Having real-time pricing of electricity coupled with users who can adapt their usage automatically to real-time prices will also considerably moderate power demand.
In the Netherlands there is a lot of reclaimed land that needs a lot of water pumped out regularly (though not 24/7, during normal weather).
I know there have been pilots with some of the larger pumping stations to incorporate the current real time price of electricity, as well as the forecast rain within the next few hours to decide when to turn on. Not sure if it's actually used in production now.
That sort of thing is a great fit for that problem.
This seems outrageous to many of us in the West, but here in Australia our power utility already cuts power to neighborhoods in half hour blocks during peak power consumption during summer (I believe they exclude hospitals and some other sites like that from this policy).
The infrastructure savings made by this are huge (think of 99% reliability vs 99.99% in software), and the few that really need it can invest in backup solutions for those times.
How huge are the savings? Do you have any numbers or sources?
Do those power utility savings translate into savings to the people who are cut off? I for one would not want to trade electricity price for reliability.
It's surely less expensive per capita to have reliable electricity for everyone than to have everyone who wants reliable electricity to have to install a generator.
99% uptime means 7 hours of downtime every month. And it's not random downtime, it's downtime under peak demand.
If the choice was free electricity at 99% uptime and you have to take care of the rest yourself, or $0.13 / kWh for 99.999% uptime, I would go for the 0.13 / kWh.
Of course in AUS they probably charge more than 0.13 / kWh and make you deal with the brownouts anyway. Actually some quick searches reveal AUS pays about the highest rates in the world.
Reliably not being able to handle peak demand isn't a cost saving measure, it's an excuse for a major failure of the infrastructure.
To be clear, in Aus we don't have 99% reliability. It's about 45 min every 2 years (whatever that works out to). That number was to explain the cost savings.
In much of the world those cost saving are directly applicable. Most of the world's population doesn't have 99% reliable electricity, and so they build reliability at the edges with everything from batteries in phone towers, to batteries in lighting.
It isn't at all clear to me if this is more or less expensive for new infrastructure. Given the increasing popularity of roof-top solar, the pricing model for 24/7 reliable wiring doesn't work out now in places where it is already built out. Network operators are trying various legislative measures to get subsidies for the networks, because no one wants to pay the rates they cost to maintain.
If I had free (or very cheap) electricity 99% of the time, spending $5K to get 99.99% reliability via a battery system is very tempting (and we are getting close to that point now). $1K for 99.9% - maybe.
One interesting thing is that the distribution of the downtime matters.
Rooftop solar is on average a $25,000 - $35,000 investment, and that's not even counting energy storage required to actually be off-grid. I don't think that only the rich should have reliable energy, and the poor should suffer brownouts to theoretically save some infrastructure costs.
For countries who don't yet have a reliable electric grid, I think investing in providing quality / reliable electricity to their population is about the best ROI (after providing reliable drinking water) investment they can make.
The economic cost of blackouts and brownouts are extremely high [1] -- for example, the rolling backouts in California back in 2000 - 2001 were estimated to cause GDP loss of 0.7 - 1.5%! (GDP was ~1.2T, so we're talking economic losses on the order of $10 billion).
The Tesla powerwall is currently $3000[1]. There are installation costs etc on top of that of course though.
Solar is separate - I'm talking about charging the battery from the grid.
Brownouts are expensive, but so is the cost of making sure they don't happen. Peaker plants cost more than $10m/year without even turning them on[2]. There are over 40 in California[3] currently available. Hopefully they don't all cost $10M each to keep available, but it doesn't take many years to surpass that $10B cost...
Rooftop solar is on average a $25,000 - $35,000 investment, and that's not even counting energy storage required to actually be off-grid. I don't think that only the rich should have reliable energy, and the poor should suffer brownouts to theoretically save some infrastructure costs.
I'm assuming you are talking USD, if so? Are you sure you have your numbers correct? That seems ridiculously expensive compared to say Australia. First link on DuckDuckGo: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/panels/cost/
If you need your solar to generate your AC in California or another southern state of the US, sure.
Here in the Netherlands, our complete solar system with installation cost us EUR 4,500, and we do run some AC in the hottest summer months. We are currently generating more than we use, with a household of 2 adults and 4 kids.
Commercial users do see this, with higher costs for energy in peak hours as well as "demand charges" based on their highest rate of consumption (typically measured in 15 minute increments). Charging more for those gives an economic incentive to trim down the energy consumption bursts that require peaker plants to run.
Buildings can design load leveling into their systems with things like thermal energy storage that shifts air conditioning consumption off-peak by freezing ice overnight and using it to cool the building during the day.
People have always tried to come up with a reason to connect the refrigerator (and other appliances) to the internet. Finally, we have a reason - to moderate the power consumption of the refrigerator based on the spot price.
Sensible price conscious refrigeration control would just be different temperature targets based on the price, not turning off the system. If l33t d00dz wanna make my milk one degree warmer, it's not a big deal.
Most peoples electricity usage is relatively inelastic and no one wants the cognitive overload of checking electricity prices before they put the TV on.
Oh, I disagree. A/C is very power hungry, and can be adjusted to cool the house lower than normal during cheap power times and let it go a bit higher during expensive power times. It can also "pre-cool" when power is cheaper.
The same goes for an electric water heater.
The charger for your Tesla can also adjust when it charges
based on power prices.
The dishwasher/washer/dryer can be set to come on at night when the power rates dip.
This has been the promise of "smart-grid" attached devices; the implementation hasn't caught up with the dream yet, but in theory, yeah, there are a lot of very elastic loads that can be used to smooth out the demand curve, or to match a jittery supply curve.
It ain't gonna work if you need people watching the electricity prices and deciding what to do. It need to be devices talking directly to the power grid. And that need standards for things like communication protocols. Does anyone here know how are those coming along?
> And that need standards for things like communication protocols.
All that is needed is a way to get the spot price of electricity from the internet, similar to how I can get the current temperature in Anchorage. Devices don't need to talk to the power grid.
If you're going to be billed by the minute, presumably you won't be taking meter readings manually, so your meter will be connected to some sort of communications network anyway.
And if you're /not/ getting billed by the minute, what's in it for the buyer to choose an AC that sometimes turns itself off?
The power company has been upgrading the meters for years to support variable pricing so they can bill by the minute. None of what I've proposed is in any way a difficult or expensive problem to solve.
Of course, the power company having billing by the minute will then create the incentive for such an A/C. That's the whole point!
Moving electricity is "hard" so effectively there are many marketplaces in which the spot price is different. A natural design that's been considered/proposed is to get that info directly from the power utility itself.
If I can get the temperature online for my neighborhood (I can), then how can it be hard to get the local spot electricity price online? I don't see anything unnatural or difficult about this. No infrastructure changes are needed.
What's the behavior of the system when the home cannot access the marketplace via their normal ISP? I think power utilities don't want to bind their QoS fate to a company outside of their control or specification.
Um, if it can't connect to the internet, it reverts to the default behavior it has now? Or it could revert to the pattern seen yesterday? Besides, an internet connection is critical infrastructure for about everything else. What's so special about this?
I'm with you all the way up to affecting appliances. The key is the power shift should be virtually invisible to consumers. You don't turn off A/C, you just bump up the set point by 1 degree for that 15 minutes. The individual impact is minuscule, the aggregate impact is leveling out the peak.
But you need everyone to be wired for this in order for a small change to add up to a big impact. Which isn't worth the cost unless it's mandated. Which is a political mess.
So we solve the problem another way; with batteries to meet the peak power demand at a reasonable cost, and not demand a massive IoT network, constantly monitoring usage and with override control authority.
You don't need everyone wired up, just a sizeable chunk. All that is really necessary is for the power companies to make spot pricing available via the internet. Appliance companies will find it worthwhile to add this capability because customers will want it because it saves money for customers.
The system will convert over as people normally replace their appliances, just like bluray has pushed out dvd players.
They actually already do it, we enrolled in Boston this summer in "RushHour". They pre-cooled our house 6 times over the summer before a expected peak demand and gave us a $40 or $50 credit. It was great, we were not home 3 of those times and the others we didn't notice at the time at all, so it was basically just free money.
That's a fine idea. I didn't think of that. But I'm sure there's a LOT of low hanging fruit like this that would greatly mitigate the need for the power companies to store power.
Most of benefits come if you have a system which can regulate slightly your use of air conditioning and heating (and a few other things like pool pumps).
In some cases you can save 50% of a daily powerbill by turning off the compressor in an air conditioner for 15 minutes.. but the right 15 minutes.
Few people would get up and turn off the air con for that, but a system that let you say how much you want to spend on it that you setup once makes a lot of sense.
It's a different beast. The price is high during those 15 minutes because of supply and demand. If you implement a smart grid that regulate load, you upset the supply and demand balance and the power might become so cheap that new self regulating systems are not worth the initial cost.
Once the smart-device interface is properly defined and the software is written, the hardware cost should not be a problem.
You will end up with some kind of "smart device" router that connects to your internet/home network to talk to the power company, and uses a commodity wifi interface to talk to your smart devices. The cost of an ESP8266 is already sub-$7 at hobbyist volumes, you can expect the additional hardware cost to easily be driven to trivial levels with widespread adoption.
The problem is purely in getting a standard system out there and designing devices that incorporate the new control model.
It is completely unnecessary for appliances to talk to the power company. They only need to talk to the internet. The power company just posts the spot price on a web site.
The appliances won't talk to the power company, they'll talk to the appliance hub. The appliance hub will be the one with the logic to handle temporarily raising the thermostat or whatever, and will handle the internet connection.
Also, using a website or other resource run by the power company is still talking to the power company. Not sure ho else you could have parsed that, but you clearly had some crossed wires there.
However, wouldn't it make sense to e.g. adjust heating/air conditioning depending on electricity spot price? That's then just a gadget that gets the information and guides the home system.
It'll probably be more meaningful in some industrial plants though, if there's any such energy-intensive industry.
I'd be pretty happy to pause an EV charge many times. Since Teslas are data-connected, they could possibly do this with no grid interface beyond the power connection.
This is one very nice aspect of a grid when there are a lot of electric cars which charge at night, and have big enough batteries that they don't need to fully charge: you can absorb a lot of variability of overnight wind energy.
And if electric cars also plug in at work... jackpot.
Even better than that, it could be set up so that your house drew power from the car battery when rates were high! You could set it to, for example, draw from the car battery until the charge drops to 80% or some settable limit.
Then all the rechargeable cars become part of the battery moderation of the whole grid!
The Tesla engineering head said giving power back isn't likely, as it would degrade the battery too much, but he stressed how much benefit to grid stability could be delivered just by altering when the batteries drew power to charge.
Sure, there are some research projects for that, but note the wildly different cost: charging a little different doesn't degrade the car's battery. All it takes is an Internet connection, a good prediction of how much charge the driver will need, and a micropayment of some kind.
That's a no-brainer compared to paying the owner for shortening the life of the battery.
