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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Instead (or rather in addition) to storing power, we can also get better at coordinating demand.

There are already programs for industrial users to get electricity for much cheaper, if they can tolerate power cuts during peak demand. Those programs will become more and more rewarding to join and extend and automate as supply gets spikier.

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That's great but then instead of increasing the effective capital cost of the generating plants, you're increasing the effective capital cost of the industrial facilities (by lengthening the time to pay off financing).

It'd be interesting to see a study comparing the two options.

The incentives create a market in which the energy consumer and producer can trade in their existing inefficiencies. The market will decide where it is best to make the compromise, whereas before there were just wasteful externalities.

If you have an industrial process that can cope with intermittent power supply, it may be only slightly more expensive to design or build so that interruption of power won't result in interruption of production. If the overall cost increase is less than the decrease of energy costs due to incentives, there is no downside.

The energy producers likewise price the incentives so that their loss of revenue is lower than their cost savings.

Unless of course the market is created and operated by Enron, then we're all fucked.

Yup. Having many distributed li-ion battery walls charging at night for peak assist during the day is one way to level out demand and make the energy infrastructure more resilient in a Google-servers-like way.

Is there a way to coordinate demand without asking thousands of people to give Alice the ability to shut off their appliances?

No, although the current system is pretty tame. The electric company can turn your electric water heater or air conditioner (depending on geography and utility) off for 15 minutes at a time, and in return you get a credit on your electric bill. Its opt in.

Sell electricity at spot prices, give consumers access to that spot price, and you'll see a lot of demand flatten simply through natural market forces.

Where I live, I pay five times more for electricity between peak hours of 2pm and 8pm than I do between off-peak hours of 10pm-8am. (The remaining hours are priced at a medium level.) This has changed my behaviour, in that I now tend to wait until bedtime before switching on the clothes dryer and dishwasher.

Actually, there already is, it's called OpenADR.

http://products.openadr.org/?posts_per_page=-1

Yes, industrial plants will turn off production (for instance at an aluminum smelting plant) in relation to the frequency of the grid. Grid frequency decreases slightly when demand starts outpacing "supply."

That frequency change used to be a natural reaction from the generators.

I wonder whether they create that signal artificially with electronics these days, or if it's still a natural consequence of the mechanics of the spinning generators they run in power stations?

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