Slashdot Mirror
Alphabet's Nest Wants to Build a 'Citizen-Fueled' Power Plant (bloomberg.com)
Mark Chediak, reporting for Bloomberg:Alphabet Inc's Nest Labs is looking to enlist enough customers in California to free up as much power as a small natural gas-fired plant produces, helping alleviate potential energy shortages in the region following a massive gas leak that has restricted supplies. Nest, which supplies digital, wireless thermostats, is partnering with Edison International's Southern California Edison utility to get households enrolled in a state-established energy conservation program. The company wants to attract 50,000 customers through next summer that could shrink their total demand by as much as 50 megawatts when needed, Ben Bixby, Nest's director of energy businesses at Nest, said by phone. "We are building a citizen-fueled clean power plant," he said.
is power!
If you burn the citizens for fuels you make more power, and need less in the future. It's a win-win
"We are building a citizen-fueled clean power plant,"
Uh, no you're not. You are running an energy saving campaign. You are not creating anything new power here.
They actually want to kick appliances off. When the load is high, your blender quits working, basically.
They actually mean "the equivalent of adding a gas-fired power plant by subtracting users who can damn well wait for their smoothies.
Hopefully no one is stupid enough to buy a Nest dialysis machine...
They stole that from the last ship
for a crematorium? Last time I checked burring citizens was done either as an occupation of a foreign country ( e.g. Vietnam), as oppression against internal population (Auschwitz), or as an alternative to wasting a lot of land for cemeteries.
Filter error: You can type more than that for your comment.
But it was not necessary.
"We are building a citizen-fueled clean power plant,"
A new twist on "Soylent Green?" A conspiracy against cemetery plots? Trumps "Final Solution" to the Immigration problem?
Or maybe it's just a way to use the results of a bean-heavy diet, given that the goal is to get "as much power as a small natural gas-fired plant produces" - get enough, umm, natural gas from citizens, and you've solved your problem!
I'll bet that dirty hippies burn pretty well what with all that patchouli oil.
Have gnu, will travel.
Socal edison tried this 10 years ago by extending their peak-usage pricing from corporate to residential customers only to find it was effective to the point of creating a profit loss. scheduled blackouts and rolling brownouts are a thing of the past largely due to advances in LED home lighting and a switch from desktops to laptops and eventually tablets. SCE dropped the tiered pricing plan in 2012 --even for corporate customers-- but revived it in 2016 as a boogeyman to scare regulators into remission after their blatant obstructionism and utter failure to contain the porter ranch gas leak. it took nearly a year for them to even acknowledge it was a growing concern.
regulators didnt buy it and the whole thing was revealed in the LA Times as a transparent attempt to muscle the state into letting it open porter ranch wells again despite having made little effort at cleanup or repair. By partnering with Nest and alphabet, it seems like edison is trying the carrot approach to getting the state to look favourably on their business again.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Data Centers need reliable power and cooling. You, not so much.
Too much demand? no A/C for you.
Too much demand? No heat for you.
Too much demand? No TV/PS3 for you?
Basically, this is to teach people that industry's demands are first, next the state, and if there is any power remaining, you.
Get used to doing more with a whole lot less.
Want to use the PS4, better get on the bicycle generator.
There's nothing more laughable than a high tech ad broker going GREEN.
You know what takes up a ridiculous amount of energy? 1) The technological infrastructure required to build and maintain Google's services and the infrastructure it relies on; 2) The mindless consumerism from which Google gets 95% of its profits, i.e. adverts.
So, go fuck yourselves, you vapid, hypocritical cunts. You want to do something about unsustainable consumption? Shut down, and use your warchest to promote limited a less materially wasteful pursuit of happiness. Christ, even switching to a for-pay search service would be good enough - I'd happily pay $10/month for Google Search if it meant I wasn't tracked or served ads.)
And when something goes wrong, or the system is compromised:
- Heater goes on and stays on, on a sweltering hot day
- Lights start communicating in morse code
- Freezer decides your food is too cold
- Garage door opens, and stays open on a very cold day
...Have Alphabet Inc (what a stupid name) turn off the AC at the headquarters in the summer and turn off the heat in the winter. Just circulate the outside air.
Same for all the other groups who want average consumers to make their lives uncomfortable in the name of...what the fuck ever.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Or. . . maybe they want to do things like turn on A/Cs earlier in the day to cool off houses while the solar power generation for the day is still high, instead of waiting for people to get home later in the day and manually turn on their A/Cs (after solar power generation has gone down, so you have to use natural gas)?
Coming home to a cooled house is actually a plus for both the consumer and the grid, but don't let that get in the way of your FOX like "'bama's gonna take our guns!" like interpretation. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I love the stupid pro-eco hipster logic on saving energy. Should 50 million people drastically change how they live to save every little bit of energy and have their lifestyles affected on a daily basis
OR
Should someone build a solar/wind/wave/whatever power plant and then 50 million people can do whatever the hell they want. Which one is easier and more reasonable to implement?
The Immigrants aren't citizens yet, but using citizens as fuel will create openings for the immigrants to fill.
Google Fuel is People!
They should call the venture Soylent Power.
One could then say in a certain sense that it's green power because it's "powered by people!"
Oh wait, that isn't what you meant?
-Styopa
Doublespeak! Saying 'this power plant is citizen-fuelled' when all they're doing is forcing people to turn off their heat or air conditioning, is like a advertisement for something 'on sale' saying you're 'saving money': you're not 'saving' anything, you're 'spending less', which is still 'spending money'! It's not a 'citizen fuelled power plant' because 'citizens' are not 'fuelling' anything, they are just being forced to use less of what is already generated. Want to have a 'citizen fuelled power plant'? Put them on treadmills connected to generators in 8 hour shifts. Oh and by the way it'll cost more to feed them than you'll charge per kilowatt hour generated.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
What starts out "voluntary" quickly becomes mandatory. Expect scheduled brownouts when the Great Computer gets hungry. Let's see if any resistance will develop. Citizen fueled... doubleplusungood
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Oferfæt Poor People From Being a Burthen to Their Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick
love is just extroverted narcissism
Soylent Power: "The Power of People (IT"S PEOPLE!!)"
Wow, you must be a utility customer in austin. You forgot the community benefit charge, resource recovery fee, code compliance fee, drainage fee, and street sweeping fee. Oh, and taxes on all that. The future is now.
So Google wants people to give up using electricity so they don't have to be more efficient? What selling away their privacy wasn't enough?
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
What a stupid story. So Nest wants to reduce demand artificially and take credit (carbon credit... financial credit) for doing so. The "power plant" concept comes in their spin saying, "Removing demand is just like increasing supply. Effectively."
I'd be more interested with what a company like Solar City can do on this front.
I'm wondering if you could have some sort of distributed mesh-network power utility where each node has battery storage and solar panels, and sets its own input and output prices, with more traditional means of generation filling in the gaps.
California has given up on bringing new power generation online, so it turns to the popular Seventies idea of paying people to conserve more. Conservation is fine is a short-term solution to shortage - of anything - but in the long run there is no substitute for generating more power by the cleanest feasible means. If CA continues to be short of water it will have to start desalinating, and just by itself that will require new capacity. Arizona can't supply all of California's power needs.
Someone has found a way to put some of the unemployed back to work. I can see it now. Vast warehouses with thousands of citizens pedaling away on stationary bikes connected to generators. Although "citizen-fueled" might mean something else entirely...
This is nothing new.
Save power. Use less of it.
Genius!
It's goddamn brain-dead Bloomburg paywalling. As soon as you see the text in your browser, hit Escape. You can then read the article without disabling your adblocker.
The poors can get power from bicycle power or beg for power for services.
Nah, they'll simply commit crimes for money to pay for power, steal power directly with unauthorized line taps, and build generators that burn anything (wood, plastic, diesel, old tires, cooking oil, coal, anything available and burnable, basically) and pump out tons of particulates, GHGs, and other pollutants and toxins and thus make the entire situation worse all around.
People will not go without energy and if you try to stop them they'll simply go around, over, or through you to get/make what they feel they need.
Prohibition never works regardless of whether it's alcohol, drugs, guns, or energy.
Interesting fact: The US Government intentionally poisoned liquor during Prohibition and allowed it to be distributed killing between 10,000 and 50,000 people. Then there was Paraquat used on marijuana that poisoned and sickened unknown numbers of people.
The US government does not have the welfare of its' citizens as a high priority.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Google, 1998: Don't Be Evil
Alphabet, 2016: Get in the Oven
My gripe with a plan like this is that there is a lot of "what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine" from the power company. The retail peak-pricing plans I have seen, you have to endure a good deal of disruption to shift your electric use just to break even on such a plan, forget about saving any money on it. If the tech could be used to advantage to allow customers to save money for a barely noticeable change in comfort level (anticipating the peak and pre-cooling the house), I could see a great deal of enthusiasm for this, but my experience is that power company pricing won't let that happen. You will end up paying more, and the power company will tell you that what you are paying for is "the satisfaction of 'going green' as they say."
Sounds like the vampires have managed to set up another nest. Wesley Snipes to the rescue.
I'm fine with a smart home. I'm old enough to remember the DAK Catalog and more-or-less drooling over the advanced dreams that the 80s could sell me. But I'm not fine any of this data leaving my property line, or with intelligence or non-aggregated usage telemetry resulting in internal details going over the wire for evaluation. Even if Alphabet "Did No Evil" (which it probably does), transmission to control on the outside opens me up for spying and makes me vulnerable to hack.
If a company wants to provide a means for me to control and automate my life, that's great. Do it with local control.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Reducing peak loads isn't at all the same as using less power.
This is also about reducing aggregate peak demand which is different than just reducing your home's peak demand. It's quite possible for non-cooperative homes to all individually reduce peak demand while in the aggregate increasing peak demand.
The point of reducing peak demand is that your generating capacity pretty much runs flat out 100% of the time. You can't readily bring added power production on-line at a moment's notice. You have to build to meet peak demand, not overall demand. If you reduce peak demand, you reduce the need for overall production.
You are not creating anything new power here.
Indeed you are not. Citizens make very bad fuel which is why crematoriums need to use gas.
Why does the Matrix come to mind?
That's what this is.
"Just don't use as much."
Now, sure, that works...up to a point.
In California, the problem is that deregulation has TOTALLY fucked up the power industry. Where it's more lucrative to "sell" power out of state, claim insufficient capacity, then import power (which isn't so heavily price-fixed) and mark it up horrendously and at just barely-there availability.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
By dodging taxes, Google is indeed using citizen as fuel.
trying to make money out of every disaster that comes along. Every crisis is an opportunity is a good thing.