course efficiency improvements are only a temporary band-aid. At some point consumption will overtake the gains made in efficiency. However, if we can forestall the inevitable long enough to move more of our power consumption needs to a renewable energy solution, the better off we will be and the less dependent we will be on fossil fuels.
The primary benefit from a smart grid isn't so much saving energy as limiting peak demand - but it would help in making best use of intermittent generation (e.g. renewables such as solar and wind).
It's not a matter of turning off all the electricity to your house. It's a matter of running your dishwasher and drier during off-peak hours and cutting back on the A/C during the really peak times. Right not, there are no incentives consumers to time their electricity usage, even though the cost to the utility varies wildly, and the utility is expected to provide as much power as you want. This BTW, is one of the reasons for the blackouts in California. That and the fact the companies like Enron knew this fact and exploited it.
--- http://davidnehme.blogspot.com
I live in Florida and FPL already has a system like this in place and has so for the better part of a decade. It's called FPL On Call. It let's FPL shut off certain appliances you wire to there smart boxes when the grid is under heavy load. My neighbors have them tied to there pool filtration system. For the discount they give on the bill, it's not a bad deal for non-essential appliances. I would never wire my whole house to one though. Or my A/C system. The other talk about letting the power system control your smart house seems ridiculous. If i'm going to build a smart house, i'm going to be the one who controls it, not the power company.
One of the biggest and EASIEST ways to change carbon footprints and reduce global warming contributions is to modify HOW we use electricity... period.
Yes, there are always drawbacks to any new technology, but having electronic and electrical systems that are smart enough to modify their behaviors at given times or in response to given inputs is a real DUH!
Everybody in the US (probably) has two or three such devices. Some alarm clocks behave differently according to day of week, some even allowing you to work sat/sun with two other days off during the week. There are thermostats to control heaters and air conditioning systems. There are regulatory systems in freezers, refrigerators, and stoves etc. You have DVR, VCR, and other electronics that reacts to inputs. Your computer probably uses a temperature reading device to know when to run the cooling fan and when not to do so.
If you could tell some of your devices to shut down for x minutes if they receive a certain signal, no big deal. Your freezer will not defrost for a long time. Water heaters don't need to be on ALL the time. A/C can go dormant on a signal but again start up to keep the temperature below a set level. All these things would allow each person to contribute to lowered electricity requirements and thus less greenhouse gases.
To me this is a no brainer that politicians should be asking manufacturers to comply with by 2010. All the electronics and protocols are in place or available right now. I also believe that manufacturers should be given incentives to retrofit such devices to appliances that are less than 5 years old.
This is a known tech solution to reducing carbon footprints and should be a win-win for all concerned. There is no reason that I can see that it should NOT be done.
Yes, as pointed out somethings should not be turned off... well, don't set those systems up for failure... DUH!
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Nowhere does it say in the article that it'll actually cut power to a house outright. In fact power cuts are one of the primary reasons for the system. All of this is made abundantly clear in the article. You did read the article, right?
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
more like power plants are idiotically designed to not be scalable and when they fail to supply enough power, they blame the customers. It's not like it came as some big shock that people use more power during the day than at night. They knew it, they didn't plan for it when they built the plant, so it's 100% their fault and they should fix it without forcing the customers to fix it for them.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
In order to effectively balance sources from grid-tied power sources, such as wind and solar, the grid needs to be re-engineered. Load balancing is a part of this. Decentralized power has some enormous advantages.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This kind of thing sounds like something that normally would happen in a 3rd world country, not the US or Canada. Are we really to the point where we have to start shutting off hot water heaters because we don't want to re-invest in the electrical infra-structure?
I'm all for more energy efficient appliances. I've got all compact fluorescents, have an automatic thermostat, and my computers power off when not in use. But not having hot water, or raising the temperature by 4 degrees? Forget about it.
AccountKiller
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
is designed to bring Demand Response to the data center. It's called Demand Response Application for Power Event Scheduling.
Oh yea.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response
The first (horrible) PoC is available on launchpad.
The nature of power plants (turbines, etc) makes them plenty scalable, within a range of possibilities. Building more plants (or generators within plants) requires a massive new capital investment, as well as environmental compliance.
There is no type of currently-available power plant that is infinitely scalable without further capital investment--solar is limited by how much sunlight is shining, wind by how much wind is blowing, hydro by friction of water flowing through a finite pipe, nuclear by turbine and heat dissipation capacity, gas by turbine size, etc. You can't just dump more fuel into any of these systems and expect a positive response.
Nothing new here.
First consumers can already "make choices about how and when to consume power".
Second, Utility company cut-offs to high-load things like water heaters already exist. Energy suppliers in some ares pay you a small amount to have the ability to drop your water heater elements during peak usage (cooking time and high air conditioning loads).
There is nothing suggested in TFA that does not already exist.
The most immediate single change that the average consumer can impliment is CFL lightbulbs. These are so effective that some Power companies PAY for the bulbs for you.
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The price of power changes hourly/halfhourly (depending on where you are in the world). Currently residential users aren't exposed to that price variability, it's all absorbed by the retailers (of power). My understanding is that smart metering is primarily designed to move to a user pays scheme that's based on that halfhourly price. Yes, there will be the ability to automatically cut power to certain appliances, but this is a good thing because you'll be exposed to the higher cost of electricity. Power prices regularly double/triple or more through the course of a day, and smart metering will allow you to plan your cooking/washing/drying when the price is lowest. For smart users this should result in a lower power bill. Of course the actual cost might not be any lower due to the cost of the smart meters. However, in the long run this fewer peaking plants (plants that only run sporadically when demand is high) will need to be built, and this is why governments concerned with green issues push smart meters, even if they're not economical.
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
Shedding load during peak periods for large industrial users truly makes a difference, and economically pays off for both utilities and them.
... flat-rate for most people is a better deal, if they want comfort ... or as another poster lemented, perhaps the U.S. is well on its way to becoming a 3rd world country, but I digress.
... they shouldn't.
... in my view, to reiterate, the main drivers of demand-based pricing is greed - utilities will likely, long-term, earn much more with demand-based pricing, and also "feel good" environmentalism driven more by emotion than facts.
However, for individual consumers, long-term, a "smart" grid that controls people's appliances will probably cost residential users much more than what they're paying now.
Right now, I can turn on any device in my home and know it will cost me exactly the same price per KWH to run regardless of what the appliance or what time it is.
Contrast that with demand-based pricing in which utilities can place appliances into various rate classifications, as well as of course charge dramatically different rates depending on the time, or even the duration of use.
Ie. a really greedy utility, say for running an air conditioner, could charge a higher rate per KWH for simply running the unit regardless of the time of day due to its high energy draw, plus then bulk the rate up even more depending on the time of day it's run, plus then up top of all of that, bulk the rate up even further for running the unit for too long of duration at a time.
In short, one could find themself being nickled and dimed and ultimately paying much more
The way the power grid is structured now makes such demand based pricing for *residential* users unnecessary, since industrial loads tend to run somewhat opposite times of residential loads. And during peak periods, many large industrial users have already agreed to shed load automatically, so why should residential users be burdened
Rambling on
Ron
I cry foul!!
The plants were designed to be scalable, and they did plan for growth.
Then a funny thing happened. Environmental-whackos stepped up and put a stop to all new electrical generation plants for a period of around 15 years. You couldn't even expand existing plants during this period.
Only when things started getting really bad, and California blacked out a couple times did the rules start to loosen.
Hell it was probably you marching up and down with your scruffy beard and cardboard sign in college that stopped infrastructure development for all we know.
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With a tank system you can spread the heating over the night (eg. turning on each tank for an hour means that you can service perhaps 6 times as many customers with the same peak load).
Most retail suppliers get charged some multiplier of their peak load so are very keen to keep peak loads down.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Do you want to save power - here's an easy solution, make devices that actually TURN OFF. Most TVs, DVD players and other electrical devices use almost as much power when they are "off" as they do when they are on. While some devices always need to be on (e.g. tivos, routers, etc...) most would work just as well if there was a way to turn them fully off.
However, in order to avoid congestion, it would probably be wise to introduce a random delay between the availability of a lower cost and the moment to use it, just like devices do with Ethernet, in ordre to avoid storms.
Also, a phone with a LED telling me : Â Hey, why not call now ? The prices are suddenly cheap ! Â would be an excellent way to introduce some sense of opportunity in a world having too many things decided just by clock considerations.
Signature omitted in order to save space. Thanks for your understanding.
Capacity costs money. When it goes idle for 16 out of 24 hours, it's just a dead weight. Base load plants are generally more economical than plants that can easily adjust their output, so peaks genuinely cost more to cover in any event. If they want to offer customers a discount to help them shave the peaks and avoid the outlay, I fail to see the problem.
I don't think the plans that essentially have homeowners buying on a commodities market are likely worthwhile. People already have jobs, becoming ameteur commodities traders in the off hours is a bit much to ask.
Hoever, simple things like a different rate during set peak hours can work well. Most households can delay laundry and dishwashers until the evening or early morning. Many do anyway because people are at work.
It's completely amazing... my foes go out of their way to make themselves look ignorant... it's a gift. you sir seem to be hell bent on paying as much as possible for your electric bill every month... and you seem not to understand that power plants come in FINITE sizes and actually cost a shit load of money.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I'm not a specialist in electric power, but here in Switzerland we have what we call are "Pumpkraftwerke".
They are basically water powered generators utilizing a large storage lake - when demand is high, the water runs from the upper to the lower lake, creating electricity. When demand is low, the water is pumped from the lower to the upper lake.
They require a large difference in height between the two seas (usually in the lower hundreds), but otherwise are pretty low maintenance.
There _is_ of course some ecological impact. But they have served us well during the past years.
Frankenstien: It lives! It liiiiives!
*blackout*
Frigingstain: Who the frack turned down the lights!
Igor: It'sh ze shmart electric grid, shir.
Frinkenstoin: Ok hunchie, turn down the smoke machine and let's try again.
One problem is that the peak and average demand on the power grid are quite different. Obviously we have to build the grid to handle the peak, or we'll get blackouts/brownouts. Now what something like this could do is help reduce peak demand. Try to balance things out so that there isn't as much usage during peak times. This in turn means we don't have to spend so much money building out more electrical distribution and production.
This is already done on a large scale in the US. For example grid controllers will talk to a company about shutting down part or all of their usage at a certain time. A good candidate might be something like a food processing/storage facility. The controllers ask them to shut down their coolers at the time when homes are kicking up their usage (like around 4-7 PM). This isn't a problem for the company, they just cool it down a bit more before hand, and the temperature stays low enough.
Well a similar thing could be applied to houses as well, in theory. Shut down or reduce certain things during peak times, or zone the usage so only part of the homes in a given area are using it at once.
I'm not saying it is a cure-all or that we want it doing things like shutting down air conditioners for 3 hours in the desert or something, but there is potential to balance things out better and thus save money.
They do plan for it - and is the reason "grids" came about in the early days of electricity ... industrial loads tend to run somewhat opposite times of residential loads, and thus much of the time, base-plants, despite often not being that scaleable, can economically cover much of the load without problem.
... it's typically only extreme cold or hot weather that leads to excessively high peak loads, though many transmission operators mitigate such extreme situations by directing industrial users to shed load and/or slight voltage reduction.
So while people use more power at night, many industrial users tend to use less, so it evens out most of the time.
The tricky time is late afternoon / early evening where peak loads can occasionally spike significantly requiring the extended use of peaking power plants, such as gas fired units to cover the shortfall at much higher expense...
However, on many grids in the U.S., most days, such peaks are not a big issue
Ron
While high demand does cause blackouts, there's another way to phrase it:
Insufficient supply causes blackouts.
It's not the consumer's fault that they're asking for too much power, it's fundamentally more the producer's fault for not providing it. Or, at the very least, equally the producer's fault.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The environmental wackos had little to do with the blackouts in California. The problem was that the state took forever in deregulating the power sector, so that no one wanted to build a power plant for five years because they knew they would be forced to sell it due to deregulation (which required each utility to own plants corresponding to 50% of power it sold).
but then again there is good investment return in peak load powerplants like pump storage powerplants, especially when coupled with a nuke powerplant.
they can be loaded using the cheapest electricity availiable and they can sell at the peak load (the most expensive electricity).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I believe the Swiss buy cheap electricity from the French at night to pump the water back up the mountain so they can use it during the day when the electricity is more expensive.
If supply is limited - which it is - then high demand comes at a high price.
Anyone want to pay double or quadruple for their electricity?
It has been well-known for ages that supply is limited, yet virtually no-one cares to save energy. This is because though limited, supply is sufficient for the most time. Only when it becomes insufficient will people start implementing such measures on a broader scale.
Ignore this signature. By order.
The utility plants are not so scalable. They are designed for peak demand which occurs between 9 and 11 am. Nuclear plants, for example, have a big inertia and can't change their production very rapidly. They are also designed for a nominal energy production and they suffer if they produce more or less.
Environmental-whackos .... Only when things started getting really bad, and California blacked out a couple times did the rules start to loosen.
No. Enron, amongst other crooked energy traders, and the states that enabled them (Hello Texas!) stepped up. California wasn't counting on being screwed over by its fellow states (as in transmission lines deliberately scheduled to block power going *into* CA during peak times).
The California blackouts were caused solely by criminals doing criminal acts. There was plenty of power otherwise.
If anything, California has since realized that it needs more of its own power generation facilities to protect itself from its neighbors that would sell it down the river (more literal than you know) in no time flat.
This smells like over engineering. The real problem is that there isn't enough power generation capacity and transmissions lines in place. Even if you make the network 'smarter', you don't fix these things. Actually I really can't understand why this is even a problem that should be addressed this way. You have 300 million people in US and you can statistically calculate when and where you need power, all you need after that is enough production and transmission capacity, balanced with a billing that has simple, but powerful enough schema to shape energy consuming. In example here in Finland many homes use seasonal pricing where there is one price for winter weekdays in 07-22, and one price for rest of the time. This scheme allows homes to warm water and houses at night, and power companies to lower load at business hours and keep the load higher at night.
The real question that should be asked, what does this tell about electricity companies and the environment they are working where they can't or want to use the simplest and efficient way to solve the energy problem? And no, this is not about carbon emissions, as new power generation capacity in form of nuclear, hydro and renewable energy solve that problem together very neatly.
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That's mostly because our local hippies don't want to build more nuclear reactors.
Instead we have to buy french electricity generated by using coal or oil.
Makes perfect sense. %)
On our current scale, supply is only limited because they haven't built more power plants. It's not like we're hurting for space to put nuclear reactors, and it's not like we're hurting for nuclear reactor fuel. They're just expensive, and some people think they're evil.
Eventually you might be able to say "we can't generate more power", but we're nowhere near there and won't be for decades even with the most pessimistic predictions.
Our supply is limited, not by physics or any sort of universal constant, but simply by the fact that we haven't built more supply.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
Sure, there's plenty of ways to bank cheap off-peak electricity if you're clever about it. There's a system for commercial buildings to make ice at night in an insulated tank that's used for AC during the day.
Any technology that requires heating large quantities of water will not be instantly scalable yet can still be used for peaking (high load hours).
Gas fired electrical generation plants can respond faster than Coal fired ones, and Nuclear (contrary to your assertion) can also respond quite quickly to additional demand.
All of these require that their boilers be kept at or near steam temperature at times when peaking is likely to be necessary.
About the fastest responding technology is hydro power. Penstocks can be opened and turbines spun up in less than 5 minutes.
Current electrical generation capacity is "scaled" by replication. As a utility approaches 100% utilization during peak periods it starts planning another generation plant. These things 1 year to design, 2 years to build, and 15 years to get permission to build. By that time the design is obsolete.
The problem is one of NIMBY, pure and simple. It will take several California brownouts before the political hacks get out the the way and let the engineers do their job.
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By that logic, the USA should have also lagged behind in computers, cars, TVs, services, housing, etc. No brainer, huh? Building cars for 300 million people has got to take 40 times longer than building cars for 7.5 million, right? I guess it would explain the Amish buggies. Heck, you're probably even starving because harvesting enough grain for 300 million people must take longer than for 7.5 million
The short answer is that it doesn't scale that way. If you have 40 times more population, here's the important part, you also can produce 40 times more with them, at the same technology level and access to resources. So it evens out.
Basically it's no harder to build smart meters for 300 million people than for 7.5 million or, indeed, for the 35,365 people in Liechtenstein. If the demand is there, having more people just gives you more people to produce them with.
Now there are other considerations which are valid, for special cases, e.g., distances for infrastructure. But the "well, it's ok to be behind because there's more of us" argument that keep popping up again and again, is almost invariably bunk.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's mostly noise about gas prices that has this argument floating about. Base load is a myth, and only applies to certain types of generation. Hydro in particular isn't affected by fuel costs. Only Drought conditions and no much even then. They can vary the feed at will, in fact they have to, to manage the river flow. A few idled generators costs nothing in ROI.
This article is pure noise.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
> California has since realized that it needs more
> of its own power generation facilities to protect
> itself from its neighbors
But this is exactly what I was saying.
California had long had the practice of dis-allowing new electrical generation plants anywhere in the state by tying them up in such a morass of regulation that it was effectively impossible to build new plants there.
This was done intentionally to push the generation plants (and the associated pollution) out of their back yard into someone elses.
Why should Texas, who built and owned their own plants and transmission lines (and who, for a long time saw no need to tie into the national grid) be forced to deliver electricity to California SIMPLY so that California could avoid pollution. Texas didn't escape the pollution. They had gas and coal fired plants belching 24/7 so California could flip the switch but never see the smoke stack.
California got exactly what it deserved. Washington, Oregon, and even Montana also faced increased rates due to California refusing to improve its infrastructure.
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What we need are some REAL leaders and not just spineless congress critters.What we NEED is some leaders who will say-"We NEED safe affordable power and a good modern infrastructure. So we ARE going to build new nuclear power plants where they can be the most benefit,while putting more research into both alternatives and safer nuclear power designs.We ARE going to rebuild our failing bridges and roads,and we ARE going to have a national broadband infrastructure so we can compete in modern society!" What we NEED is a leader who'll tell all the NIMBYs to take a hike and do what is best for the nation.
But,sadly,I doubt that is going to happen. Instead we'll get more wars over the ever dwindling oil reserves,more finger pointing and useless rhetoric,and we'll slowly slip farther and farther behind everyone else as we slowly turn into just another third world dictatorship. I truly hope that I'm wrong. I truly hope we'll get leaders that can look ahead and think long term instead of simply looking at the next election cycle and the enrichment of their friends and ways to ever increase their powers over us. But I haven't seen anything in a long time that would make me believe it just won't keep going the way it has for the past couple of decades. But that is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
1st Step :
~75% of power is nuclear generated
2nd Step :
At around 11.30 pm and until 7 am (or so), you pay less for your electricity.
That means every one sets their tank based water heater to automatically use only night hours power.
(you can still switch to manual if you run out of hot water).
That way, all those heaters are off from peak hours usage.
Bzzzzt, wrong, thank you for playing, have a nice day, next contestant please.
Sorry, that power plant was built back in 1975. Before big-screen TVs and before computers. Before always-ready-on-standby electronics and wall-warts everywhere. And when it was built is *was* scaleable, they *have* to be, because if you generate power that no one uses, it has to be dissipated as heat and *that* is wasteful. And costs money, which gets passed on to the consumers. Meanwhile they've got coal-fired plants that are completely shut down more than 75% of the time, because those plants are only needed during peak times - 8 hours a day for two months in the summer, and 8 hours a day for two months in the winter. Meanwhile the maintenance costs and staffing costs need to be paid 100% of the time, whether it's running or not.
Let the consumer be hit in the pocket with the true cost of that 50 inch plasma TV, or the true cost of leaving the computer on so they can have that torrented movie waiting for them when they get home from work. Either that, or the consumers will have to pay a *much* higher flat rate to pay for yet another power plant that will only get used for those 6 days a year during a heatwave when the power company has to brown out because of capacity. Yeah, real smart there... paying millions for a plant that sits idle... fully staffed and maintained... for 51 weeks of the year.
Still, you present the typical American view on economy and resources, which makes Americans so well-liked throughout the world... why economize when you can spend more? You used to be well-known for that stance in autmobile industry, now it shows in electric power... I don't understand why is it so hard to save energy that every other option must be exhausted first?
More power plants - sure, why not. But just because people can't economize... no. Learn to manage the resources you have; they are not that scarce, you are just wasteful.
Ignore this signature. By order.
it was effectively impossible to build new plants there.
No, it was done to curb pollution. Previously, the environmental impact wasn't considered -- or hardly at all.
You do realize that CA prides itself on protecting and cleaning up its environment?
Why should Texas, who built and owned their own plants and transmission lines (and who, for a long time saw no need to tie into the national grid) be forced to deliver electricity to California
No one forced Texas to do anything. Keep that in mind for my next counterpoint...
[Texas] had gas and coal fired plants belching 24/7....
No one forced Texas to do anything. Besides, you just effectively argued that Texas' environment (and consequently the health of its own citizens) comes secondary to heavy polluters.
California got exactly what it deserved.
Now we see your true feelings. It's a blame the victim mentality. Enron felt the same way.
Washington, Oregon, and even Montana also faced increased rates due to California refusing to improve its infrastructure.
Perhaps you missed where energy traders, such as Enron, were illegally gaming the market. Criminal acts drove up prices for everybody.
Once Enron imploded due to its sheer unsustainable greed, energy prices fell again. The fake power shortages went away. People went to jail. People lost their ill-gotten gains. Funny, I haven't seen a rolling blackout since.
Look around your house. How many digital clocks are there? How many things with Standby LEDs? The quick-on circuitry of appliances takes up a LOT of power when you add them up.
Even those recharge transformers that you leave in the wall after you unplug the phone, notebook , ipod are all taking up power all day long.
In my country (Portugal, EU), the power supplier has the option of a bi-hourly tariff. You pay more for the power during the day but less during the night.
I bought a bunch of timers for my heaters so they only work at night and only turn on dishwasher and clothes washer machines at night, before going to sleep.
This is a relief to the supplier because it flattens the power usage around the clock and it's good for me because I pay less for electricity.
conservation has to play a part in a new model of energy use - what's the incentive for an electricity retailer to develop a system - or even participate in a team leading the the development of a system that eventually reduces their revenue? we have to get off the megawatts metric, and think about the end services provided, using efficiency, using conservation as components of that solution. start selling the services people need, with the valuable absence of CO2 emissions, and high technology - not parsimonious fear-mongering doomsday predictions, it just won't sell.
IMHO, to prevent instabilities and peaking, system can not be left blind and non-cooperative. We should have an integrated intelligent system for power delivery:
...) on low price/priority settings and our immediate need appliances (hair dryers, computers, lights, microwave ovens, ...) on high price/priority settings.
There should be an asynchronous handshaking protocol for appliances to request exact amount of additional power from the grid and to postpone activation before the grid acknowledges that it is ready to supply it.
Furthermore, when load intensifies, in order to prevent "starvation" of new appliances waiting to be switched on, all appliances would have to be able to gradually scale down their consumption on demand from the grid.
Alternatively (/additionally), there should be "power bid" system: consumer should set the limit for the price of a watt consumer is willing to pay for given appliance (according to consumers' own priorities and preferences) and then the grid could clear the overload by raising the price (thus pushing of-grid appliances with lower priority set by their respective owners) in real time.
Obviously, we could set our low priority "batch job" appliances (dishwashers, clothes washer/dryer,
Interestingly, this system could also allow small/micro/local rapid response energy producers and merchants (buying low, selling high, provided they have efficient energy storage/retrieval systems) to compete on the "watt market" and offload the system, thus creating new opportunities, better energy supply and more accurate cost management.
For instance, we could also express the timing in monetary equivalents: you can buy immediate power from small producer or merchant now, for higher cost, or you can book lower cost watts delivered from huge power station at some later time, when they are ready to deliver some extra power. In short, if you can tell exactly how many watts you need, for how long and you can afford to wait some time to get it, you could get yourself significantly lower cost.
While this ins't a completely bad idea, the cited articles suggest savings to consumers will be fairly modest, in the 5~7% range at best, and quite the opposite in a significant number of cases. I'm not really sure how much demand shifting "we" consumers can do that we're not already doing. In the interests of brevety suffice ti to say that for _me_, damnably little. And i suspect a lot of consumers are going to be pig-biting mad when they end up paying premium rates to run their air conditioning on hot days after leaving the AC off all day whiile they were working anyway. My prediction: this stuff _will_ on average, save most consumers a litle money untill it's widely deployed, at which point power utilities will start gaming the system to jack their effective rates up. Ultimately, consumers will pay more for less, utilities will sell less for more than if the system weren't installed at all and overall consumption will not change from current trends at all. "Kinda" like how that whole cable TV thang has worked out. Or your POTS wire. etc.... imho.
Exactly. I live in Texas, and if you don't want to pay through the teeth for polluting our land for your cheap electricity then eat blackouts.
Stop building power plants, then regulate how much suppliers in your state can charge the people. What could go wrong?
Did Enron screw California over? Yep, don't like it? Fix your goofy ass laws, and build some infrastructure. It's the same exact thing that's happening right now in the oil market. In the U.S. we stopped building any infrastructure in refining or producing, now idiots are crying that someone else controls the price of their fuel.
There are different type of power plants, some are very economical but take a long time to come on line or change output levels, these are called baseload plants; other plants cost much more to operate but can come online quickly and change power levels almost instantly, they are called peaking plants. On peaking plant we have locally that can cold-start in 15 minutes!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This doesn't seem terribly new or revolutionary... Here in SE Michigan we've had a "little amber light" in the box out back connected to the electric supply for the A/C for at least 10 years. During the summer, during peak hours when all of SE Michigan runs their air at once, they shut off A/C units for a couple of hours randomly to avoid brown/black outs.
Modern Hydro (and Pumped-Storage) plants can actually respond within a minute.
In areas where it's geographically practical, Pumped Storage is also a fantastic way of dealing with the peak/off-peak usage problem, and could also potentially be used to provide "solar power at night," albeit at great expense.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Demand shaping enabled by smart meters is happening today (check out Florida Power & Lights programme) and works. Tricks like turning a water heater off for 40 minutes during the middle of a summer's day when the air con load maxes out can deliver major savings.
The real problem is that the entire energy system is demand driven: when you turn the a light there better be electrons there or we have a brown out. Want we need to do is convert the energy system to supply following: devices use power when it is available.
The trick is the feed the price from the energy markets into the home where we can run an internal energy market. Your appliances bid for the power they need and the highest bidders win. Our smart homes and the appliances themselves decide when is the best time to soak up excess energy supply. Lights will always want power, your water heater might not if it's hot, and your washing machine might be happy to wait until the power is cheap late at night.
This also nicely accommodates your own generation (solar cells, CHAP ...)--give it a price and add it to your home energy market. You can even sell you excess back onto the grid, if it makes sense.
Like all increasingly scare resources, we need to use less. Technologies like desalination are only making it worse (desalination needs a lot of energy, and we need more water to make more energy). If we want a sustainable energy system then we need to be a lot smarter about how we generate and use electricity.
A little more detail at SlideShare.
r.
PEG
i.e. they can pay me more for kWh I shed during peak times than it would cost
me to continue using those same kWh at the flat rate.
Think of it this way: the utility is buying generating capacity from me;
I should get something similar to what they would pay to purchase peak power from
any another supplier.
[Gene]
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
'undergrads think they know everything, graduates know they know nothing and PHDs know everyone else knows nothing.' And post-doc's stopped thinking at all a decade ago and started the yes-man professorial tract in which all thinking ceases and automaton paper printing begins. All in the name of someone's tenure tract.
And once running, 200MW turbine can change its production for 5MW (2.5%) in just 4 seconds! Probably even faster, but that was a limit that we had to obey when we were controlling power system frequency in Serbia.
No sig today.
I've gotten a letter from my electric company every month for quite a while. They explain how the smart meters work. They want me to put in a meter that will let THEM turn off the power during peak demand (or whenever else they'd like). Maybe I'll learn how to hack the meters and start turning off my neighbors power for fun.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
I've got mod points, but it's better to reply in my capacity as a controls engineer working in sustainable energies, then just mod you down.
As debatable as it is whether CA utilities did or did not build for excess capacity, it is quite frankly irrelevant. The kind of excess capacity that they would have planned for would have not been what we needed then, and especially what we need now.
We need measures to reduce energy consumption and measures to better use what we've got. Thermodynamically, a big plant isn't anywhere near as efficient running a small load, than a small plant running a small load. Ideally, we'd be able to generate 95% (I made that number up out of thin air. 100% is of course ideal, but obviously not attainable) of our energy with base-load plants and only occasionally spin up small gas turbines for the peak loads. While smart grids do nothing for the former (unless people just become more aware of the cost and thus reduce usage) they certainly do help with the latter. A washing machine run at 3AM, for all intents and purposes, is ready in the same amount of time as one that was started just before bedtime.
A good place to look is island grids. Many islands literally do not have a second source of power, so they have to specify their one plant to handle both base and peak load. This is increases capital costs and reduces efficiency at base load, increasing recurring costs. And they can't even sell excess capacity, so the island utility is really pushed up against a wall. Unless... unless you do something to spread out the load. Because, let's face it, an island grid is actually pretty nice from a simplicity standpoint because there are a lot less unknowns. No trains, little industry, just a lot of washing machines and air conditioners.
So, in short, placing the blame on someone else is not the answer. Conservation is not a virtue, and global warming and energy shortages don't stop at our borders. Smart grids are coming and are in fact a very good solution to many of our capacity problems. While they don't help save power use, they do make the usage more efficient.
P.S. As an aside, it's unfortunate that the last, least important step-- time optimization--, is being done first. If people would just put that damned ADSL modem on a timer (mine uses as much energy in a day as my refrigerator), unplug chargers they're not using, and put the computer in hibernate mode at night, that would do far more than time-optimized smart energy.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
My power company allows me to work on a off-peak rewards program. Peak electricity is about twice as much, while off-peak (7pm - 7am) costs 1/3 of the regular price.
We do our laundry, dishes, and shower on off-peak time. The water heater is set for economy mode during the day.
Doing this billing option does require a new meter on your house, and I'm not sure if the electric company charges you for it or not - the previous owner had it installed.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
"many industrial users tend to use less"
Trust me on this. I am an IT provider to nearly 100 industrial sites as part of my commercial client base. NONE of them shut down their systems at night, NOT ONE. They may let a bunch of employees go home, and many don't run 3rd shifts, but most of the equipment stays on, even the lights in most cases.
It's a very rare industrial site that has not learned that the time and energy and logistics of stopping production and starting it again, with product left on the line partially assembled, is not only counter productive, but in many cases simply costs more.
It's easier to use fewer people, or slow the line down slightly, and run 24/7, than it is to stop/start daily.
Commerical (most of them), sure, they turn out the ligths at night, but not industial.
Unfortunately, it's not "at night" that's the issue anyway. It's the few hours at the peak of the morning, and at sunset that are the worst, especially in summer when AC runs on electricity only, where in the winter much heat is from other sources (coal, gas, oil, wood, etc).
AC units kick on and off frequently, every 15-45 minutes depending on the home, climate, and time of day. During the peak heat of the day, everyone is running one, businesses and homes alike. Although it "saves electricity" (assuming your house is well insulated) to use a timer based AC system (wamer when noone is home, cooler when thay are, automatically) the real truth is that now we not only have to deal millions of units turning on and off, but nearly ALL of them turn on about 4:15-4:30, and run continuously while they cool the house down to it's comfort temp from it's all-day noone-is-home temp. This is a MASSIVE load on the system.
By adding some inteligence to the grid, we can stagger the times AC units come on and off. By allowing some tollerances, and some minor schedule adjustments, we can 1) prevent every AC unit from running at the same time, 2) cool your house earlier one day, and later another, balancing your electric use with others, 3) keep your house withing 3 degrees of your target at all times, 4) charge you more for unaceptable "comfort" levels (if you like it colder in your house than 78 degrees in the summer, no problem, we'll just charge you more), 5) we can avoid a lot of "surge" use, avoiding lots of expensive supplement power, and lower to overall cost WITHOUT building more power plants.
We do need more power plants. As people bring home plug-in hybrids or full electric cars, we'll have to account for this. We can't have half of california plug their car in at 5:45PM and expect all of them to start charging at once...
The good news is (most) electronics are getting more efficient. As we switch light bulbs, get more inteligent and more efficient ACs, fridges, and other appliances, use lower power PCs and TVs, and start doing other things like eliminating "sleep creap" from devices, throwing out plug-in scent warmers, etc, we can offset a bunch of it, but not even close to all. I can only hope that all of our NEW power will come anything but fossil fuel.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
One of my personal pet peaves is those damed plug-in scent warmers.
;D
I had a few, and when going through my previous home a few years back (it was INCREDIBLY poortly insulated, and I did everything I could to save power and avoid $350 bills), i took a serious look at what those things were costing me.
On average, they only burn about 4 watts each. I had 4 of those for 18 total watts (a few diferent types that used different power loads), and one candle plate (thing you set jar candles on to melt, used 17 watts).
Over 30 watts, running 24/7/365 (and often with dried up cartidges we'd forget to replace). You know what? Not only did it waste a lot of power, they damned things actually don't smell as good, or last as long, as some scented oil in a diffuser (spherical bowl with some wooden wicks stuck in it). I have 4 of these in my house now. You can pick up a good diffuser at a nature shop, world market store, or other places, or make one yourself by hitting a craft shop. The oil itself is cheap in bulk, and I cut it 3:1 with perfume base (aka rubbing alcohol). It's about $5 worth of oil to fill one, but I only do that about 3 times a year... Same cost in plug-ins for that room? $4 every 45 days... more than twice the cost not counting the electricity saved!
warning: If you have small childred or michevous cats, you may want to 1) place your oil difuser out of reach/access or 2) use strong double sided tape and affic it permanantly in place (if you have a spot you can do that to). I have 2 of mine in wall mount sconces, one above the fridge, and 1 in my bedroom on top of the gentlemans chest (about 5 feet off the floor). Getting spilled oil out of a carpet, furniture, or other surface is not something I plan to ever have to do.... (again)
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
No it isn't. You have to build dams for that, which the environmentalists will also object to.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
What laws were broken? I know all about the big Enron accounting scandal; I'm talking about the alleged illegal gaming of energy sales to CA.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Dude "WE?"
If you're all selling power for 7x what it's worth, then where's the problem?
It's called an incentive. It's to encourage you to 'do the right thing' by helping -y-o-u- (cough, I mean) early adopters with their payback period.
thx e
Woah woah woah.. Who decided that 78 degrees is the target here and that less than that is "unacceptable?"
Humans are most comfortable at a "room temperature" of 72 degrees, on average. At 78, you're going to have nearly one standard deviation of people that are actually sweating (and not necessarily just the fatties, either). I think we can all agree that office stench is also important to keep down.
The problem is manifold, as like I often say, "You can always put on another sweater. You can't take off more clothes than all of 'em."
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Unfortunately it is rare to find oneself in a situation where you can take off "all of 'em" My work requires business casual. :(
What the grid needs is a massive storage system. I'd venture to say that a large percentage of generated power just disappears because it isn't consumed. I remember reading a Popular Science article about these huge underground flywheels for doing just this.
"Most TVs, DVD players and other electrical devices use almost as much power when they are "off" as they do when they are on."
This isn't true for TVs, particularly high-draw TVs like CRTs.
You do have a point though, devices should have at least 4 power modes:
OFF - 0 watts
Deep sleep - just enough power to sense the "on" button and/or remote-control "on," plus run the internal clock.
Sleep - enough power to respond to other events such as a timer expiring or a wake-on-LAN or wake-on-mouse event.
Full power - normal
Plus 0 or more intermediate states between "sleep" and "full power."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Some CFL bulbs are encased in plastic, meaning you can drop them on the floor and they probably don't break. If they do break, the plastic will contain the mess. I don't think it's airtight but it is a big help.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Exactly. Some factories with a large enough capex will run 24/7 so the equipment is fully utilized.
Pumped storage dams tend to be located at very high altitudes, and have relatively small reservoirs (in terms of surface area).
In terms of environmental cost, this is probably the best-case scenario for a hydro project, given that there's very little wildlife being displaced.
There's a growing trend of pragmatic environmentalists coming up that will hopefully replace the last one, and encourage responsible forms of progress rather than opposing it altogether.
Even the founder of Greenpeace is disgusted with the monster that his organization turned into, and is now pushing for the responsible development of nuclear and hydroelectric power.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Austin Energy has a Power Partner Program where they install a special thermostat to your A/C that cycles power less often during peak summer usage.
-l
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Why doesnt California take that pride and live in the dark. It sounds like you are trying to force Texas to do something... power California. It is hardly environmentally friendly to mess something up a long ways away, it just makes the users pretend to be clean and provide stats for how much improvement has occurred. In fact, there was no improvement, there was only a relocated mess. Pay through the nose, deal with brownouts, or build plants... or reduce usage. Please, just please, don't talk about California's pride of protecting their own environment at the expense of someone else's.
just get a tattoo of a collar and tie, and some nice shoes.
My water heater is gas, you insensitive clods!
The expensive peak load plants in the the US power air conditioning. So we get offers in our electric bill for some sort of automated gizmo that will let Big Brother control our *thermostat* from headquarters. When it gets hot and blackouts are imminent, Big Brother wants to be able to turn our thermostats up 3 degrees.
Coming soon, a fair number of people will have plug in hybrid cars, and that will give the electric utilities incentive to install smart meters that can charge the cars at offpeak rates instead of expensive peak rates, and even out the load, so even more power plants don't have to be built to power cars.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
there's also a system of using no power at all by evaporating water to remove the heat while only powering a fan.
Nevada Power offers a time-of-use billing.
http://www.nevadapower.com/conservation/home/home_rebates/time_of_use.cfm
as do many others. They also have discount for allowing a disconnector to be wired into your A/C compressor/condenser fan circuit where it can be turned off for just an hour - it won't let a house get too hot, but that is enough to help shave the peaks.
Which saves them a lot of money, since you must size your generating capacity to your peaks, or else end up like California with rolling blackouts.
Luckily, Las Vegas only had one.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
In other words cut off the power when you need it the most. It might not be such a big thing to cut off AC at the hottest hours of the day in the midwest but try it in Arizona or here in Florida and you have a serious problem.
Sorry, but I pay the power company for my usage and to provide unlimited access. I have no problem with programs like this existing but they should be opt-in. Some of us would prefer to control our own usage rather than having the control taken from us.
In truth, Florida Power and Light already has such a program in place but it is opt-out and it took months to get myself off the program. They gave us a tiny $5 credit each month and in exchange we sweat on the hottest days and suffered through the worst of Florida summers. Luckily we survived.
Surprisingly enough, California even has a nuke plant!
www.sce.com/songs/
P.S. Will an admin please fix commenting. "It's been 4 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment" errors - on NON-ANONYMOUS comments. After 2 minutes it should be allowing non-anon posts, but isn't.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
Really? I find that very hard to believe. On average, the fridge is using about 1 kwh/day.
Energy Star
It's always on and always drawing some power even if the compressor isn't cooling. The DSL modem is drawing more power per day? How much? I just really find that hard to believe.
too high of a demand can cuase blackouts and wtf are you going to do when your power shuts off pretty much RANDOMLY in your house around that time?
Fire up a generator.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
While costing nothing to maintain may not be accurate they likely cost ALMOST nothing to maintain when they are idle. After all, the wearable and moving parts aren't being used. Since the plants are only used about half the time, their expected lifespan has now doubled.
Since the power company will be making the payments on schedule and not only when the plant is fired they will still pay the same amount of interest. If the plant was slated for 10yrs of usage and due to idle time that 10yrs will still occur but be spread out over 50yrs only a moron insists the burners be fired during the first 10yrs just because that happens to be when the checks are being written.
What I meant was that high-draw items like CRTs take up a lot more power when they are on than when they are in standby. This compares to a VCR where the difference between "on but not playing a tape" and "off/timer recording mode" is small or nonexistent.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So until some bountiful and clean power source can be delivered cheaply, electric utilities are pressured to extend the generating capacity we already have.
Perhaps we should look into nuclear again?
(ducks)
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
They still stink. Fresh clean air doesn't small at all.
Exactly.
Well said.
NIMBY in the extreme.
This is what I was trying to say all along, but that California centric fool can't see that refusing to build infrastructure because it might have a pollution price tag, while at the same time demanding other states supply power is nothing but pushing pollution out of sight.
Texas plants have scrubbers. California could do the same. Yet for a 15 year period not ONE new power plant was allowed in California.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If the plant was slated for 10yrs of usage and due to idle time that 10yrs will still occur but be spread out over 50yrs only a moron insists the burners be fired during the first 10yrs just because that happens to be when the checks are being written.
Nobody fires up the burners simply for the sake of firing them up if nobody needs the electricity.
Instead, the plant doesn't get built in the first place.
When you're building a huge capital project you first determine what the utilization will be. If the utilization doesn't justify building the plant, then you don't build the plant. Maybe you build peakers instead, or maybe you just let the state have blackouts. That's how private capital works - if you want people to pay for their own power plants, then you need to make sure they can make back enough money that they'll want to build them in the first place.
The grandparent is correct - depreciation is one of the largest expenses on something like this. Just look at your car - half the cost of operating it is probably depreciation. If you buy a new car and let it sit and rust for 20 years, does it cost nothing simply because you didn't have to buy gas? Of course not - you paid the biggest expense of all the day you bought it - nobody of ordinary means would buy an expensive car if they only needed to drive one day per month.
The article says: "...program your house or appliances to make that move." So this tech will help you turn of your stuff during peak hours, now isn't that exactly what you're suggesting?
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Actually, 74 "room tempurature" is considdered cool to most people, including my wife. 76 is a comfortable setting for most people. The standard settings that the EPA and your power company recomend it to keep the tempurature at 78 or higher in the summer and 68 or below in the Winter.
Actually, in the summer, you should wake at 78 degrees, it should rise to 85 when you're not home, return to 78 in the evening, and rise slightly to 82 at night. In the winter, you should wake at 70, it should drop to 62 when noone is home in the daytime, return to 70 in the evening, and settle at 66 when sleeping. A tolerance of +/- 2 degrees is permitted in the thermostat (if set to 78, it will rise to 80 before cooling to 76, then slowly rise back to 80, etc...)
This is the Energy Start setting you need to comply with in order to receive EnergyStar certification fro your home, and the accompanying discount on your power bill.. When you signed up for EnergyStar discounts, you AGREED to these settings. Failure to maintain them, should your power company be aware, could leave you lible to repay any back discounts you recieved. I've never heard of this, but EPA certified programable thermostats all use this default setting (and some can not be overridden if they're monitored by your power company, something Califiornia is about to pass into law).
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I forgot the EPA link:'
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/product_specs/program_reqs/thermostats_prog_req.pdf
sorry
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Actually, scientists have been looking at creating VAST underwater resivoirs, combined with surface resivoirs, in a cyclic pumping solution. The idea is that water exists in it's natural state underground. During the day, when solar is being generated faster than it can be used, we pump water to the surface, or simply a higher level resivoir. At night, we let it flow back to it's subteranian home, and generate power. Since the flow of water from surface to underground can be tightly controlled, we can produce variable power at will, and "store" wind and solar energy.
The resivoirs are manmade, in mostly non-pourous rock, that are coated with a sealant. The underground portion would be hundreds of feet underground. The surface resivoir would fill and drain like a tide (and "sureface" doesn't necesarily mean open to air, it could just be one higher up in the rock bed)
Since the water is contantly cycled, it can also be easily filtered, so contamination is not an issue. As a bonus, in some places these can be built where rain runoff normally goes, and we can turn it into a great big water purification plant, and any water arriving by steam or river generates electricity. We don't need to dam it off, just funnel it into a hole in the ground, so there's no mass change to the environment (no new lakes 6 miles across to deal with). If we start by pumping seawater to the location, and fill the system from scratch, we also don't have to cannibalize existing ecosystems to get the water, and desalination and filtering would render it drinkable for future uses.
With all that water, we could build the nuclear plant down there, 500 feet underground, where it's safe from terorists, airplanes, and leaks.
Sure, it's gonna cost A LOT, but water power systems have VERY long lifespans, as do solar and wind generators. We'll need to replace the filters regularly, and the pumps occasionally, but a modular infrastructure would be part of the plan.
It's quite nearly sci-fi, but also quite possible.
Expanding the system for additional power generation is as simple as building another resivoir below the 2, giving another chamber to flood water into. We'd just need more solar and wind to pump it back to the surface.
Instant poewr, at instant notice, over superconducting lines to regional power grids anywhere in the USA we need it.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Yea, I call BS on that too. My fridge uses a 120v AC on a 20 Amp circuit. My cable modem uses 12v DC at 1.5 Amps. I don't know the conversion, but I'd be willing to bet I can run the modem for close to a month on what the fridge uses running the compressor for 30 minutes.
The batter backup I have under my desk provides 1500VA. It will run my telephone base station (wireless phone dock), wi-fi router/firewall, cable modem, VoIP box, and cell phone charger plus it's own LCD display screen for about 8 hours without power from the wall. It would run my fridge for about 7 minutes...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
By using wind, solar, and other 100 % renewable power sources, they can overproduce enough juice during the day to pump that water themselves. The wind, tidal, and geothermal systems provide a nice base load at night to supplement the other power sources. Also, the water's not running downhioll all the time, just what's needed to stem the overdemand for short periods.
We've been trying to get these things built in the USA for years, but places we can make them are too far from need points, so without building our superconducting redundant electric grid, we're a few decades off from reality here. They could power California easy enough from the rocky mountanis off that though...
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Winter doesn't even matter. As I said, you can always pile on more sweaters and blankets. 70 even sounds high in the winter. I keep my thermostat at 64 during the winter, and 50 (it's lowest setting that isn't off. I don't want the pipes to freeze if it suddenly gets cold) when I'm not going to be around for a while.
But you can't just go average the other way (and I still contend that 78 is an optimistic average). If you set AT the average comfort temperature, half the people will be uncomfortably warm or even sweating, and half the people will be comfortable (since they'll just apply the requisite number of sweaters to reach their comfort temp if it's higher than the set-temp.)
And yes, I'm one of those people that could strip down to skivvies and still be uncomfortably warm in a 78 degree room, unless I've been immobile for the previous hour.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Maybe he mistyped - a higher power computer + modem probably uses about the same amount of power as a fridge everyday. Luckily computers are starting to get more efficient, but my Athlon XP system + 19" CRT uses ~300W or so.
My info is right from the EPA. It's not MY decision of what is and isn't comfortable. Perhaps if you didn't keep your house at 64 all winter you'd be used to 78. Today while I've been out and about I took the chance to notice a few thermostat settings:
Starbucks, 79 degrees
BestBuy, 78 degrees
My bank's lobby, 78 degrees
McCallister's Deli, 75 degrees (some older woman complained it was cold while we were there)
My house is currently 78 degrees. If I was wearing a suit, or jeans and a thinck shirt, sure, I'de be uncomfortable, but I'm in a thin summer polo I wore to work and a pair of Khakis. Perfectly comfortable.
I have a few friends like you. They're all over 200 lbs (some closer to 275). One has been inspired by The Biggest looser, and he's lost over 80 lbs in the last 10 months. We used to call him "Yeti" he liked it so cold, now he's comfy at closer to 80, and won't let you near his thermostat to make it cooler.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I worked on load shedding projects 25 years ago that had tens of thousands of units installed and covered large fractions of some states. It used radio pager technology and temporarily shut down selected groups of units, each had an item, such as the air conditioner, hot water heater, irrigation pump, that would be shut down for about 15 minutes when commanded by the computer in the office. Different groups would be shut down each time to spread the inconvenience. Participation wasn't exactly optional.
Near as I can tell, the advent of the smart meter, an idea back then whose time had not yet come due to the cost and reliability of the technology involved, has brought about schemes to exploit the lack of reliability of people in order to extract more profits from them. Other than that, it would seem this whole thing is just another rehash of an idea already in successful operation over two decades ago and not limited by having people voluntarily doing something.
"Power providers and tech companies are working to redesign the grid so you can switch off your house when high demand strains the system, or program your house or appliances to make that move." Isn't this a typo? Shouldn't it says 'So THEY can switch off your house..'?
82 at night? Eighty Freaking Two?
Yeah, that's great as long as you enjoy waking up in puddles of your own sweat.
Eighty two. Jesus.
In Colorado, the power company gives you an option: they pay you $25 and they install a switch on your air-conditioner that lets them turn it off at peak times. I agreed to this several years ago and I haven't noticed a thing except for seeing the switch on my air-conditioner. I assume it works and that they have exercised their rights...
If its not marked with metadata, it's not ready yet.
But... that being said, here's the math to back things up:
My wifi modem/router uses 17W. That surprised me, I verified that with some very sensitive instruments, so it's about as accurate as you could want. (NOTE: This includes the stock wall wart included with the modem, so of course if you used a more efficient DC input from solar (which is what I did) then you of course save a lot. That (inefficient) wall wart uses up about 4W, which is over 30% of the energy required to run the modem!)
So the math is pretty simple. At 17W during 24 hours, I use 1.47MJ (Holy crap, running something 24 hours a day adds up quickly!), whereas the 1kWhr/day fridge uses 3.6 MJ/day. So, yeah, that's about the same order of magnitude.
Once again, unplug that damned modem when you're at work and asleep. Or do what I did and put it on a timer. Or do what I'm doing and run it on a timer and off solar.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
Their numbers, not mine. I think 82 at night is uncomfortable, too uncomfortable. I handle 78 at night OK, but anything more and I'd be changing sheets daily from the sweat. Pillow top mattresses hold heat well, and even with a thin sheet and a ceiling fan running, I can't do much more.
I have to think that in a typical 3 bedroom house that an efficient air conditioner, running at night when it's not fighting the sun, could actually use less electricity than 3-4 ceiling fans running.
Of course, MOST parts of the country don't stay above 82 at night, except on rare nights. Simply opening the windows is fine by me in SC for all but about 6 weeks of the year. When I liven in CT we didn't have AC at all except in the kitchen and living room.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
In English, that's known as pumped storage, and it's used pretty widely as you explain.
FWIW, it costs around $100/kWh to build, based on recent projects like this one, and is IMHO the most likely candidate for allowing large-scale integration of intermittent sources like wind and solar.