Hacker News Reader

Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

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.

Exterior lights can dim if the power rates go up.

View on HN

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.

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?

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!

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.

Nest is planning this.

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.

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.

A/C can also freeze water to shift the load very cheaply.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com