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

Illogical

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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:Illogical

[ibpooks]

It's not about turning it off when it's needed, it's about flattening the peak of the load curve by synchronizing run cycles. For example if your furnace needs to run 30 minutes out of every hour to maintain the set temperature (and so do all your neighbors), then the smart grid can synchronize the furnaces to run every other house for 15 minutes, then run the other houses, etc. This will smooth the load the power company has to deal with without anyone having a decrease in service. It removes some of the spiky demand associated with the random effect of appliances cycling on-and-off at will. Excess capacity can be scheduled to improve service for everyone and reduce the peak design requirements.

Re:Illogical

[ColdWetDog]

I don't want my fridge to turn off and all my food to go bad. How would that save me money?

I'm always impressed that so many professional engineers hate ACs so much that they would create a system just to upset them.

Re:Illogical

[ibpooks]

On a very large scale (like an entire city) the random distribution does take over and level itself. However on a smaller scale, like a subdivision or a neighborhood the spiky effects are quite evident -- approximately one-third higher than in a similar area with controlled demand. Why does this matter? One reason is that it allows the utility to spend less on hardware like transformers and wires, which keeps the billing rate low. It also reduces the chance of peak load failure of transformers and breakers during the peak air conditioning days, which have major expense of unplanned outages and emergency repair costs. It is so much cheaper for a utility to be able to set back AC units in an area of town where the transformer is dangerously overloaded than it is to do rolling blackouts or risk a catastrophic failure.

Re:Illogical

[mar.kolya]

The way energy markets are organized makes sure that you will not 'save money' no matter what.

Those monopolies will want their money. Even if you burn no fuel - investment has been made. And less you use - longer they can be charging you.

Take 'smart meters' as example. At no point people getting smart meters were paying less. They were using less, and using at 'cheaper' time. But energy markets 'suddenly' rose to accommodate for that and make sure energy magnates get their bonuses.

That was your first mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

We all love 'The Internet of Things.'

No, we don't.

Re:That was your first mistake

[Em Adespoton]

I thought that was sarcasm. Was I wrong?

To me, an FM broadcast of information that can be acted on or not, as I decide, is far superior to a ThingNet. Let the information be free and the action local.

Bonus points to the appliance manufacturers that implement standby, energy-saving and regular modes that take multiple factors into consideration, such as price, usage patterns, and performance optimization. This is stuff we should be able to do right now without always-on bidirectional communication between all appliances.

Silly assumptions.

[Dzimas]

My refrigerator needs to maintain a consistent temperature to prevent spoilage. Turning it off to save electricity is a daft idea. Same goes for my furnace -- where I live, it can hit -35C in the winter and frozen pipes are a real risk if the furnace is shut off for a few hours in the middle of the night. Automatically dimming the living room lights and turning off computers and TVs wouldn't really work, either. ;)

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:Silly assumptions.

[jfengel]

Is there really that much room in the deadband on a refrigerator that we can save significant amounts of electricity? We're talking about food spoilage here; letting the food get above 40F can be potentially lethal.

I'm not an engineer, but I am a cook, and we are extremely careful about the amount of time food spends in the danger zones. We're cautious, to be sure, but we have to consider the case of the most-susceptible people. I don't know how much room there is to slacken the parameters, and I'm sure there's some, but I'd need to see some numbers to know if the risks we're running are worth the savings we'd get. A fridge costs something like $150 per year to run, which is significant, but you'd need to demonstrate that we can save a hefty percentage of that to make it worth messing with.

Re:Silly assumptions.

[I kan Spl]

A fridge really does not have that much of a thermal "band" where the temps can safely change.

If it gets above 40 or so then some nasty bacteria can grow, below about 31 or so then your lettuce will freeze. The temp sensors in fridges are not that great, so they usually swing up and down by about 5 degrees or so even when you don't open the door.

No, the fridge is not a good idea of an appliance to change based on electric costs.

Re:Silly assumptions.

[Skidborg]

I think you're massively overestimating the amount of temperature difference 30 seconds would make. If shifting the run time by couple by a couple minutes brought disaster, then opening the fridge would doom your food every time.

Re:Silly assumptions.

[swb]

It may be cheaper to drop the setpoint down when power is comparatively cheaper (and how much cheaper are we talking -- a couple of cents per kWh?) but it is it more energy efficient to drop the setpoint down so that it can cycle less and gain temperature above optimal when the power is more expensive? Eg, if optimal is 36F and I drop it to 34 when power is cheap but let it rise to 38 when its expensive only to need to drop it back to 34 when its cheap.

In my experience, doing something similar with my central air conditioner in the summer usually seems like a mistake. If I raise the setpoint from 72F to 75F during the day it seems to take constant running for hours to get back those 3 degrees, more running than it would seem to take just to keep it at 72F.

It seems like it takes more energy to drop a box a few degrees than it does to keep it at a constant temperature. Of course all I know about refrigeration and thermodynamics is that it means we can't have nice things.

Lowest prices?

[Anonymous Coward]

My utility charges me the same rate day or night. The time of day that my equipment turns on has no bearing on my final bill.

Re:Lowest prices?

[DamonHD]

As it does currently for most of the UK retail market, but that is hardly universal and is not true already for many non-domestic customers.

Time-of-use charging will become increasingly important and widespread, and people who roll with it will save serious cash (and help the grid).

Rgds

Damon

Re:Lowest prices?

[TheDayOfMe]

Around here we have two rates, peak and off-peak there is also an option for a third shoulder rate depending on the account type you choose. We have off-peak options on our hot water tanks so that they only heat during the cheap rates.

Been like this for decades.

Benefits are Overstated

[tapspace]

First of all, the government has acted irresponsibly with the powers it already has. Giving them the ability to remotely control our appliances is a terrible idea. We have to fix the problem with the unaccountable government and lack of societal trust before we start even thinking about these sorts of pie-in-the-sky, cooperative efforts which require a VERY high amount of accountability by those in control.

Second of all, even if the government can be trusted, the companies that will build these things will not take security seriously. I won't say maybe; I won't say possibly. Definitely. These things will definitely not be secure. Most companies still think they can just take a half-hearted crack at security, let marketing make it sound impermeable to the masses and act surprised when it comes out that the security was crap in the first place. It's pretty much the industry model at this point.

Finally, and most importantly, it's not even clear that smart meters will have the intended effect, that people adjust usage. As another commenter pointed out, when everyone is using electricity at the same time, there is usually a reason for that.

My fear is that these devices will be forced upon the public (they already are forcing the "smart" meters on us), and when the evidence is gathered that consumers don't adjust usage voluntarily, it will be done by force. And, the government does absolutely nothing to make me think this won't happen. Why should we, the public, accept this?

No radios needed.

[anorlunda]

The Summary says "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"

That's crazy. There are already organizations called Independent Systemm Operators (ISO) that run real time auctions to do thst function. They have been operating since the 1990s. No radios are needed. They have had high reliability communications methods for many decades.

Glamor for Nerds

[Marginal Coward]

But saving electricity by using it efficiently, while not glamorous, is at least as important as a $6000 Android phone.

Especially if you're trying to pay off a $6000 Android phone.

Assumptions

[MrLogic17]

Most people are commenting about Demand Response - appliances delaying to lowering usage at peak prices. That is not what this is about.

This is about having multiple power companies, and switching between them based on price. Interesting idea, but that assumes that a person even has the option of a second power utility. The vast, vast majority of places in the US have a single, monopoly power utility.State government controls such things, and they are not easily changed.

Re:There are certain appliances that this works fo

[DamonHD]

1) There are respectable predictions that those who ignore peak-based savings will have bills 3x higher than necessary. We only recently got rid of peak-time phone charges 3x off-peak, so hardly impossible. And wholesale prices can certainly vary by more than 3:1.

2) There is no invasion of privacy necessary at all. Listening to mains frequency is a decent clue as to when to widen a temperature deadband for example.

3) Why wouldn't you do insulation AND other measures? I have taken several and have energy bills (even ignoring my solar PV) a fraction of what they used to be while adding two kids to my household. Insulation is part of the picture but not the whole story. I haven't even finished yet.

Why be so reactionary about something unobtrusive that probably implies a better engineered system that will work better all round?

Rgds

Damon

Re:no thanks

[ShanghaiBill]

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 live in San Jose, California, and we already have (optional) peak pricing. I signed up for the "SmartRate" program, and it saves me about 20% on my electric bill. It is only in effect from June-Oct, and only from 2pm to 7pm. Anytime the price spikes, my AC shuts down automatically. I can turn it back on, but I don't, because I know what it will cost me.

Re:No thanks.

[DamonHD]

Sorry, but that's just straw-man paranoia.

Almost all of these schemes (a) adjust within a preference (b) allow you to override and (c) don't allow anything to be broken remotely. And you can stay out of them entirely. In fact these schemes don't need everyone to participate nor in the same way. But if you play passive-aggressive you're going to get some oversized bills for no gain in effective control or comfort.

Conversely there are plenty of dumb pure-commercial solutions out there. Including the one with fixed user name and password "admin" and "1234" exposed to the Internet. No "government" nor "utility" involvement in that one.

In our case you set a desired base temperature and any adjustments are relative to that, so you can be as warm or cool as you like relative to the next person.

We also take security seriously and will not allow any remote access however much the bling might sell it until we've had enough scrutiny to get it right.

A well engineered system should actually improve comfort and control while being deft enough to slip in savings.

Rgds

Damon

Re:1984

[BronsCon]

Well, if you can't figure out how to spell "fridge", perhaps your frig *should* be turned off, so you don't procreate.

Re:no thanks

[DamonHD]

Do you think that energy prices are NOT going up anyway?

Managing the grid well should help keep those price rises in check.

I could point you to the figures that the GB grid spends on balancing, and cutting that would be nice. A smarter grid with smarter appliances does that.

But wholesale fuel (eg natural gas) prices have had a far bigger effect over recent years.

So, was that a straw man argument?

Rgds

Damon