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Smart Power Grid Could Wreak Havoc On Itself
MrSeb writes "Smart power grid monitoring that lets you pick the exact cheapest time to run the dishwasher or recharge your electric car may put too much power (so to speak) in the hands of the consumer, according to a new study by MIT. Researchers say that users receiving minute-by-minute pricing information might cycle off-peak power use more rapidly than utilities can spool up their power plants. In other words, it's OK if you're the only person charging your Chevy Volt at 2am in the morning, but if a whole town does it exactly the same time... there will be issues."
they will quickly become peak hours, I have the upmost faith in our utilities to gouge us for whatever they can
The big question that seemed/seems lost in all this "The electric car is gonna save the world!" hype is how an energy grid that can barely handle our energy needs AS IT IS is supposed to function when a significant portion of the population replaces their evil petroleum cars with electricity-draining electrics. When I've asked that question in the past to my usual suspect lineup of hippie friends (who also think that organic food and wind turbines are going to save us all too), the only answer I ever got was a vague "Well, most of that'll be happening at night, when the power demand is down anyway." But we're talking HUGE power usage spikes with those cars. Think of how much our system is already taxed when HVAC units have to cool a 10-degree-higher heat wave. Now imagine half the population plugging cars into the gird every night that draw WAY more power than any consumer HVAC unit.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You could be charging your car at 2AM in the afternoon!
He's right! And if everyone in town flushes their toilet at the same time, all the pipes will burst and we'll all die!
Great idea. Maybe we could do this with a high-energy-density liquid! Something like long hydrocarbon chains that are straightforward to break when we want to reclaim the energy...
70%? Source, please. If everyone slowly charges their cars over 10-16 hours, this might work, but if many people want to charge their cars at the same time, it will bring the grid down to its knees. An electric car charger can add as much strain to a grid as a whole house.
You entirely missed the point.
By design cars are planned to support multiple charging modes. The most basic designs assume a fast charge and a slow charge. Those charging at night will use the slow charge method.. Furthermore, there has even been discussion on allowing the car to participate in the smart meter network such that it can intelligent switch based on current grid load in the neighborhood.
So long story short, typical charging at night, is fully expected the charge cycle to be spread out over at least 6-8 hours; if not longer.
Its not like the people planning this stuff are absolute fucking idiots. Making such lame assumptions tends to point the finger in the opposite direction.
I've been saying this for years - despite what boosters of electric cars would have you believe, there isn't a magical well of electrical power available at night.
Yes there is. You've been wrong for years.
The utilities have spent the better part of a century either finding customers for the overnight low demand period or optimizing their networks to not generate unneeded power in the first place.
But they haven't found enough customers for overnight electricity to make the demand anything like during the day. As to "optimising the networks", power station capacity that is there during the day is also there at night. Whilst much of it is currently taken off line, if night time power demands increase, then they can leave more of them on-line at night.
Of course there are consequences to changes. But that's a very different thing from there being catastrophic, or even difficult consequences.
The question I raised was basically "Yep the technology works, but how are you going to change the mindset of people away from ME ME ME to US US US?".
The same way - and the only way - you usually get large numbers of people to engage in apparently cooperative or altruistic behaviour: bribery. Offer people a small reduction in electricity rates (or a cash rebate, or some other real-money incentive) in exchange for allowing the utility to remotely adjust/control their consumption.
Many utilities (in the United States and elsewhere) are already doing this with air conditioner thermostats. They offer a rebate or rate break in exchange for giving the utility the ability to remotely shut off your air conditioner for a set period of time (generally no more than one hour per day, and often less) during high demand periods. Some have gone to even 'smarter' systems, which allow the end-user a small number of 'overrides'. (Usually you can go without the A/C for a few minutes, but if you're hosting a party and need the cooling, then you can have it on a handful of occasions each year. This little bit of added flex)
I see no serious technological, political, or social barrier to implementing a similar system to regulate charging systems for electric vehicles. If anything, there's even more flexibility here--the car (and its owner) don't care whether it does its six hours of charging between 9pm and 3am, or between midnight and 6am, or as a dozen 30-minute blocks spread over the whole night.
~Idarubicin
Basically, as part of her graduate work in Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook (about 1990), my wife (Cynthia Kurtz) did computer simulations of digital organisms, and discovered that sometimes being "dumb" is really being smart, because you don't stick with the smart crowd who ends up competing over the same resource. People did not want to believe her results because they went against all the "foraging theory" of the time. She only got an MA out of that, not a PhD. She presented her results at an early ALife conference. Now people rediscover that effect in smart power grids...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.