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Computers Causing 2nd Hump In Peak Power Demand
Hugh Pickens writes "Traditional peak power hours — the time during the day when power demand shoots up — run from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. when air conditioning begins to ramp up and people start heading for malls and home but utilities are now seeing another peak power problem evolve with a second surge that runs from about 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. when people head toward their big screen TVs and home computers. 'It is [not] so much a peak as it is a plateau,' says Andrew Tang, senior director of the smart energy web at Pacific Gas & Electric. '8 p.m. is kind of a recent phenomenon.' Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis. Efforts to reduce demand are already underway with TV manufacturers working to reduce the power consumption in LCD and plasma while Intel and PC manufacturers are cranking down computer power consumption. 'Without a doubt, there's demand' for green PCs, says Rick Chernick, CEO of HP partner Connecting Point, adding that the need to be green is especially noticeable among medical industry enterprise customers."
Just change the air time of American Idol to 6:00pm and turn politics to 8:00-9:00pm
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Easiest way to fix these humps in power demand is to disable stanby/hibernation and leave computers on all day!!
The free market is actually coming up with solutions?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Traditional peak power hours -- the time during the day when power demand shoots up -- run from 4 pm to 7 pm when air conditioning begins to ramp up
But what about those of us who DON'T live in Texas? I only use my air conditioning 3-4 months a year, and not consistantly then. I haven't had it on for weeks; I ran the (gas) furnace this morning.
And most people I know (granted, most of tem aren't nerds) turn the TV on as soon as they get home. How did they come to the conclusion that computers are causeing the spike?
Maybe folks are eating dinner later and it's that George Foreman electric grill and 750 watt microwave nuking dinner that's causing it?
Sorry, I didn't read the linked blagh. Were there some useful stats garnered from real research, or was it a slanted piece like it seemed from its URL?
Free Martian Whores!
I think that the problem is that very few people have 13 to 17 inch LCD TVs anymore.
They are more power efficient but bigger. THe back light is the real killer.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
1. Offer to sell electricity at a fixed rate by the hour
2. Broadcast the price through the outlet
3. Let appliances display the current (ahah) hourly rate
\u262D = \u5350
I hope that the 'market' comes up with many of the ones that I can think of.
Battery UPS in your PC case... stores power for power outages and uses the battery during startup cycles, thus spreading the draw from the grid to less used times.
EU just made incandescent lights illegal.
Green design homes
Light timer switches with built-in motion sensors and other such devices.
More efficient solar energy. Windows with solar collectors built-in as well as LED lighting so that daylight can continue unabated.
The list goes on. Anything that prevents a 250 watt drain on the grid during peak times will reduce the problem dramatically if millions of homes participated. Say 2 million homes used 250W/hr less at peak times for any given grid supply area: 500MegaWatt hour savings. That's a lot of savings.
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CRTs are power hogs, but your laser printer is the biggest power hog of your computer system. The fuser gets up to 2k F to melt the toner on the paper.
Plasma displays use less than CRT, LED uses less than plasma.
A space heater uses more juice than just about anything in your house save your AC or (if it's electric) your water heater. Your toaster comes in a good second (while it's actually toasting, which isn't long) followed by your microwave.
If a device's primary purpose is to heat something, it uses a shitload of electricity.
All your electric appliances/gizmos are rated in watts. Just RTFM, it's usually listed on the back page. If you have no FM it usually says on the back of the appliance how many watts it consumes.
Free Martian Whores!
As far as I can see this is just a bs sensationalizing fluff story. I work for a multi state power utility as an engineer and we have no such issues.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
If air-conditioning is the peak demand, which it is in the South, then no reductions to such "secondary peaks" like evening TV-watching (etc.) will help, because the utilities must maintain the generating capacity to meet the highest peak.
Only when air-conditioning demand is brought below the next-highest peak will there be any benefit at all from these secondary reductions.
That said, computers and TVs do contribute to the air-conditioning peak, and so it helps to make them more efficient... but that wasn't the point of the article.
The air-conditioning peak can only be brought down by difficult measures: upgrading the windows and insulation of older homes, upgrading older air-conditioning systems to newer models, keeping the house hotter inside, overhauling older duct systems to fix leaks and the like. Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system". We very much like to be told that it is virtuous to do what we already wanted to do.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The other 90% is your standard generation.
he 10% is a buffer for high-demand hours, for leeway in routing, minimizing outages during maintenance, and emergencies.
It's (mostly) separate hardware that kicks in only when needed.
They're saying that the power usage throughout the day has developed a second high point that often requires the extra hardware to kick in. They mention this period being a plateau, meaning it lasts a long time. Running extra hardware is expensive, running it for a long time is more expensive.
Most of the time when those things are idle does NOT apply to the 50 hours when it's at 10%. (I believe you meant to ask if the time when it's at only 10% (and thus idle 90%) applies to the 50 hours when it's idle).
They're either on of off, in large groups. They're expensive to start and stop. So the answer to your question is mu. T he extra hardware doesn't run at 10% like a CPU. The extra hardware runs at 100% and adds to the capacity of the grid.
Taking the whole grid into account, you could classify banks of extra hardware, and at any given time find the % of which are on and off, but the only thing that matters is when they're on in your area. You par for generation and delivery separately, remember.
This is a little off-topic, but there's an analogous jump for bandwidth.
I used to work at a fairly large university, and you could watch the bandwidth charts and see what was happening:
9 am - people arrive at work, bandwidth climbs
1 pm - bandwidth plateaus - people are eating lunch / students waking up or getting back from early classes
5 pm - bandwidth halves as workers go home
7 pm - bandwidth climbs again due to student usage
9 pm - plateaus
2 am - begins to decline
6 am - minimal usage
LCDs _do_ save power compared to equivalently-sized CRTs. Quite significantly, in fact. My 24" LCD monitor uses half as much power as my older 21" CRT.
However, I suspect that when they moved to LCDs many people also upgraded to physically larger TVs.
The other thing to consider is that many people have plasma displays, which consume significantly more power than LCDs.
If a device's primary purpose is to heat something, it uses a shitload of electricity.
The big power spikes in the UK are at the start of the ad breaks in soaps, when millions of people get up to turn on the kettle and make a cup of tea.
You're young and naive; things don't move that fast. I'm 56 and the stuff that was science fiction when I was a kid has mostly already happened.
Look at Star Trek (it's dead, Jim). Self-opening doors? Yep, in every grocery store. Communucators? Yep, only we call them cell phones. Flat screen voice activated talking computers on a desk? Yep. When Star Trek came out the average computer wasn't much more powerful than today's scientific calculator and took a whole building to house, and cost millions of dollars. Say "Mom" into your Razr and it will dial your mother.
Some other things we didn't have included digital clocks, the internet, CDs, DVDs, VCRs, microwave ovens, motion sensors, crack cocaine (some things alas should never be invented), antiviral drugs, antidepressant drugs, LEDs, LCDs, air bags in cars, fuel injectors in cars, or global warming.
In Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan McCoy couldn't cure Kirk's age-related farsightedness. But Dr. Yeh cured mine!
In 2003 the FDA approved the CrystaLens eye implant. It was a life changing technology for me; as the linked journal says, I was very nearsighted all my life, and in middle age I became farsighted as well, using contact lenses AND reading glasses. I wear no corrective lenses at all now.
They invented the flying car in 1903, it's called an "airplane". There is more energy than I can use coming from the wall sockets in my home, is that not "limitless" for all practical purposes? And they can in fact cure many cancers these days provided it is caught soon enough.
To this geezerly nerd, I'm living in a science fiction world. You might be interested to read Growing up with computers. I think you are likely to see as much progress in your life by the time you reach my age as I have. Unless I croak soon I expect to see even more technological miracles.
Free Martian Whores!
"Those are expensive and/or painful measures, and more importantly, those measures fail to tell us that "it is virtuous to buy a new computer or entertainment system"."
How much would we save if all computers hibernated during non usage? Or had smart UPSes that turned everything off and on instead of running 24/7?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You won't find a more efficient design on the market right now. Samsung's 67" LED DLP set draws about 120 watts.
A quick google finds these:
65" Panasonic Plasma at 800W.
65" Olevia LCD (probably CFL backlit) at 540W.
55" Samsung LED-backlit LCD at 250W (note that this set is smaller than the rest)
For saying that this isn't free market you sure did a great job explaining the OP's case for him.
This guy said this is an example of a free market "working"
free markets work on supply and demand.
These companies are not responding to power companies' complaints. The power company is not benefiting from a free market, just a fortuitous but unrelated chain of events.
If the customers of laptops demanded obscene brightness, more screen real estate, and high performance short bursts of computing power, they'd put 17 CPU's and 4 panels on laptops and they'd suck the grid dry.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
My employers make and sell consumer television sets.
One of the large power companies pays the proportionate costs of our advertising for all the TVs we sell which consumes less than x watts (Sorry - can't reveal the figure).
They do this because its in their interests to get lower-consumption TVs out there, and paying our advertising is easier than paying for additional capacity.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Welcome to retarded. Going green used to be about garbage and pollution -- which at least had air-quality in mind. But reducing power usage -- especially electrical power usage -- is such a bad idea I'm calling it a super-bad idea (or should that be a sub-bad idea?).
First-off, Intel and AMD aren't reducing power to be green. They are reducing power as a part of miniturization -- smaller circuits can't use more power without shorting. Server farms of thousands of computers care about power only on the bottom line, it's not about being green.
So what's going to happen in ten years when the next power surge is everyone plugging in their cars at night? And what happens when they charge in minutes instead of hours?
Going green is not the way humans in a capitalist business society solve problems. If you're asking 500 million people to use less electricity, you'll maybe get 50 million using 5% less. Congratulations. And with each passing year, you have Africa using 999999% more. What will you do in fifty years when the global first-world is thirty times larger?
In our societies, you solve problems by finding new business opportunities that decrease requirements by orders of magnitude across the entire population -- not 5% on a per-human basis.
And in order to present those new business ideas with contrast, you use MORE of the offending substance. Not less. More. You use MORE gasoline as a society, and then it becomes MORE worthwhile for a new business to replace that gasoline with something else -- telecommute, hybrid, fuel cell, electricity. If our gasoline requirements were double what they are now -- ehem, when they are double what they are now (in terms of volume and price together), electric cars will save you more money, and there'll be a reason to start replacing gas stations with charging stations. You'll have turn-key telecommuting solution, and video conferencing solutions will become more plentiful. Right now? Right now you have "eh, for that much, I'll just fly them in and forget the teleconference".
You want more efficient solar panels? Something more than the 20% you get today, and the 30% the lab gets today? Use twice as much electricity, and someone will spend the money to develop better solar cells. Right now? It's still more expensive -- and more polluting -- than gasoline. Which is why no one uses them.
So, in summary:
1. asking people to use less means very few people use very little less.
2. using less means less of a problem means no point in solving the problem.
3. using the problem means more of the problem means greater benefit to solving the problem.
4. solving the problem in the correct place means an order-of-magnitude benefit to the entire society (now most of the world).
Drink up.
The 90%, or a large slice of it, is nuclear and large coal fired power stations that are hard to turn on and off. These are the baseload stations, and they run 24/7. Then there are lighter-weight stations that can be turned on and off in an hour or two, which run during the day. Then you have some very lightweight stations using technologies such as gas turbines, which can spin up in seconds. These are turned on just at the peaks, and constitute the t10% which is rarely used.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Ive seen a TV program where these people on an island were powering a radio and washing their clothes using a bicycle and a couple of coconuts, so why do we have an energy problem?
Well, most of the time, the plants sit locked up and offline. About a week before the projected peak, the regional entities will issue hot weather alerts indicating if it is projected that those "peakers" would be needed. On the bulk power level, electricity cannot be stored, it can only be produced in near-equal amounts to the energy being consumed by residential, commercial, and industrial demand sources. It does noone any good to have a powerplant on standby if its energy is not needed.
In normal operations, you have a class of cheap-fuel plants (aka base load) running on Coal and Nuclear that pretty much run flat-out full output all 365 days of the year. Somewhere in there you also have your Wind, Solar and Hydro plants, no fuel cost but less predictability & control of their output. Next, you have your marginal Combined Cycle plants running on Oil and Natural Gas, which have the capability to control and maintain their output between minimum and maximum.
At the top of the heap are those Combustion Turbine (jet engines strapped to the ground) and Diesel, very expensive but very very quick response -- these are the resources that run 50 hours a year. But that's ok, because 360/365 days of the year you don't need that amount of generation to be produced.
Car battery capacity is usually between 40-60 amp-h. That is, if you wanted to use battery power for three hours of peak, you would get (generous estimation) of 20 amp-h per battery. Your battery gives 12 volts, and, again under ideal conditions you should get 12*20 = 240 W-h per battery for the peak time.
A standard light bulb is 100 watts. Your plasma TV may be 800-1200 watts.
Thus to run the TV for three hours you would need five batteries, and that assumes that you could run them to dry. Lead acid batteries can produce surge power pretty well, but it would likely be cost prohibitive unless you could get a lot of duty cycles out of them.
Looking at Sears -- a cheap car battery is around $50. Electricity costs $0.08 per kwh where I am. Thus to equal the cost of one battery you would need to produce 50/.08 = 625 KW-h of electricity before being spent. That is 625,000 W-h or 1,000 charge cycles.
I'm not sure if a battery can handle this before getting corroded and functioning badly. Of course, this is only the cost of the battery, and really what you care about is the delta cost from night and day electricity. Additionally, people could not use retail car batteries but could get cheaper lead-acid apparatuses.
At delta cost of $.05 per kw-h, then if you could get more than 1000 charge cycles from the battery, then anything above this is profit on the order of $.05 KWh * 1kW * 3h = $.15 = 15 cents per day for your plasma. Is it worth it?
The short answer is no. The long answer is probably not.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
As TV manufacturers move from Cold Cathode Fluorescent backlights to OLED backlights, you'll see a significant drop in power use. What really needs to be dropped is standby power, which is being sucked up the whole time the TV is off.
1) More efficient drivetrains for cars -> we immediately think "kewl, now I can use a bigger motor and go 0-60 in 4 seconds!"
2) Lower power semiconductors just let us ramp up the GHz.
3) Better insulated homes, we buy bigger homes with more empty rooms.
4) Ultimately now matter how energy efficient we become, it will just make the carrying capacity that much higher (i.e. more affordable to have more kids).
All of these are good things - I like big flatscreens, fast cars, and kids as much as the next guy. But as for efficiency reducing mankind's footprint on the environment, I'm worried it might not happen.
You're absolutely right -- people just get jaded. The comedian Louis CK has a bit where he asks when flying went from man's greatest dream to a dreaded bore, and points out how people whine that their choices of movie is quite limited and their chicken was overdone while they're hurtling along from continent to continent at 30,000 feet. "It's A MIRACLE. You're FLYING! The airlines shouldn't even have to advertise anything other than 'WE can FLY!!'".
I still have a sense of wonder that we can get voice recognition and optical character recognition to work.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Without a doubt, there's demand,' for green PC's
Not true, I sell computers and at my store we have a 'green' tower that uses 70% less power then the other towers. For the entire month that we have had these towers, I have sold 0 of them, and it isn't because I haven't been trying.