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Networked Fridges 'Negotiate' Electricity Use
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers have developed a way to network household and commercial fridges together in a distributed peer-to-peer fashion that lets them 'negotiate' with each other on the best time to consume electricity. A retrofittable controller is attached to each fridge and then a temperature profile is built around the unit. The controller enables communication between other fridges on the network and also the power source. It enables fridges to work together to decide when to cool down, and thus consume power, based on how much surplus power will be available, and to anticipate power shortages and change their running schedules accordingly to use as little power as possible during these times."
This won't be useful to many people. How many homes have more than one refrigerator? Not many I would think.
Fridges are fairly low power devices with naturally random and uncorrelated cycling. One would think that in any given neighborhood, the normal randomness of the many fridges' cycling would be sufficient to result in a fairly level electrical "base load". I can't see that enforcing the levelness of this distribution could actually offer very much of a reduction in the peak load on the grid. What causes excessive peak loading is the coordinated use of many high-power loads. Typically this is air conditioning in the summer - all the units run simultaneously because it's hot outside, and each unit draws about 50 times more power than a fridge. Clothes dryers and washing machines in the evening also do this to a lesser extent. In the grand scheme of things, I really don't think there's much room for improvement through load-leveling of just fridges.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
We've been joking about it for years, but we finally have an answer for the ages-old question of "why would I need an IP address for my fridge?"
Now, we just need some compelling reasons for networked sinks, sponges, cutlery, and microwaves. Not Talking Toasters though. They'd keep us on IPv4 for another decade.
How does a post where it is clear that the poster didn't RTFA get modded insightful?
Moderators never RTFA either.
Fridges as we know them are pretty sad contraptions with no shortage of room for improvement. They put a whopping big heat source under the chamber they're trying to keep cool. They use room air from the hottest part of the house, even though in most homes that room is a foot or two away from outside air that is much cooler, if not actually even cooler than the fridge interior should be. In general, they're an agglomeration of kluges and marketroid idiocies. So yeah, this could be a key part of a rethinking of what a fridge is and how it works that could eventually cut power usage by as much as eighty to ninety percent. The same could be said of quite a lot of appliances and HVAC components. Hell, done right, we now know that comfortable homes can be built that require no conventional heating or cooling systems at all.
Kinda makes you wonder why we're supposed to need this "smart grid" for all this massive increased demand we supposedly have no way to avoid, doesn't it?
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
You might as well start with a spherical cow.
Humans are not random operators, especially in industrialized societies. Spikes can come in as little as fifteen to twenty seconds in a society like ours. Rush hour starts and within fifteen minutes you starts seeing a wave spreading away from centers of workplaces of air conditioners being turned on or up and lights going on as people get home. The Superbowl starts and everybody comes indoors from the barbeque to watch the game, air conditioners get turned up as the patio doors get shut. Ad breaks come and toilets all across the area flush within thirty seconds of each other all over the time zone. A big audience tv show has whispering or something else quiet and air conditioners get turned off so people can hear what's on screen.
We live in a society where most people get up around the same time, go about the same distances, stay away for about the same durations, and come back in to do the same damn things as big chunks of their neighbors for hundreds of miles around. And some of these things, like rushes during ad breaks or when a popular show ends have noticable peaks and drops that can be measured in tens of seconds. This doesn't even get into things like what happens when all the living soil is replaced with pavement and, for example, stormwater load spikes get much higher and then drop off much faster. And then, with all that water moving faster everywhere, again more people turn devices on and off to deal with the consequences.
No averages have nothing much to do with such demand at all.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
What's your point? There are thousands of things that people "could" do that they don't. They could superinsulate their homes with dirt, straw, and a few weekend days. They could teach their kids the basics of astronomy in an afternoon or two. They could all show up at the polling place and vote for every single election. Hell, we could all build cantennas and have free wireless in every city in the world by the end of this week.
Reality isn't about what people in theory could do. It's about what they will do. And out here in the real world less than one percent of the population has the skills to do what you're suggesting and less than one percent of that one percent actually might. No comparison to a plan like this, not even taking into account the fundamental issues of determining protocols and load calculations.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Living in Canada where it is -25 outside right now, I have always found it an extreme waste of energy to be powering a fridge and freezer to keep things cold in a house I am paying out the nose to heat because it is so cold outside for 1/3 of the year or more.
How come new houses aren't built with some kind of a "chill pipe", kind of like an insulated duct line that routes outside air directly into the kitchen, that could be connected to the fridge? The pipe could be automatically closed or opened as the fridge detected the temperature outside.
There are real, and hard, limits on how efficient you can make them - most installed refrigerators are going to have to fit into a standard slot. Increasing insulation means losing internal capacity, and remodeling a kitchen to increase the size of the 'slot' is expensive even where practical.
To be honest, I tend to worry a lot less about energy conservation in my home in the winter, since I've got a big machine in my basement dedicated to burning methane for the sole purpose of producing heat.