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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing, or paying extra for the privilege of an "unlimited plan" or something.

That could be achieved for example by instead of setting your space heater to "low heat", "Mid heat" or "high heat", you could just hit the "$1/hour of heat", "$2/hour of heat", or "$3/hour of heat" settings. The heater itself can look at the minute by minute pricing to decide how much heat to output, and the user can decide to turn it up if they want to pay.

Electronics to connect to wifi and check a server for pricing cost under a dollar now (ESP8266).

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The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing

This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?

People make similar choices all the time...

Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead."

Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.

You're comparing filling up the car to literally freezing. Find some humanity!

The alternative to heating that much is wearing outside clothes inside, while heating only enough to prevent frost damage (and ideally not requiring gloves).

Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious intent you want it to.

There's imperfect analogies, and then there's completely unrelated 'analogies'. It was the OP chose this analogy in particular, it kind of implies that they consider the situations to be similar.

I just read some people in Texas are camping out in their cars to keep warm.

That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second granularity.

Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.

in before "but this is freedom to make rational decisions!"

rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.

At some level, consumers do pay that minute-by-minute rate, it just gets averaged out.

No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash, another group of people jacked up theirs up.

Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of those 68s are going to get changed to 80.

If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot more will be set 68.

If anything, the poorer people will be the ones going to 68. So your grand plan is to let the poor freeze while the rich stay warm?

We normally operate our thermostat at 67 during the winter but have put it down to 60 given the power crisis. If people are crying about going way down to 68 I have no sympathy.

68 = they deserve the pain, 67 = all ok?

It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why is there so little empathy on here?

Because there’s a difference between

- the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty

- we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die?

- the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years

Why are you assuming that the poor are demanding t-shirt and shorts temperatures? Please stop making up strawmen.

And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.

Because that’s what the discussed 68F temperature is, I didn’t make up 68F as a straw man, it was suggested by parent comments as an unreasonably cold that it’s in humane to leave poor people to experience unassisted.

Dishwashers come into it when the parent poster arguing in favour of markets-fix-everything said their plan was not for poor people to become human icicles, but for everyone to be pushed by prices to adjust non-essential power use such as washing to other times. Such a plan doesn’t depend on a smart anything - ERCOT twitter feed is suggesting people don’t do laundry on Valentine’s Day to reduce power use, the suggested price influence is that people don’t do laundry by their own choice because it costs more.

Pricing isn’t demand based, so everyone does laundry and uses heat, then the grid collapses - do you think the rich and poor are equally affected by rolling blackouts? That they’re more egalitarian? I suspect not, as rich people will have more and fancier clothing, more money for impromptu propane purchases, more insulated houses, more luxurious vehicles and more money for gas, etc.

There is no current way to provide enough electricity to keep people alive while not providing any for rich people’s luxuries. If demand-based pricing can reduce overall use so the grid doesn’t collapse and there isn’t a huge price surge and people can afford to survive, isn’t that better?

Fixing wealth inequality or assisting the poor could come outside this system - UK has a winter fuel payment for the elderly and poor, for example: https://www.gov.uk/winter-fuel-payment

When we are facing record snow and temperature low with possible grid collapse that could result in numerous deaths then yes... my sympathy for first world comforts softens.

Ok just for the record you’re not going to freeze to death at 67. I know because I’m in Dallas and my heater is out entirely. It’s 52 in here and were cold and uncomfortable but we’re not going to freeze to death either.

While I agree with your outrage, 68F is 20C, that’s a hot summer day in the UK; check this historic weather data for Heathrow Airport[1] for example, 5 months recorded a temp over 20C in 2020 and usually 4 or 3 in earlier years.

That isn’t a temperature you can reasonably describe as “freezing”. I’m not used to having a thermostat that high even in winter, it’s getting hot and stuffy that warm.

[1] https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/sta...

You must have much higher humidity. Because 68F at 0 humidity is a little chilly even in a sweater. Right now it is -8F and my heater just clicked off set at 60F and I’m cold even under my electric blanket with a sweater on.

Must be; it's 16C (61F) indoors and I've a window open to get a cooler breeze in because it's fresh outside.

I think you have that backwards. Cold air with low humidity doesn't feel nearly as cold as cold air in high humidity.

20°C isn't cold at all unless you're soaking wet or there's some serious draft going on in your house.

Making people pay directly for what they use puts them at an advantage when the alternative is for them to pay a share of what everyone uses.

Would you prefer to be poor and have a large electricity bill because bob up the street uses power at the worst time of day, or would you prefer to at least have the option to save money by heating your house when power is cheaper and let bob pay extra for not being considerate about his power use times?

Devices can offer functionality to take the decisionmaking burden from the user.

For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.

don't know about you but my dishwasher's shortest program is ~30 minutes - if price of electricity changed every minute, i just wouldn't care because it'd be pointless.

Most of the energy a wash cycle uses is for heating the water it just took in. The part where it splashes the water around uses next to nothing.

Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.

> from: GE to: end user

> Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled

> Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled.

> In order to save money, please send us money.

> P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak.

> thank you for your consideration.

> Mike at GE

I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme.

Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)

Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging? Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the one single entity?

If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)

You make it sound like an economics problem when it's ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you can't rely entirely on supply side solutions else you are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme demand, a cost that's inevitably passed onto consumers.

This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable.

Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year.

It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.

There is a large cost to building out excess capacity to handle peak demands. That cost gets passed on to customers, and everyone ends up paying more for electricity. There’s also an environmental cost, as “peaker” plants typically burn fossil fuels. Even building grid-scale storage solutions would have a fairly large environmental impact (assuming that’s even feasible at all on the scale necessary).

It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.

They could have automated systems to react to prices. Or they could be simpler (like on a fixed daily schedule).

They might not need to now, when most energy is generated by systems that run around the clock. But as we generate more solar, it'd be great if people could run more of their high energy activities like say, car charging during the day. I don't know of any way to incentivise this behaviour other than pricing.

Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug it in this afternoon instead of right now".

> This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?

Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day.

I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api.

I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things:

- turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do this are available in the $150 - $350 price range

- scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary - showering to low demand times

- maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications to the construction

- or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC)

- not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to allow their vehicles to be used as power banks.

It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current price hike, API access and real time price information helped me to make the jump however.

Conclusion:

Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems like a good idea for companies that are in a position to provide it.

Batteries don't work all that well at these lower temperatures. I suppose if your Tesla is in a garage that would work, though.

Teslas regulate their battery heat for this reason.

https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips

Sadly Tesla doesn’t have the tech in their car to pump power out fast. You need their home battery product power wall.

It’s actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during peak demand.

Here in Australia, I'm on a power plan that charges you the actual current wholesale price (plus an admin fee).

I have an app where I can check the price, and set up alerts for when there are price spikes and such.

I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into changing your behavior gradually.

Giving electricity consumers the opportunity to set their consumption preferences is actually super logical. It's an obvious way to shave peaks off the total demand for electricity.

Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.

If you have a Tesla power wall, I believe you can set it up to do this. Basically go power wall (house battery) to house during expensive times of electricity. And then charge the battery back up during cheap electric times. I think even 10% of the grid with such a system would do a lot to take the edge off peak demand, as all of those goes guys go to 0% usage.

I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the current energy price displayed on a screen in our kitchen.

This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.

This is amusingly interesting to me. I’d love to know more about your setup and the results make sense (I’ve considered installing a second dishwasher to be able to handle an entire days worth of dishes overnight) but it also seems somehow slightly dystopian.

I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.

The screen in my kitchen is a dakboard (https://dakboard.com/site) we largely use it as a digital picture frame and calendar but it supports querying/parsing json out of the box. So to get the price on it I have it hit my providers json api https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/.

For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle).

Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.

Very cool

Ahh, yes, the center of Neoliberal logic. Widespread rip-off is acceptable if the individual has technically a choice to not get ripped-off and if the fineprint of the contract had a size of at least 0.000001pt.

Can you elaborate further on why you think the parent is in favor of ripping people off or deceitful contracts? I didn’t read anything in their comment to suggest that, so I am genuinely curious how you came to that conclusion.

Half-hourly electricity pricing exists in the UK: https://octopus.energy/agile/ I'm considering switching to it actually.

Interesting offering. This is where you want a battery (electric car counts as one). Costs need to come down first.

I actually don't have a battery. I have a large hot water tank with immersion heaters, heated overnight. I'm already on "economy-7", which is where the price is cheaper for 7 hours overnight.

Texas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26138767

Oh, cool, interesting to see a similar thing exists elsewhere. It looks like Griddy is missing a reasonable price cap though.

Notice that it's pseudo-realtime pricing... The price for a given half hour is set the day before. That means the price can't adjust for unpredictable events like a power station failing.

Counter argument is that it is not my business to have to think how to consume energy to match the production pattern of my provider. It is literally their business to meet my energy demands. Invest in more generation capacity, more storage, improve the transportation grid.

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