Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US energy grid | Hacker News Reader

Smart thermostat swarms are straining the US energy grid

theregister.com

13 pointsorionion9 comments

OK, sounds possible; even likely.

But seems like fix is no harder than dealing with Ethernet collisions: Instead of setting default to 6am, it gets set to 6am (- small random time). Or you could make it 6am (+ small random time). Make small random a required part of any setting you want to apply. Or anything simple like that, to break up the surge. Am I wrong?

But this requires the user to cede control, at some sacrifice to convenience. There's no incentive for the manufacturer to make that feature, nor for the user to employ it. The chances of passing legislation mandating such a feature are inversely proportional to the duration of the mandated fuzz period.

In a perfect world, one could even imagine smart thermostats (and other smart devices) coordinating to lower peak demand, rather than increase it, by "fuzzing" usage over the entire day. But this necessarily means refusing to power a device precisely at the time when you're statistically more likely to want to use it. It's a tragedy of the commons.

An answer might be to offer very granular spot pricing of electricity, providing an economic incentive to do what the grid needs, rather than trying to force the issue. This could also work well to buffer peaky renewables, provided there was enough elasticity of demand.

This is the business model Nest thermostats use (just as a demand response example). Utilities subsidize the devices, consumers opt in. When high energy demand is forecasted, if you’ve opted in, the thermostat will allow the house to warm by skipping condensing unit runs for a window of time when the utility issues a request. The user can override this demand response.

GP is correct; some skew is required to solve the challenge, with perhaps a bit more orchestration around ramps post shedding event, to prevent a surge in demand (same as you would for powering a datacenter back up after a blackout event, for example).

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9244031?hl=en

https://escholarship.org/content/qt9zp4c0x1/qt9zp4c0x1_noSpl...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response

https://www.energy.gov/oe/activities/technology-development/...

OK now, that's pretty cool. (Although Nest gives me chills, in any temperature.)

Thanks for links; some really good ideas. The PDF in particular has a lot more ways to reduce or shift demand; even a little can have a big change overall.

We pay our governments to solve tragedy of the commons problems.

So:

1) Default times are required to be randomly dispersed over a 15 minute interval.

This should be entirely non-controversial: If you don't override the default then you really don't care.

2) Selected times are required to be offered as randomly dispersed over a 15 minute interval, with an option to say "no, dammit, do what I said".

This is not too controversial: If the dialog box says "Picking this time instead helps keep your hydro bill low", then a lot of people will say "ok". Uptake doesn't need to be 100%. Controversy will likely be for the device providers, who will have to implement the UI.

Option would be to allow "shift by 5 minutes" (or some such) that still preserves some randomness.

It's a bit eerie that my phone alarm at 0600 is completely synchronized with "This is the World at Six" news intro. I'd hate to be the power utility facing a 20% demand bump over a period of 5 seconds.

Recall the crap spriacies about 'smart readers' and such...

It was called off in the security communities as sci-fi.

However

We are here.

The Nests and such are integrated with the local HVAC of a house.

We have trillions of SIEMENS and HONEYWELL and BLAH BLAH all over the place.

Now, we already know SIEMENS roll in Stux and DuQu...

So... NEST is next. and here is the threat (based on Stux) ;

---

Assume you attack the intermediaries and tell the plant that it has a much higher draw/need/req than actual ( This is how Stux and DuQu worked )

Kill a plant.

So, basically the same issue as fuzzing the times at which a bunch of computers run cron jobs which all hit some shared, limited resource.

Smart thermostats were suppose to prevent this. Apparently Jevon's Paradox at work or something.

From the Department of Unintended Consequences

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