The 'Radio Network of Things' Can Cut Electric Bills (Video)

We all love 'The Internet of Things.' Now imagine appliances, such as your refrigerator and hot water heater, getting radio messages from the power grid telling them when they should turn on and off to get the best electricity prices. Now kick that up to the electric company level, and give them a radio network that tells them which electric provider to get electricity from at what time to get the best (wholesale) price. This is what e-Radio is doing. They make this claim: "Using pre-existing and near ubiquitous radio signals can save billions of dollars, reduce environmental impact, add remote addressability and reap additional significant societal benefits."

Timothy noticed these people at CES. They were one of the least flashy and least "consumer-y" exhibitors. But saving electricity by using it efficiently, while not glamorous, is at least as important as a $6000 Android phone. Note that the guy e-Radio had at CES speaking to Timothy was Scott Cuthbertson, their Chief Financial Officer. It's a technology-driven company, from Founder and CEO Jackson Wang on down, but in the end, saving money is what they sell. (Alternate Video Link)

Comments

Re:Illogical

[hawguy]

I don't want my furnace to turn itself off at 2 am while I'm sleeping and it's 20 below outside. If everyone is using electricity at the same time, it's for a reason.

But maybe you'd be willing to let the temperature in the house dip down to 65 degrees at 2am if it turned out there was a spike in pricing then... but it knows you want the temperature back up to 70 degrees by the time you wake up at 7am. The furnace is one appliance that has a lot of flexibility in exactly when it runs - most of the time you can shift its runtime by 15 minutes (or longer) without a noticeable difference in comfort, so you can take advantage of short-term power price fluctuations.

A naive setback thermostat might turn the heat on full-blast at 6:30am to warm the house by 7am, but a smarter thermostat that can look at power prices might warm the house back up to 70 degrees at 5:30am before the 6am peak pricing kicks in, saving you money.

Re:Silly assumptions.

[DamonHD]

Neither your house nor your fridge maintain an absolutely constant temperature; they cycle in a "deadband" about a set-point.

Neither your house nor your fridge instantly go to pieces thermally if you cut the power; they both have (valuable) thermal mass.

Simply widening the deadband a little, too little for there to be any functional difference, and probably for you to never notice, can make a significant difference to the grid and to your bills. The point is to slightly adjust an automatic cycle that you pay no attention to anyway to better share a scare resource.

People who are prepared to let these things happen are likely to have bills significantly, even 3x in some predictions, lower than those that don't, in a matter of a few years in some cases.

Rgds

Damon

PS. I have skin in the game. The OpenTRV project that I lead (http://opentrv.org.uk/ and http://www.earth.org.uk/open-s... for a more geeky page) aims to as much as halve space heating costs and footprint by this sort of trick while aiming to *improve* comfort by delivering heat when it is actually needed/wanted. There will also be a simple tie-in with the grid that could save up to ~2GW of peak electricity demand from UK domestic *gas* space-heating systems without most people ever noticing. That's bigger than our biggest nuke.

Re:no thanks

[tlambert]

My appliances all work just fine without being connected to the interwebs.

If by "work just fine" you mean wasting energy and costing you more, then you are right.

I see these things (energy use / cost) as disjoint, but then I am pro nuclear power, and think that we should build as many plants as 150% of what we need for peak demand, and when it's a time where there isn't peak demand, use the extra power to desalinate water for Los Angeles so that the people who live in that fricking desert don't have to steal it from Northern California and Colorado.

I also am amazingly pissed off when the PG&E commercial comes on the radio:

PG&E: "Hello, PG&E, can I help you?"
Caller: "Yes, my electric bill is too high!"
PG&E: "Well, we can help you figure out ways to use less energy..."

My gut reaction on hearing that is:

Caller: "I didn't say I wanted to use less energy, dumbass, I said I wanted you to charge me less for the energy I *do* use!"
PG&E: "Uh..."
Caller: "Quit being a damn politician, and answer the question I asked, rather than the one you wanted me to ask!"
PG&E: "Uh..."
Caller: "What an asshole..."