You can only adjust the frequency of the whole grid by adding or removing gigawatts of load (or generation)! Or have the same effect by cutting into someone's mains supply and mucking around with it directly, in which case they might as well blow up all the target's stuff outright!
So the point is is possible to do some stuff with *NO* additional comms or security hazards, and some with some highly secure comms and very constrained changes in behaviour with those comms across the Internet or not. All are useful.
Slippery-slope arguments are rather weak by themselves: what happened if we were to accept any old slippery slope argument, what would happen next?
However, it is true that the energy system is changing, since for all sorts of reasons we can't carry on as we were; one element of the new system will be trying to get people to use preferentially energy when it is abundant and defer use when it is not. ToD pricing and dynamic demand are two likely elements of that.
I don't know your situation and location of course but it it highly likely that your utility guy is simply wrong. I'd be most surprised if any significant grid does not need "balancing" services of some sort. Some of those can be provided centrally or distributed over appliances. Both have some costs in terms of energy, and both have other cons and pros.
Tell me more about your service district; I'm intrigued.
The change from selling more energy to selling services which happen to involve energy is called "decoupling", eg selling streetlighting rather than the energy to run street lights. The market is already changing and demand falling and utilities are up sh*t creek if they don't change to avoid a "death spiral".
The physics is very simple here: not heating/cooling your house takes less energy than doing so constantly, and many heating/cooling systems will work more efficiently somewhere near their maximum output.
If you let temperature drift too far from the set-point that you want then your system may struggle to get back there in time, but it is possible to work back from the set point and time and have the system work out when to come on to get you there ("optimum on" in trade jargon), and also thus the furthest the temperature can be allowed to drift.
Partly that depends on outside temperatures ("weather compensation") and largely it depends on the capacity of your heating/cooling system and how well insulated your house is.
(I try to do some of this very crudely in our OpenTRV device and I'm sure that I do not have it right yet, and I am allowing 3C setback if the system is fairly confident that you are not likely to be around.)
BTW, wholesale electricity prices can go *negative* in extreme cases and up 100x normal at the other end, so though only maybe 50% of your retail bill is the energy cost, there is still plenty of scope for passing on big savings if the user wants to accept time-of-day pricing.
Crude net metering is very crude economically for all sides as it does not allow microgenerators to charge a premium when their power is most valuable and it forces the 'grid' to buy it at retail rates all the time even when it is not valuable. You're solving the wrong problem. There are examples of how to fix the politics and the economics.
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.
BTW, what we're working should give extra savings on top of district heating (where it makes sense, which is not everywhere). An early installation was in a flat on a district heating system in Denmark...
2) A better engineered device is capable of doing a better job. It costs me pennies to get a low-power sensor with precision of 1/16 C. That's bags of headroom.
3) I don't necessarily accept the narrowness of the band you claim, but that's by-the-by.
As I'm pointing out in the (real) situation that I am describing there is NO network connection nor data flow to or from the appliance. There's a multi-million mount market out there already working on that basis. Possibly multi-billion.
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.
So, think of the converse; when the grid has capacity to spare and/or power is cheap pull the set-point *down* a little and let your fridge's thermal mass ("coolth") help it stay off a little longer without worry during the next peak. There is a market in being able to respond within a couple of seconds of grid wobbled and for reducing demand for as little as 30s; all well within the normal operations of your fridge compressor (ie delaying running it 30s from usual may be necessary for other reasons anyway).
Doesn't even have to be about lowering 'total' usage at peak times, it may simply be about moving usage away from times of grid distress. That's worth very roughly £100k/MW in the GB market, for a few hours per year of displaced (not reduced) consumption.
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?
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.
Slashdot Mirror
You can only adjust the frequency of the whole grid by adding or removing gigawatts of load (or generation)! Or have the same effect by cutting into someone's mains supply and mucking around with it directly, in which case they might as well blow up all the target's stuff outright!
So the point is is possible to do some stuff with *NO* additional comms or security hazards, and some with some highly secure comms and very constrained changes in behaviour with those comms across the Internet or not. All are useful.
Rgds
Damon
Slippery-slope arguments are rather weak by themselves: what happened if we were to accept any old slippery slope argument, what would happen next?
However, it is true that the energy system is changing, since for all sorts of reasons we can't carry on as we were; one element of the new system will be trying to get people to use preferentially energy when it is abundant and defer use when it is not. ToD pricing and dynamic demand are two likely elements of that.
Rgds
Damon
I don't know your situation and location of course but it it highly likely that your utility guy is simply wrong. I'd be most surprised if any significant grid does not need "balancing" services of some sort. Some of those can be provided centrally or distributed over appliances. Both have some costs in terms of energy, and both have other cons and pros.
Tell me more about your service district; I'm intrigued.
Rgds
Damon
You are wrong.
The change from selling more energy to selling services which happen to involve energy is called "decoupling", eg selling streetlighting rather than the energy to run street lights. The market is already changing and demand falling and utilities are up sh*t creek if they don't change to avoid a "death spiral".
Eg http://uk.reuters.com/article/...
Rgds
Damon
The physics is very simple here: not heating/cooling your house takes less energy than doing so constantly, and many heating/cooling systems will work more efficiently somewhere near their maximum output.
If you let temperature drift too far from the set-point that you want then your system may struggle to get back there in time, but it is possible to work back from the set point and time and have the system work out when to come on to get you there ("optimum on" in trade jargon), and also thus the furthest the temperature can be allowed to drift.
Partly that depends on outside temperatures ("weather compensation") and largely it depends on the capacity of your heating/cooling system and how well insulated your house is.
(I try to do some of this very crudely in our OpenTRV device and I'm sure that I do not have it right yet, and I am allowing 3C setback if the system is fairly confident that you are not likely to be around.)
BTW, wholesale electricity prices can go *negative* in extreme cases and up 100x normal at the other end, so though only maybe 50% of your retail bill is the energy cost, there is still plenty of scope for passing on big savings if the user wants to accept time-of-day pricing.
Rgds
Damon
And as I say, it has very mixed results. Not all good, not all bad. But also a lot of RF pollution.
Rgds
Damon
Crude net metering is very crude economically for all sides as it does not allow microgenerators to charge a premium when their power is most valuable and it forces the 'grid' to buy it at retail rates all the time even when it is not valuable. You're solving the wrong problem. There are examples of how to fix the politics and the economics.
Rgds
Damon
TMP112
Rgds
Damon
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
BTW, what we're working should give extra savings on top of district heating (where it makes sense, which is not everywhere). An early installation was in a flat on a district heating system in Denmark...
Rgds
Damon
Your utility rate still implicitly contains a cost for providing peaking power and frequency support amongst other things.
If your appliances do some of the work silently then some of those costs go away for your supplier / ISO.
Rgds
Damon
Storage is still expensive, but is competing against demand response in that market.
I have been pricing up MW-scale batteries for an electricity company for precisely that role.
Rgds
Damon
1) It is already being done.
2) A better engineered device is capable of doing a better job. It costs me pennies to get a low-power sensor with precision of 1/16 C. That's bags of headroom.
3) I don't necessarily accept the narrowness of the band you claim, but that's by-the-by.
4) Don't forget the freezer.
Rgds
Damon
As I'm pointing out in the (real) situation that I am describing there is NO network connection nor data flow to or from the appliance. There's a multi-million mount market out there already working on that basis. Possibly multi-billion.
Rgds
Damon
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
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
So, think of the converse; when the grid has capacity to spare and/or power is cheap pull the set-point *down* a little and let your fridge's thermal mass ("coolth") help it stay off a little longer without worry during the next peak. There is a market in being able to respond within a couple of seconds of grid wobbled and for reducing demand for as little as 30s; all well within the normal operations of your fridge compressor (ie delaying running it 30s from usual may be necessary for other reasons anyway).
Rgds
Damon
Over which attempts to transfer data have not been an unalloyed success (ask radio amateurs, for example)...
Rgds
Damon
PS. There are clues available to appliances just listening to grid frequency on that hardwired connection, I agree, but that is not the entire story.
Doesn't even have to be about lowering 'total' usage at peak times, it may simply be about moving usage away from times of grid distress. That's worth very roughly £100k/MW in the GB market, for a few hours per year of displaced (not reduced) consumption.
Rgds
Damon
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
Not within the deadband/hysteresis of the thermostat they don't.
Rgds
Damon
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.
a) I'm quoting from one of the sources from the summary.
b) The quote is saying that it's "too early to tell" and is thus neither (1) nor (2).
Rgds
Damon
I think that the current low price is all about the Saudis making life hard for Russia and Iran. Everything else is insignificant.
Rgds
Damon
Which is how my new router arrived. Very sensible.
Rgds
Damon