Is the smart grid all hot air?
austinvernon.site
austinvernon.site
I learned about this 3-6 months ago when PG&E erroneously remotely disconnected a large number of people in the Bay Area, including my apartment. I walked outside my unit and the entire building had power except for me -- the maintenance team was mystified and said the meter specific to my apartment reported it had been remotely killed.
It was impossible to figure out what had happened, and after many hours of vague outage status messages, I was finally able to reach the billing department who said they had been fixing this issue all day, and they remotely reactivated my meter as I was still on the phone with them (they had a whole disclaimer about turning it on remotely too).
I got a vague letter and $100 statement credit a month later that admitted an issue accidentally cut off a lot of meters, but no further details on how or why. Very strange experience and made me question the whole smart meter thing.
(don't do this)
You would not believe how much more money they began to make once they started selling power using scratch cards. It was n-times the difference.
People, paradoxically, spend more when they can easily see how much they spend.
Also, the smart meters do more than just enable remote shut-off on a per unit basis, they also allow for more granular data capture around your usage patterns throughout the day, which someone might not appreciate for a number of reasons, e.g. viewing that data as private, or preferring flat-rate billing as opposed to the time of day based pricing schemes that it enables.
More generally, these sorts of systems are not without their advantages, but they are characterized by an increase in centralized control and surveillance.
It could be used to avoid unnecessarily inconveniencing customers, as you suggest, or it could be used to improve the strength of utility companies’ positions in disputes. Perhaps both?
If you want to examine smart grids, it's strange to ignore what's been developed in Germany and NW Europe over several decades. A lot of this revolves around fast communication strategies and supply/demand prediction algorithms:
https://eu.landisgyr.com/blog/grid-control-the-future-of-the...
> "To be able to operate this complex solution infrastructure, Netze BW has applied a so called “traffic light concept”. The green light indicates that no congestion is predicted, while the yellow light is a sign of a potential bottleneck in the grid that might require certain restrictive measures by the market players. For example, a Virtual Power Plant operator would adjust the operating mode of its storage and generation assets to avoid predicted transformer overload. However, despite these actions taken during the yellow phase, the actual technical limits of the electricity network might still be violated in real time due to unforeseen events. In this case, the red light would call for immediate mitigation measures enabled automatically by the REMS system."
In what ways does this analogy fail, for the purposes of understanding power grids?
The grid is a gigantic clock that at least in the US is running at 60 ticks per second. This is pretty easy to manage if you have some massive power source on it like gigantic turbines at a nuclear power plant. All your small clocks aren't going to push that around so much.
The problems come in when all you have is small clocks, who sets the phase of the grid?
Grid synchronization is a different issue to the electrical-hydraulic analogy (which, by the way, was the one that Maxwell used and its pretty useful). Grid synchronization comes from the fact that electrical quantities in the network (current, voltage) are alternating periodic. Generators, which are usually mechanical, oscillate and induce such periodic signals. The system must remain synchronized. But this has nothing to do with the network being electrical.
> “We find that replacing conventional generators with inverter-based resources, including wind, solar PV, and certain types of energy storage, has two counterbalancing effects,” said Paul Denholm, NREL principal energy analyst and lead author of the guide. “First, it’s true that these resources decrease the amount of inertia available on the system. But second, these resources can reduce the amount of inertia actually needed
> “Ultimately, although growth in inverter-based resources will reduce the amount of inertia on the grid, there are multiple existing or possible solutions for maintaining or improving system reliability,” Denholm said. “So, declines in inertia do not pose significant technical or economic barriers to significant growth in wind, solar, and storage to well beyond today’s levels for most of the United States.”
Anyway, I was hoping someone could fill in some details for me. Imagine a simplified grid: a dam that sends water through a penstock past a turbine/generator and into an electrical circuit, and a couple of resistance heaters on the other side of the circuit. The energy comes from water flowing through the dam - the dam operator opens up the sluice gate to let water flow through, the generator extracts the mechanical energy and turns it into electrical energy and it goes down the wire to the resistance heater where it gets turned into heat energy. Everything is balanced - the right amount of water is flowing through the dam to turn the turbine at the right speed to balance out all of the energy flowing through the wires and into the resistance heaters (and lost along the way, like losses in the transmission lines, etc). In this setup, there's some measure of pressure that turbine pushes back against the water flowing through the penstock of the dam, which is balanced out by how much pressure is coming from the water behind the dam and the pressure being put on the surface area of the penstock in the dam and the pressure being relieved by the water leaving the dam.
I get that thanks to inertia, if the sluice gate accidentally slams shut and all water stops flowing through the dam, the turbine is going to keep spinning for a bit and energy is going to keep going out onto the grid, though it will start to slow down due to friction at the turbine and energy being extracted from the system by the resistance heaters on the other end of the grid.
What I'm less clear about is how does inertia help when the water keeps flowing at the regular speed but when demand drops from the grid load. Let's say one of the resistance heaters turns off in a home somewhere - what happens to the energy from the water that was previously flowing into the grid via the turbine? Does the inertia in the spinning of the turbine somehow push back against the water flowing the dam, slowing the water down a bit/building pressure up in the penstock and behind the dam - with that pressure buildup being exactly equal to the energy that used to be going into the resistance heater? And that pressure either stays built up from the turbine until someone lowers the sluice gate a bit to cut back on the waterflow through the dam? Or does nothing involving inertia happen here - if the resistance heater gets turned off the overall load is reduced and the turbine spins a bit faster because there's less pushing back on it, and the water can move through the dam a bit faster, and the turbine just spins faster until someone notices it's going a bit too fast and the gate needs to be lowered so it drops back to rotating at 60hz?
Similarly, if someone turns on another resistance heater and now more energy is needed on the grid, but the sluice gate isn't opened up immediately, is inertia involved here somehow? If the turbine has to push harder on the grid side because of extra load, presumably the turbine slows down? Or does the turbine get pulled along by the new load somehow (more inertia?), and so more water can push past the turbine, giving it the extra energy it needs (and presumably dropping the water pressure in the penstock in the dam? And the pressure stays low until the sluice gate is opened up a bit more and more water can flow through the dam?)
I am using water pressure from a dam here, but I assume this would be equally true in a gas plant generating steam - if more energy is needed, the pressure in the steam drops until someone turns up the burner and creates more steam, etc, or if less steam is needed the pressure just builds up until someone notices and turns down the burner?
If anyone can explain how inertia and the grid translates into changes in the actual source of energy, I'd much appreciate it!
If your ratio of inertia to power demand variability is too low, then any sudden change in power demand will lead to your generator rapidly spinning up/slowing down before (in the case of your imagined dam) you have any chance of de-/increasing the water supply to the turbines as required. If it slows down or speeds up too much, then whoops you're hitting the grid frequency limits, power trips, and you've got a blackout.
If it spins up too much and too rapidly it might even exceed the mechanical limits of the generator, though normally real-life systems should of course always be designed to be capable of safely handling even a complete load trip, because there's always the possibility of a tree suddenly falling onto a power line or whatnot…
With sufficient inertia on the other hand, any mismatch between power generation and power demand now only manifests itself as your generators gradually starting to spin faster/slower, giving you enough time to adjust the water supply valves as required.
> "In a synchronous grid, all the generators naturally lock together electrically and run at the same frequency, and stay very nearly in phase with each other...Small deviations from the nominal system frequency are very important in regulating individual generators and assessing the equilibrium of the grid as a whole. When the grid is heavily loaded, the frequency slows, and governors adjust their generators so that more power is output (droop speed control). When the grid is lightly loaded the grid frequency runs above the nominal frequency, and this is taken as an indication by Automatic Generation Control systems across the network that generators should reduce their output."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_area_synchronous_grid#Fre...
Cascading power grid failures might be another good example:
Stability issues are beyond the network being electrical and correspond to the electromechanical dynamics of the grid.
These types of analogies are very sound and well studied [1].
Great power engineering books, such as Olle Elgerd's Electric Energy System Theory, make extensive use of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical–electrical_analogie...
There's also the fact that transmission of energy by fluid in a pipe (sound wave speed I think) isn't anywhere near as fast as transmission of energy in a wire by electric fields, even though the electrons themselves aren't really moving that fast at all in bulk (*drift velocity is low). There's a 'pipe full of marbles' analogy for that effect, but the actual energy is carried by the electric field, not by a flow of electrons as with a flow of water through a water turbine. There's also the Drude model which treats the electrons as something like an ideal gas with electrons scattering off the positive metal ions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drude_model
However if you get into band theory of solids as a means of explaining conductors, insulators and semiconductors, anything related to a water pipe analogy falls apart:
Asked a different way, what didn't work for the purposes of this article? It's at a high enough level that "becomes an impediment" isn't really an issue. Nor are "p-n silicon junctions". Nor the speed of transmission.
photochemsyn speaks about how the hydraulic phenomena is not adequate to describe some electronic aspects (e.g., modeling p-n silicon junctions). These issues are irrelevant to how well the hydraulic analogy works to describe the workings of the AC transmission grid.
That it doesn't work in all possible cases talking about A/C transmission doesn't really impact its use as an analogy in a high-level view of the grid.
The hydraulic analogy easily extends here - just imagine water flowing back and forth.
This is well studied [1] and power engineering books make use of this analogy.
The grid is a heavy rope that you are trying to keep tension on so that it doesn't touch the ground. One side of the rope is the power station, the other end splits and frays into individual strands that connect to every meter on that grid.
Strands are continually, almost randomly, disconnected (let go), reconnected (picked up), and the amount of "pull" on the rope each strand creates will vary (usage fluctuations). This means the power station needs to continually be adjusting how much it "pulls" on the rope to maintain tension and keep it from dropping.
I like this one because it not only avoids water and pipes and cuts to the core of the balance issue that is going on. It's not "thing A flows from point B to point C" but rather "this is an active system and careful balancing act".
That being said I recognize that the water pipe models are well studied, even in how they successfully model some aspects (and fail to capture others) of electrical grids.
This is not how the hydraulic analogy works. The "speed" of the water is irrelevant. The analogy is used to understand losses, energy balance, energy conservation, reactive power, etc.
The hydraulic analogy is very sound.
> Car companies have been relentlessly making electric motors (which generate electricity if spun backward) smaller and cheaper. A small wind turbine only has to be cheaper than retail electricity rates.
It likely won't be cheaper. Small wind turbines have very high levelized cost of energy because:
- The wind at the lower heights they are built at is multiple times weaker and also less consistent than the wind that large turbines can access.
- The power output of a wind turbine is a function of swept area, which is the square of blade length and therefore very limited with small turbines.
No matter the efficiency of the generator it can't make power that the blades can't capture.
Small wind turbines only make sense in off-grid setups in areas with poor solar resources.
Imo the future is more independent home generation while the grid is backup and for commercial and ev recharge needs, outside of urban areas. That will be a far more resilient overall system.
Lcoe of non grid solar is high, but I believe this could be greatly improved with federal leadership and incentives. Of course that means opposing the power lobby
There are basically two industries: grid, and residential. A massive plant like a car factory has a huge roof, they might be able to get the grid people to show up with their contracts.
Multi-family homes would probably be punted to the residential sector.
Part of the residential issue may be that the utilities are so balkanized across the US. If we had some national residential companies that could do aggressive negotiation and train and cost-cap installation...
Tesla solar was doing some interesting stuff with google maps for initial estimates, and the like. General Electric once upon a time before Jack Welch turned it into a hollowed-out zombie would have been another.
The power companies can't be trusted, fundamentally you'd be paying them to undermine their raison-de-etre: centralized power generation and central importance of the grid. No CEO looks at "hey, how about you distribute and lose control and ownership of your core product" and jumps at that thought. You need a well-funded external player.
Honestly, some company like Uber who DGAF about local regulations and has a playbook for providing a service with overwhelming value and using that to completely undermine the balkanized local regulations and entrenched power structures.
Uber sucks for many reasons, but the taxi services SUCKED and were local monopolies, and Uber pushed them to modernize to some degree.
1) 1950s era technology, so well understood
2) Comically cheap vs storage
3) Instant response
4) No/low inconvencience - well insulated boilers hold temp of 24hr+
It's such an easy win to shave the top off the evening peak & thus reduces need for battery storage.
One of the main issues is that for residential pays a flat rate all the time. There is no incentive for people not to use electricity during those huge peaks which really drives generation costs. Ideally people would not cook/clean/heat water/charge anything during those hot summer afternoons or cold dark windless evenings. Your electric water heater is a good example of it could be saving costs by charging when its windy/sunny/low demand periods and even better lower water temperature so wont be so hot when prices are high. Smart EV charging is even more important, if you leave the car plugged in every night, but with logic so some hours it'll charge quickly and maybe some nights not at all.
Is that documented / true on a large scale? Anecdotally, I know a few people who turn on the clothes dryer, dishwasher, etc. at night or schedule the washing machine to start at 5am to run them on the lower tariff period. Maybe it's not very common though.
> One of the main issues is that for residential pays a flat rate all the time. There is no incentive for people not to use electricity during those huge peaks
I’ve you’ve got a lower rate at night, then you dont’t have flat rate tariff. Something very common in most of the world. Having a lower night rate means you obviously have an incentive, that’s the entire reason it’s offered.
Figure ES1, Pg 8:
https://www.brattle.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/7289_anal...
And "General service class [IE: commercial] customers show little evidence of load shifting behavior and are less responsive to the TOU prices than residential customers. However, general service class customers show some mixed evidence of conservation, although this is still marginal."
But they don't like to publish this info much. Smart meters were controversial (from it's giving me headaches, to this costs a lot of money for ? benefit over regular metering).
Electric utility pricing is regulated to be based on Return on Equity, so if they could increase their capital base through smart meter infra and cut the opex of meter readers, it economically benefits the utility, but not the consumer.
Don't overspend on getting to 100% fairness.
Same reason why if you ask for a meter audit, they'll do nothing if it's +/- 2%, even though anything other than 0.000000000000000000000000% error is unfair.
1. When the price of power went up, everyone spontaneously decided that charging the market rate for power was evil and the company deserved to be destroyed.
2. The company delivered a lot of power at high market rates because customers demanded it. But those customers then refused to pay (and in many cases weren't able to pay), which is why the company went bankrupt.
It doesn't matter so much that there's demand if the government and the population all hate you and you can't collect the money you're theoretically owed.
Only true for some countries.
Denmark has a mix of flat rate and hour-based variable rates. In my case prices are often 3 timers higher in "rush hours" (typically weekdays 5pm to 8pm, 17:00-20:00) than during a midday in a weekend with a lot of wind.
I cannot choose flat-rate due to the situation in Ukraine.
edit: This map is very good to see the price and source of electricity in Europe (and how well the countries are interconnected): https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DK-DK1
I can log into my provider at see the price for previous days and for tomorrow.
One of the problems with real-time energy pricing is: poor people don’t have the cash on hand to replace their furnaces or upgrade their insulation- or worse yet rent and can’t improve energy efficiency at all.
It’s difficult to raise prices enough to make it economically rational for middle class types to get batteries and heat pumps without reducing the poor to poverty.
Sometimes consumer smart grid gets evangelized as 'the fourth industrial revolution' - Dr. Simon Michaux argues the material blindness of it in such a way that only the rich may experience it : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0pt3ioQuNc&t=625s ( Dr. Simon Michaux: “Minerals and Materials Blindness” | The Great Simplification #19 with Nate Hagens ).
Of course, my jurisdiction rolled out time-of-day billing and found that demand shifted only a few percent, so I wonder if the program even covered its costs for smaller users.
All so the installer/metering provider can buy a bigger yacht.
Hard to do conserve much when the apartment operator provides your major appliances (typical in north america), no dishwasher, laundry is in a central laundry room, and HVAC+hot water are centrally provided.
Would do a lot better if they just ran a program to replace all of our light bulbs/fixtures.
People getting paid to charge their cars because the grid has a surplus of (probably green) energy.
One of them is trying to install a heat pump too to double down on this approach.
It rarely gets discussed in the media for some reason.
I have done some work with the Octopus systems and they are very new an agile, but don't handle the complexity that the big 6 have put in place over several decades. The overall metering and settlements business in the UK is quite complex especially including legacy gas and elec accounts and meters.
In theory. Then the fire department comes and says "do not run washing machines and dish washers while you're asleep or away". And with that you're back to running them during peak hours.
We just had that discussion in the media here, due to the introduction of peak power as a part of the electricity bill.
https://www.nrk.no/livsstil/advarer-mot-oppvaskmaskin-om-nat...
https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/bonn-fra-brannsjefen-i-fredri...
They know because they have to put out the fire in the middle of the night, and they do an investigation afterwards to determine the cause of the fire so they know it was e.g. the washing machine.
There have been a few, like the Norden bomb site, but they were pretty far from anything we’d consider a general purpose computer. They also were not as accurate or reliable as was initially expected.
https://www.energy-storage.news/vattenfall-starts-filling-up...
[1] https://polarnightenergy.fi/technology
[2] it can boil - silicon boils at 3265°C - but it is hard to see how such a temperature can be reached
A resistor, some bricks and some insulation. If anything they are too rudimentary.
In the sense that something that is frozen can't freeze. Apparently the melting point of sand is about 1700°C, so 1000°C sand indeed should handle about the same as 20°C sand or -100°C sand. That does sound rater neat for a large scale setup.
In a small-scale setup the convection currents, easy handling and lower insulation requirements of a water setup would probably still win out.
Eg. a tesla plugged in at 6pm could shift it's charging time to earn quite a profit on the realtime-priced wholesale electricity markets.
* Tesla et al (the company) would like to make that money - in the lifetime of a car, it could be tens of thousands of dollars. They propose to do it with 'virtual power plants' which can make/use power and trade on the power market.
* The homeowner would like to make that money too. Through the use of manually setting timers to use power at cheaper times and having a peak/off-peak plan.
* The electricity distributor would like to make that money - by mandating that devices like cars and water heaters be remotely controllable by them, so that they can buy less of the most expensive power generation.
* Electricity generators would like to make that money too - by not doing any demand management, prices vary more widely, and they get big profits when they can spin up gas turbines to cover that peak demand.
Technically, none of the above ideas are hard to implement - but each party blocks policies and rules that move in the direction of someone else making the money.
I've long suspected that the most viable path (only viable path?) is for Tesla to capture the profits and share a percentage with the equipment owner.
Since the payoff to the homeowner happens "in front of the meter," it gets around the bureaucratic nightmare of fixing the perverse incentives in electricity pricing (eg the flat rate problem /u/rr808 mentions). All you need is one large aggregator to participate in the real-time wholesale market, issue commands to the "fleet," and divvy up the profits.
Then owners could group together on their own terms to get market power.
I don’t know man. This sounds awful. Like an even worse HOA. Unless I’m misunderstanding your concept here.
If better systems (eg Tesla's Autobidder) generate more revenue, then even after paying a percentage you still come out ahead.
Meanwhile an under-sophisticated algorithm will just end up being the "dumb money" in the marketplace.
If at any time during the night the prices of the unpurchased futures drop below that of the ones you have purchased, you can sell one and buy a different one (rescheduling the charge).
There isn't any better algorithm within those constraints. As long as the energy futures market is a fully liquid market, the price you'll get will be (on average) equal to the spot price you would have paid if you'd made the ideal scheduling decisions and bought on the spot market.
I still suspect more sophisticated players will find easy ways to "game" such an algorithm (eg pre-bidding). Whenever you have a large herd of predictable sheep, it's an opportunity for a wolf.
For the record, I don’t own a Tesla and I don’t want to. I have no plans of giving Elon Musk any of my business.
Presumably this is supposed to be different from what I said (sharing profits), so are you suggesting the service provider should take 0%?
>Then owners could group together on their own terms to get market power.
Thats precisely the part consumers don't want to do (and where Tesla can add value): aggregation and Autobidder.
If there are thousands of dollars on the line, third parties will bid against Tesla...
For V1G (ie one-way demand response charging), I'd prefer cars also have a Set It And Forget It option:
Always charge immediately to [ 30% ], then charge to [ 80% ] by [ 7 AM ] [ weekdays ].
And then it just Does The Right Thing.
For configuring stationary batteries, the equivalent would be:
Always reserve [ 40% ] backup, then trade with the grid when payout exceeds [ 20¢/kWh ].
Current generation Tesla systems allow some of this configuration, but not all.
EDIT: I think in my location all that has to happen for demand to shift is for the power company (BC Hyrdo in this case) to offer different rates. They can do this statically or dynamically and one way or another things will shift. As a person I can figure out to charge my car or heat my house/water or whatnot for a lower cost. I don't think they care.
We switched to a new power company purely based on rates. They offer free power for a 3 hour slot between 9pm and midnight.
We spent $2k on hardware to take advantage - a 7kw fast charger for the EV and a clockwork timer for the water tank.
In return we could load shift so much that 45% of our power is now free. That's with no other behavior changes (well one small change - family members became aware that having long hot showers in the day meant a lukewarm shower at night).
All super simple, and all driven from the bottom up by specific rates.
Instead it's more economical for me to drive my grid dependence to zero. I'm one of the "no thanks" folks in the article.
Tesla knows your utility rate, including the absence or presence of time-of-use billing. They also have access to the real-time market behind the meter. In this position, they can always Do The Right Thing to minimize total cost of EV charging (electric bill minus earned Autobidder revenue).
In your case the Right Thing sounds like choosing the tiered PG&E rate, and letting Tesla aggregation pay you for load shifting.
Looking at my data so far, it's cheaper for me to have a tiny gasoline generator to fill in under the quite-rare shortfalls (e.g., the two continuously rainy weeks in December where I don't quite charge up my batteries during the day, and I need to run heating overnight) than it is to pay the minimum grid connection charge.
I expect that as our local grid costs continue to skyrocket at about 4x CPI, and with distributed generation costs coming down, that many more folks will do the same.
Because all EV need to negotiate with the charger their plugged into to determine if they can charge, and how fast. It pretty easy to build a charger compatible with any EV that simply caps the cars charging rate until electricity is cheap.
Here in Europe at least, there are already several companies that make these chargers, including ones that just MitM the cable between your car and your normal charger, and allow you get better rates though aggregation with other owners.
Capitalist labour relations, but now with your car manufacturer :)
Unsurprisingly, they dislike distributed/democratized power generation and storage.
> shift it's charging time
*its
They have peak/off-peak rates with an additional monthly fee based off your maximum kilowatt usage in any 30minute on-peak interval. They also integrate with an ecobee thermostat (and give a $100 credit for buying them - just got two for $50 a piece) and will automatically adjust your thermostat up by at most 4 degrees during on-peak conservation events where demand is spiking in the valley. They can even pre-cool your house by 2 degrees prior to the event on off-peak rates to try and comfortably get you through the conservation event.
I’ve configured my pool pump to turn off during peak hours and will avoid doing dishes and laundry during peak. I imported last years hourly usage into spreadsheet and ran the numbers. If my math is right, I should save on average between $100 and $200 per month on electric (I’ve had winter bills as low as $150 and summer bills as high as $750!).
We also use a pool heater about 3 months out of the year. Never considered the A/C condenser as a heater. Initial thought is that the time of year you need to heat the pool is the time of year you aren’t running your A/C.
Right now, your comments are shockingly ignorant.
Voodoo accounting is all over the west. You can tell by the water levels, which is the "final accounting".
Our approach to water is part of why we are able to give up so much from our pull on Lake Mead during this drought. Nevada is giving up 21k acre-feet, Mexico 80k af, and AZ is giving up a whopping 512k af. Nothing as far as I know for cutbacks from CA's draw.
If it doesn’t work out, I dont understand a worst case scenario less than “move closer to water”
If you pump water out of your groundwater table faster than the water cycle replenishes it - that isn't sustainable. If you draw from lakes faster than the water shed and streams replenish them - that isn't sustainable.
The Salt River Project in Arizona carefully monitors the water shed, reservoir levels, and ground water levels to sustainably provide water to the valley. Arizona seeks out new sources of water that will provide sustainable water moving forward. When we build - we take water demand into consideration and source water upfront. Yes we have pools and water parks, but we plan for those and work to make them sustainable. We don't just let almond farmers tap our ground water and drain our water tables like some neighboring states. It helps that the only solution for us is a sustainable solution; the only way to survive here in the desert is to have a sustainable water supply.
To GP's point, many of these measurements are showing that humans are unsustainably pulling from these reservoirs. The levels are dropping, lakes are running dry, and rivers aren't making it to the ocean. But, when I look at the numbers, I can't say it's Arizona causing that. Arizona seems to be doing it's diligence in sustainably using water. I can't say the same for our neighboring states.
We need breathing room!
Arizona is a desert, and there are ... googles ... 7 million people living there that should not be. There are 300 golf courses! There should be ZERO open air heavily-manicured grass golf courses in a landlocked desert.
When people joke that if you want to settle mars, let's settle Antarctica, it's closer and easier to do... well, the REAL settling-mars project is Arizona.
I've also heard that Las Vegas, another middle of the desert atrocity, is also 100% water efficient.
I've also been told about things like "clean coal", "fracking doesn't turn farmers water on fire", "pesticides are safe", "global warming isn't real", and a host of other big fat lies that you'll only discover are wrong in the future when it is too late.
So either you are being mendacious, or you are happily eating the big lie served up to you on a platter.
Humanity is so screwed.
Too late for what? If what you’re saying is true - we won’t be able to reliably move water to the desert over the next 1000 years. Then Arizona won’t have enough water and those people will have to move closer to a water source. But is Arizona reducing the amount of available water on Earth? I feel like you’re referring to a long-term ecological crisis that this is causing, but I’m failing to see it.
Between $0.0829 and $0.1299 depending on peak/off-peak and seasonal. 3k sq ft house built in 2004.
Switching to their Time Of Use Demand plan, which it doesn’t seem like they have a public page for. It’s substantially cheaper per kwh than TOU - as low as $0.03 - but they have a fee for your peak demand in the month as high as $17 per excess kw.
While people may argue over who should get what slice of the pie, I think the situation in Europe has already answered that: you, the owner of the EV and charger or heat pump, get the pie.
I think Tibbers business model is good here: We charge a flat (~$5) monthly fee to smart-schedule your assets and buy electricity for you, and then you get ~100% of the profit from your demand-responsive asset. We also make some money if you spend less $$ on energy, since we settle daily with producers, but monthly with you, so lower cost of financing if you spend less.
The major blocker to more demand response, at least in EU, is the pace at which countries (looking at you Germany) roll out meters capable of hourly remote reading.
The network/grid infrastructure is mostly a natural monopoly: infrastructure which requires communal long-term goals via regulations and the infrastructure cannot be run as a normal pure-profit business.
Generators and consumers need an electricity market designed to meet capacity and other[3] goals (link mentions: Ancillary Services, Frequency Keeping, Over-frequency reserve, Instantaneous reserve, Black Start, Voltage support, Automatic Under Frequency Load Shedding (AUFLS), Dispatch-Capable Load Station Setup, Frequency Keeper Selection, Infeasibilities, Load Forecasting, Offer and Bid Setup, Scheduling and Dispatch, etcetera).
I like your point. It is hard to design regulations to avoid the monopoly capture your examples show, and how to have a functional regulator that isn’t captured, and a market that encourages participants to develop functioning systems. Tesla needs some incentive to build and maintain a system to optimise charging schedules and load shedding.
[1] https://www.nera.com/practice-areas/energy/energy-market-des...
[2] https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natu...
[3] https://www.transpower.co.nz/system-operator/electricity-mar...
Each of the demand response techniques you mentioned address a different concern, and are all complimentary to each other.
Planning and managing grid capacity happens on many different timescales. From decade long planning of large scale infrastructure, through to the millisecond-by-millisecond management that occurs during a grid crisis.
Each of the techniques you mention create a demand response effect at different timescales.
Simple multi-rate tariffs that offer different rates and different times of day, create macro scale changes in a grids daily demand curve. Reducing the peaks, and filling in the troughs, allowing distributors to reduce their total future CapEx spend.
Virtual power plants like Tesla allow distributors to “buy electricity” for cheaper than buying it from peaked plants for periods where they known that total demand is going high, and cheaper energy producers are already saturated. You’re operating on timescale looking a few hours or a few days into the future here. It’s important to note that Tesla themselves are creating addition value here, beyond simple tariff changes. Teslas virtual power plant will be committing themselves to a guaranteed load reduction at a specific period of time in the near future, failure to produce that reduction means Tesla has to buy extra electricity to make up the shortfall at extremely inflated rates. So Tesla create value through the efficient and accurate aggregation and management of many cars, dealing with issue like cars being unplugged, or already charged and varying levels of owner participation.
Electricity distributors requesting remote control is less effective than Tesla’s approach, because the distributor now has to carry all the risk associated with loads ignoring their commands. It’s basically impossible for them to mandate control, not unless their gonna employ the plug police to make sure nobody wires up a heater without telling them. Ultimately distributors can create and enforce load mandates by simple refusing to upgrade electrical connections to provide more supply, and downrating existing ones. This is already how industrial electricity supply works.
The number of types of demand response a specific load supports isn’t zero sum, it’s multiplicative. Each additional form of demand response supported creates additional value, and markets already exist to price that value.
In parts of the world with well functioning energy markets, the issues of how best to do demand response are handled by the energy markets. Each type of demand response (generally measured on two axis, speed of response and reliability of response) creates value for different market players. They can then create schemes to buy different types of demand response that fits their needs, or it can be bought though existing markets. The final piece of the puzzle is figuring out how properly aggregate individual loads into a large enough fleet that it can have a meaningful impact on the grid.
Unfortunately you changing the charging times on a Tesla has very little impact on the grid. But changing the charging time of 10,000 Tesla’s, now that might buy you a seat in the energy markets.
Useful reading: PJM 101.[2] This is a training course from the PJM Interconnect, the power grid for the northeastern US. It's for people who need to know the basics of how it works.
There's a lot of confusion about how big AC grids distribute power. Direction of power transfer is controllable. Capacitors and inductors are switched in and out to get a leading or lagging phase angle. It's not just everything in parallel.
[1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/leesona_moos/nuclear_battery...
[2] https://www.pjm.com/Globals/Training/Courses/ol-pjm-101.aspx
1. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/opus-one-tests-...
A 'smart grid' that continues to give utilities a mainframe style monopoly position will not work and will never be the solution. They simply aren't capable of building or maintaining the infrastructure, at any price.
Or email me if interested.
2020 reports: https://www.reddit.com/r/askTO/comments/hhdv0o/east_york_alm...
Is digital twin type modeling used? If not, is the problem space a good one for digital twin modeling?
Why don’t we have a ‘smarter’ grid then?
it is an economics problem at heart, not a pure technical one. Until, the incentives align to solve the issue around big power monopoly, smarter regulatory bodies, the tech can’t do much.
Arguably, tech might be focused on the wrong side of things. That is a much better debate.
In France, which has low marginal production but high capacity costs due to its nuclear fleet, even residential customers have been charged this way for a long time. It's easy to charge anyone this way now with smart meters but the way that EDF did it historically is that your meter has a circuit breaker set to the peak that you've paid for. Go over, the breaker trips and you need to reduce load and reset. (Of course there is a safety circuit breaker with higher rating as well). If you want more capacity, you pay for it and they come and install a bigger breaker.
I do think that future electricity networks, energy will be cheap most of the time but peak power at congested times will be very expensive. That's pretty inevitable with the grid mixes being proposed since the grid will be net over-supplied most of the time (energy very cheap) and very occasionally undersupplied (energy very, very expensive). This asymmetry arises from the asymmetry between the economic cost of too much energy (linear economic loss to the producer) and too little (non-linear loss to everyone). This is intuitive: A grid that has too much energy 1% of the time is fine, not enough 1% of the time is three days of blackouts a year.