Smart thermostats inadvertently strain electric power grids
news.cornell.edu
news.cornell.edu
When I had it enabled, I was _always_ too hot (in the summer) during peak hours. Sorry, not sorry: I'm not willing to sacrifice my comfort for the ~$10/mo incentive.
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[0] https://www.ecobee.com/en-us/eco-plus/community-energy-savin...
On especially hot days, I will raise the setpoint higher, and use a small fan to circulate air around where I am spending time, which is very effective when humidity is not too high.
What you are doing sounds inefficient.
Because it's less humid, I can maintain a higher indoor temperature and still be comfortable, meaning the air conditioner needs to run less.
Do I use net less energy? In my case, yes, but your mileage may vary depending on your equipment, insulation, etc.
Your dehumidifier and your air conditioner are mechanically identical. The only difference between the two is where the waste heat goes. The exact same device is called a 'dehumidifier' if the waste heat is vented indoors and an 'air conditioner' if the waste heat is vented outside.
There's not really any efficiency gains from running a dehumidifier to reduce air conditioner use. They both use the same power and have the same effect on the absolute humidity, so you might as well just run the air conditioner (unless you want it to be warmer).
Before the dehumidifier I could get the room cool, but it still felt sticky. With both I'm able to keep the humidity at bay and cool the room as well.
In my case I did some tests, and the additional power usage of the dehumidifier is way more than offset by the power savings I realize by running the air conditioner less frequently. This only works because the dehumidifier enables me to be comfortable at a higher indoor temperature.
To summarize: it is one part adaptation to the heat, one part low humidity, and one part air circulation.
It gets warm but fans are enough and I have a portable swamp cooler for when it gets really hot.
That, plus blocking the vent closest to the thermostat in summer, tends to get the upstairs to within 3-4 degrees of the thermostat setting.
Temperature Comfort is largely a learned behavior in my humble opinion
I find myself going "huh, it's getting a little warm" at about 5:45pm, at which point I check and remember it's a "Rush Hour" session.
Earlier in the year in Australia when day time temperatures were 35°C-40°C (95°F-104°F), waiting until midday to turn on the AC would mean using another 10 kwh more than if the AC was turned on at 9am.
Granted, this is an new Australian house which means it's built to standards about 30 years behind what you would expect for a first world country.
Depends on the shape of the temperature graph for the day, the power of your AC system, your insulation, etc.
If your on a day that doesn't get below 90 and gets above 110 during the hottest part of the day and your AC is barely rated at the minimum recommended for your square footage and you have average insulation, no, and even regular AC use is going to be marginal and your AC is probably going to frequent service.
(And the things that make precooling work better also will make your AC work better and, for the most part, more energy and maintenance cost efficiently when you aren't precooling.)
If you live in a place where you frequently need AC, aside from decent insulation, getting an overrated, high-efficiency unit (which seem to be correlated for residential units, probably because both drive up cost, and there is a correlation between people looking for more capacity and people concerned with efficiency) is a serious quality of life improvement.
Later in the evening, it drops lower to be able to sleep, but also cool down the house, and taking advantage of the coolest part of the day for best efficiency of the AC system. It stops holding that temperature around 7-8am and goes to a much higher set point.
The house stays dry enough through the day that it never really gets uncomfortable, especially with a gentle breeze from a small, quiet fan in the room.
Not every solution works in every situation. That doesn't mean it doesn't work, it just might not work for you.
(Posted from a location that was 108° last week.)
My solution was to install whole house fan which runs through the night when temperature drops to 16C-14C. It allows to both replace air with colder one multiple times and due to improved air-flow to cool off the walls.
After I shut windows close at morning most of the houses stays within comfort zone ( < 22C) till 6-7pm even on 40C days
The whole house fan solution is great though.
Edit. I think most people simply do not realize what temperature have internal and external walls in houses and how it interacts (or counteracts) AC. If you will go to read greenbuildings/passive houses forums, there are a bunch of discussions about thermal mass of the walls
Also, building codes should be considered the minimum.
I am keenly aware of how much thermal mass walls hold. My apartment is 3 external walls that are constructed pretty much only of a few inches of concrete, bare. The result is that after a full day of summer sun, even though it drops to 64 degrees outside at night, my air conditioner cannot keep it 76 degrees or lower inside. It's crazy. It's worse in the winter when I can feel the walls sucking heat out of my apartment.
R-15 for 2x4 or R-21 for 2x6. Not highest numbers in USA I guess and after you buy house that already "exists", it's expensive to change it.
>I am keenly aware of how much thermal mass walls hold. My apartment is 3 external walls that are constructed pretty much only of a few inches of concrete, bare. The result is that after a full day of summer sun, even though it drops to 64 degrees outside at night, my air conditioner cannot keep it 76 degrees or lower inside. It's crazy. It's worse in the winter when I can feel the walls sucking heat out of my apartment.
Whole house fan is the way to go. If you can't install one, I think a couple of strategically placed window fans over night to create some air flow through the house might work better than AC
I did some research on preventing walls from getting too hot (my room wall on the outside hits 170F i think). Narrowed it to
- Transparent paint with some particles that reflect sun/reduce heat gain
- Awning
- Shade sail
- Trellis and grow some vine to cover the wall.
That seems unbelievable! Is that a typo?
Actually, it's possible to inject foam insulation into walls without ripping them off. It goes in through small holes, or through utility boxes. Plenty of companies do that. I've even seen it advertised on TV in California.
But injectable foam insulation usually going into empty walls. I already have butted fiberglass in there. I don't think it's viable to make laparoscopic wall surgery to remove fiberglass . I did a quick google, and looks like you can do injectable foam over fiberglass. But I am not sure how much R it will add, but I am sure that for cost of of injectable foam + wall repair, I can get another hvac and run it for next 10 years...
I did consider recently to double walls on sunny side of the house with few layers of foil backed foam boards.
It’s cheating, a bit, to live in a place that drops 20-40 F at night … but even if we didn’t, the ability to turn every open window into an air conditioner is a great trick.
Which is funny, because you can always and universally add an extra layer of clothes to keep warm. You literally don't need heating as long as you forgo internal plumbing. But there is no universal alternative to AC to cool something down and people die all the time from heat exhaustion at home.
To "oceanplexian": Note that I used the word "universal". Evaporative cooling only works in dry climates. And the funny thing about dry climates is that they almost all lack water. I'll never forget the feeling of dread and horror when I saw water fans in Madrid cooling outdoor seating areas.
Your desert cooler is an environmental calamity and they should be banned.
To "celticninja": Yes you can do all those things but not universally in any climate (which was my point) and where it is possible it's probably an environmental disaster to do so (I can't think of any city in a dry climate in the world that doesn't have a water sustainability problem). You see we rely on AC (to your point), because we've thought the problem through and didn't stop at a shallow understanding.
Jeez guys! If your climate is dry enough for swamp coolers to be effective, they're dry enough for solar panels to make sense (if you care about CO2. I don't, I'm on acetaminophen). And it makes a lot more sense than wasting mineral water (i.e. well water).
Heat pumps are more than 100% efficient at heating the house, which is what we want, and one of the places where we are on the same side as thermodynamics.
As in you’re merely absorbing some of the heat from the sun to then move existing heat around?
Frankly, even without solar power it wouldn’t generate “extra” heat directly over a long timescale, it would only accelerate the release of existing “heat” currently trapped in oil/gas/nuclear/etc.
Once the heat is captured by the solar panel, I think you’re right using it for a/c is neutral - just moving heat around.
As for burning stored energy, that has to play into the heat dynamics of the globe. Like if you release it all at once it stops processes that would remove it from the atmosphere (animals and plants die), and it creates runaway heating feedback loops. there is some level of burning stored carbon that the planet can buffer and absorb and results in no change in global temperature. So burning stored energy in excess of that is a big problem. Like how you can sit or walk without noticeably sweating, but running causes you to have to actively cool yourself by sweating.
And the Delta(T) that an AC has to work with are far more favorable in AZ summers than a heating heatpump in MI's upper peninsula in the winter.
If they pre-cooled the night before it might be a different story.
I've had two Nests before, and two Ecobees, and they both were fine, in general, but for the next house not sure which I'd prefer.
Hey, but at least you don't use plastic straws, right?
PS: You’re welcome.
Landfills aren’t actually that bad when it comes to getting rid of waste. If you expend more carbon using the “eco-friendly” straws than using the normal ones then it’s not worth it overall.
On the other hand, paper straws are a shitty product that are unsuitable for use, but if I was offered a significant discount on beverages that were served with them...well, I wouldn't take it, but I could imagine someone who was desperately broke considering taking it.
"Sorry, not sorry" multiplied by 1,000,000x and through the decades is what got us (all) in a climate emergency.
I tried something similar with Nest but holy crap is it a pain in the butt to integrate with home assistant, and keep the integration functioning.
This is actually what I've been doing. I haven't done anything actionable with the data yet, though. Beestat [0] has some great data break downs as well.
On a similar note: My house is only a single zone and I've been manually adjusting the dampers when fall / spring come around. When I find some time, I want to try to build something that will automatically adjust the dampers based on where I am in the house to create a pseudo multi zone setup with Home Assistant.
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Isn't this exactly what they do? That what the Nest does when there's going to be a spike; it cools the house.
* Sets the thermostat 2 degrees cooler (74) ~1 hr prior to the rush hour time (3:30-5:30)
* Sets the thermostat to 4 degrees warmer between rush hour timing.
Problem is, with the current heat my house cannot be cooled down to 74 1 hour prior, and even still... it floats up to 80 degrees by ~4:30-5PM anyways and the AC kicks back on. Then it takes until ~10PM or so to get BACK to the 76 set temperature. This is a relatively modern house (built in 2010s), so it has modern insulation, sealing, etc. It's just ACs aren't really sized for being able to wildly swing temperatures and maintain temp. When it's 100+ degrees outside, they're sized so they run basically constantly when the sun is out, so slipping temperature means you're playing catch up for the rest of the night.
I don't have any experience with Nest, but the Ecobee seemed to just increase the cool set temp when there was demand. I didn't experience any proactive cooling.
Interestingly, in the Ecobee Community Energy Savings FAQ I linked above it says:
> [...] your thermostat may precool your home prior to the event to make sure you’re comfortable.
But I never experienced this. I wonder if its energy provider dependent.
As an example, if I set it to 74, then when Energy Savings kicks in, it may set it to 76, which is too warm for me. So I simply set the "standard" temperature to 72, and it will set it to 74.
I use the same energy as without this program, yet I get my $25 energy savings rebate.
Silly.
Whether you go from 76 to 78 or from 66 to 68, you’re helping avoid the burst in demand they’d get.
The real thing is: These events last for hours. If what you say is true, then wouldn't altering the thermostat for a small period (e.g. 30 minutes) suffice?
So as soon as it hits 3pm, I change my thermostat to a cooler temperature, so that the final temperature is what it would have been without this program.
Pretty much exactly the same usage as without enrolling into the program. Same "spikes", etc. Without the program, it would be set to 74 continuously. With the program, it's set to 74 before 3pm, and then at around 3pm (or just before), I set it to 72 so that it will continue at 74.
If you are willing to make 60 thermostat adjustments per month at 42¢ each, you earned that $25 in my book.
Prior to this program, the local utility company would merely announce the hours of peak events, and recommend minimizing energy usage as much as you can tolerate. They'd calculate how much less energy you used, and give a credit commensurate to that amount. I used to just chill at a nearby library during those hours (no kids in those days).
With this program, all they do is check that I participated often enough to exceed a threshold, and I get a fixed rebate (regardless of how much I exceed the threshold). And I effectively get that rebate by not saving any energy, and with little effort on my part.
It's silly.
I'm paying 50% less in cooling costs than those cooling an equivalent space as mine and I'm getting plenty of fresh air and I'm still working comfortably. Heck, today is one of those days where the highs are going to be in the low 80's and I probably won't even need to turn on my AC. In fact it's already at the high for today, 84, and it's 76 inside my house and I have a nice breeze coming through the window.
Just another way how working from home is saving me money and improving the environment.
Free cooling is already part of many commercial AC systems, usually referred to as an "economizer".
Since we'll be renovating/refreshing the whole house I'll have the opportunity to do stuff I won't be able to do later without much more disruption.
The system would need to have a second mode and a fresh air intake, as well as wiring and support from your thermostat. It can be done, but HVAC is a slow-moving industry.
Fairly common to see here in Boulder and the front range in older homes(before ubiquitous AC units), because it tends to be cool at night + hot in the day during summers, so around 5AM you can have the house fan turn on, cool your house, and then you ride that throughout the day until the evening when the temperature starts to drop again. Works quite well IMHO - my first rental had a system like this as well as AC, but I actually never touched the AC.
AC cooling efficiency requires abandoning several of these, and others are simply not given much thought because they don't matter if you're using AC all the time anyway. Which is unfortunate, because it shrinks the parts of the year in which going AC-free with windows open is viable.
But, still, none of the large thermostat makers offer any type of integration to the local utility. Or even the local weather! ComEd actually offers a box with a 3G modem that sits outside next to the A/C compressor and will cycle it off when demand is too high. But even that has no connection to the inside system.
Ecobee. Nest. Honeywell. Johnson. What's up with everyone?
Simply exposing homeowners to real time pricing would be useful, even if nothing is done automatically with that information.
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9749812
> Once your thermostat knows the Rush Hour is coming, it may pre-adjust the temperature in your home before it starts. This is so less energy is needed to heat or cool your home during the Rush Hour event.
On the basic levels it allows extra sensors to choose central fan use instead of ac, and proximity sensors to not turn on when your away (also a cell phone integration) in addition to scheduling.
It also has humidity based comfort (where it will adjust the set point higher if the system has been able to get to a low humidity). More advanced you can configure how much the ac will overcool for the humidity, or overcool before the time of use.
Even more advanced, you can configure your staging, responsiveness, and desired runtimes (though keeping this on auto is better)
There is even a project, beestat.io that compares your settings versus houses similar to yours in terms of runtime and insulation factor. (And recommends against an extremely responsive system)
The problem here is that these thermostats have NTP-synched clocks and come with default schedules out of the box and failed to consider the importance of staggering over a 5-min time period. It’s understandable from a consumer acceptance standpoint (“I set it to start at 6a, why did it turn on at 6.03a?!”), but that could be solved with some messaging.
Better still would be for future thermostats to be required to connect to the Internet and to the grid’s price signals or utility’s servers in order to receive rebates. This would see them base behavior on pricing signals, which would include a device-specific random offset to the price taking effect.
Resideo (formerly Honeywell Home) acquired some very cool tech that would solve this issue, too. Developed by Whisker Labs (formerly WeatherBug) It combines a weather feed with a custom thermodynamic model of each home to adjust the start time of each setpoint. This provides both energy savings and more comfort. For example, if it’s an abnormally cold Feb day, it would start the heater earlier to reach the desired setpoint rather than a normal thermostat starting at a precise time and hitting the setpoint later in the morning.[2]
Final fun fact: ~40% of smart thermostats never get connected to the Internet. Many people are price insensitive enough to buy a communicating thermostat and just slap it on the wall without bothering to program the Wi-Fi settings. There are sneaky ways some manufacturers and ISPs are trying to overcome this, though it’s a borderline dark pattern. [source: I used to work for a large ISP’s connected home ecosystem team]
[0] https://zigbeealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/docs-0...
[1]https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/2030.5/5897/
[2] https://www.resideo.com/us/en/corporate/newsroom/all-article...
I sometimes wonder if the smartest thermostat isn't actually a 'really dumb' thermostat on a timer. As in, you want it to be warm? You have to get up and set the heater to 21C/70F, this turns off after 4 hours (or when you lower it). This way if someone hit snooze, their 'smart' thermostat isn't turning on the heater at 6AM. If they usually are home at 7PM but have dinner at a neighbors house, it doesn't think they are commuting home and start turning on the AC...
And your hvac sizing and plumbing efficiency determines the jitter too, where there is typically a minimum compressor on and off time of 300s, but the runtime is determined by how quickly it can get to the setpoint.
Ecobees whave automatic "staging" configuration, but can be set manually to have have more or less setpoint responsiveness and over cool Max by .5 degree increments
There's minimal jitter in people's behavior when they are explicitly synchronized by a television broadcast, and none can be added within the constraints of broadcast television.
In almost all cases they are shoddily built and break really easily. I miss a proper metal lever based flush.
If there exists a hell for toilets, that one belongs down there.
None of this slow swirly watch it spin away shit; it's more like an airplane toilet in aggressiveness.
And at the end of the day, even if the vast majority find it disgusting, increasing water/sewage prices will force the change sooner or later.
The education is also about water not being an unlimited resource. I have no idea how educating or reminding people of that is patronizing or arrogant, but to each their own.
Our non-smart thermostat has trouble keeping accurate time and drifts a minute per month or so. That would spread the load out more because “6am” is a ten minute window.
If the demand rises over the course of 10 minutes, you get a small drop in voltage and the plant ramps up gradually.
If the demand rises by the same amount over the course of 3 seconds, you'll get a much bigger voltage drop and the power plant has much less time to speed things up.
There's further complexity because real power grids are the size of nations and have many power plants. If several power plants notice the voltage dropping and increase their production, a few seconds later you might have too much power. Then they might respond by cutting their production, and a few seconds later you have too little power and so on.
More than that, if the voltage drops too low, like from a sudden large power draw, you could get a brownout or even a blackout in severe cases. Voltage level is monitored and wild swings indicate instability which trips various safety systems.
Non-smart thermostats (even digital ones) usually drift on the clock settings substantially over time.
Even if most other thermostats have a timer feature, I guess they are not all turned on and set to the same time by default.
Older buildings have had the electromechanical thermostats you describe.
Storage is a big deal that seems to be the focal point of most of the renewable/non-renewable debate, but there are other concerns that are discussed less frequently.
Having sufficient inertia in the grid is important as well. It's like a low-pass filter for the desired grid frequency. The less equivalent spinning mass you have, the easier it is for these spikes to cause serious problems - Even if you have a gigantic reservoir of water ready to spin up some turbines, you still need to be able to handle all of the instantaneous events up to that point, during, and following.
But we are at an interesting point in time where "smarter" devices make the addition of demand management easier than ever, and at the same time less predictable power generation makes demand management financially more attractive. We just have to settle on the right mechanism: do electricity prices stay simple, but the provider can control your devices, or are electricity prices reflective of actual supply and devices regulate themselves based off that.
Think stuff that's naturally storage-oriented, like charging forklift/AGV batteries, pumping something into a tank, boiling a large kettle, etc. These are all potentially loads where the convenience cost might be well worth a discount from the utility, where the discount is maybe proportional to how long the throttling can be— some loads you'd only want to lose a few minutes (so, basically buying the utility time to spin up another turbine), whereas others you could lose for hours at a time (actual load shifting).
I can't imagine that a 50MW industrial operation just pays their power bill the way you and I do.
I think Google Maps does it too with routing— it adds a bit of fuzz so that it doesn't send literally every car down path A when there's a path B that's nearly as goo.
At least Vixie Cron doesn't support anything like this.
Each cron job that needs it has to implement it on its own, e.g.:
https://github.com/Debian/apt/blob/2.5.1/debian/apt.apt-comp...
[1]: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd.tim...
Why? Won't all the heaters that turned on from 5:30 through 6:30 be on?
If everything is synchronized and everyone in a region starts drawing lots of power at the exact same time, the line voltage on the grid will suddenly drop below safety thresholds and could trigger a brownout for that whole region. The point being, randomizing power draw over a period of time allows the grid more time to match demand.
But the capacity isn't there, at least not if the article's primary claim is correct:
"the peak demands are concentrated primarily when renewable energy is unavailable"
It doesn't seem like the availability of renewable energy will be much better at 6:30 vs. 5:30 or 6:00. So once all the demand is ramped up, there would still be a capacity shortfall.
Power coming from renewables can exacerbate the problem, thus requiring grid storage, but the problem remains even without them.
For example, let's say that people have dumb thermostats and they turn them down 2 degrees overnight - because you don't want to turn it down too aggressively since it won't warm the place before you wake. They wake up and turn them up 2 degrees. There's jitter so it's not all at once. The home heats up over the next 20 minutes and the heating turns off. Let's assume that everyone wakes up evenly distributed between 6am and 7am. The grid is handling 1/3rd of customers (or less) at any given time. By minute 20, 1/3rd have turned on their heat, but by minute 21 the first 1/60th of customers have their systems turn off.
By contrast, let's say that people have smart thermostats and they turn them down 6 degrees overnight. The thermostats likewise introduce jitter and we'll say they evenly distribute over a 1 hour period. Given the greater amount that they need to warm the place, they'll each be on longer - let's say for an hour even though degrees aren't linear. Half of them start in the first half of the hour so by minute 30, you're dealing with half of the customers running their heat - but because there's longer to go to heat up a place 6 degrees, none of them are shutting off. At minute 31, now 31/60ths of customers are running their heat. Then it's 32/60ths. This continues until we're at all customers with the heat on simultaneously. We'll be at 50/60ths usage for 20 minutes which is 2.5x more load than the other example.
This principle holds regardless of different building properties or increased jitter. A greater percentage of people will have their heating systems on at any given time in the morning due to this.
This is important because it means that it increases the likelihood that utilities need to run so-called "peaker plants" that are more costly to operate and pollute more to handle the load.
Sometimes utility companies offer incentives around avoiding this problem. I believe some California utilities have incentives for charging your electric car overnight when the load on the grid is minimal - because it's cheaper for the electric company to supply electricity then. Likewise, it would be cheaper for the electric company to supply electricity for heating then. Some electric companies have off-peak rates. Some electric companies have incentive programs where you can enroll your smart thermostat with them and they can shut off your AC for an hour when they're trying to shed load (you can override it, but it can help them shed load from lots of people who don't notice a degree or two change).
No, everyone won't be turning on their heating at the same time. However, if everyones smart thermostats run the heating system for 2 hours in the morning rather than 20 minutes in the morning because they more aggressively manage the overnight temperature, there's going to be a lot more overlapping running. This usage will overlap with other peak-hour usage like hot water heaters, toasters, microwaves, stoves, and businesses opening up - compared with overnight heat usage when businesses are closed, people aren't showering or making food, etc.
The answer is probably smarter smart thermostats. They turn themselves down overnight, but then the electric company manages the overnight temperature so that they don't face a morning rush to heat and have to use peaker plants. This would be done with consent of the users and within ranges specified by the users and to the user's benefit in terms of saving money - ie. the person wouldn't have to pay more just because their heat was kept a bit higher overnight and it wouldn't be kept above their comfort level. Likewise, users could opt into a program where they might be able to save money (say $5-10/mo) with the note that during peak times their home might heat up more slowly than it otherwise would - if it would normally take an hour to go from 60F to 68F, maybe it takes 1.5 or 1.75 hours. Again, that would allow the utility company to shed load while not inconveniencing consumers too much and providing adequate compensation for what is an inconvenience.
Electrifying our heating can mean that our heat starts coming from sources like wind and solar rather than gas and oil. However, it'll also provide some challenges around peak-time usage. These aren't insurmountable problems, but they do exist.
> "With few exceptions, when the load peaks, the price also peaks. So, if you can move some of your electricity consumption away from the peak times, real-time pricing will enable you to save money by buying more of your energy at lower prices."
There are many ways to implement this but it might result in a fairly pricey thermostat requiring an internet connection and the ability to automatically switch from grid power to local battery power as prices fluctuate. It would likely reduce demand variation however.
https://extension.psu.edu/real-time-pricing-for-electricity
Some people have also rolled out notions like allowing utilities to control thermostats remotely but I think that'd be very unpopular for most people, it has too many dystopian Big Brother connotations.
Of course, if everyone does this on every morning when the national weather service predicts high temperatures, you've just moved the demand forward a few hours and not actually spread it out.
Note that almost all of those inputs are going to be identical for people in the same area, so as others mentioned building in some jitter is necessary.
We have a minimum 15 minutes delay before powering back on a device that was powered off.
I've raised the issue where there could be a problem where there might be a ressonance effect with our devices and similar smart grid devices from other sources due to the 15 and n x 5 minutes delay being ubiquitous.
For now we came to the conclusion that this not an issue, but I still think this is an easily avoidable catastrophe that can be easily mitigated by adding a random offset to the delay.
My boiler is more efficient if it runs at low. But with the thermostat allowing the house too cool off, the boiler had to run at high to warm up the house in time. (I don't remember the exact number it's something like 98% vs 80% efficient.)
This ended up using more energy, than leaving it to run at the lowest possible output temperature the entire day.
When I googled this I found that Energy Star does not consider smart thermostats to be energy saving.
I suspect the same will be true of A/C - letting the heat pump run at very low all day will save more energy than high speed to quickly cool the house.
The batteries can charge when there's a surplus of power on the grid, and then absorb the load when everyone turns on the heat/AC at the same time.
I wonder if others do this as well, causing a massive spike in demand at midnight.
It's about any dumb thermostat that runs a schedule, so that HVAC kicks in at, say, 6:00 am for thousands of homes and businesses simultaneously.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/price_spot_market/chart.ht...
This doesn't mean that end consumers should pay spot prices - we have seen where that leads in Texas. But having four distinct prices for night, morning, day and evening might already achieve a lot.
Your widget needs to fetch data periodically and the network connectivity died. You'd be tempted to start fetching data right away after it goes back, right? Okay, but if a huge network provider gets back from an outage, you will have a problem - all widgets in that region will start fetching data at the same moment.
Just add a little bit of jitter into start time.
Do people need their thermostats to be punctual? I don't think so...
That can't be a good thing. I'd assumed the dodgy source I read it through had twisted it, but it seems like Cornell is endorsing this contradictory take, which it basically repudiates at the end of the story. Why would they do that? Just for extra clicks?
First line
> may be falling into a dumb trap.
Why does he say 'may' here? Are they or aren't they? Isn't it his job to tell us?
> this so-called load synchronization will become a problem in the near future.”
Seems like they meant to say "might, in the near future, fall into a dumb trap".
I looked up their 40% figure and that seems wrong too:
> Parks Associates' smart thermostat research finds 29% of US internet households plan to buy one of these devices in the next six months. Smart Thermostat Market Assessment finds that adoption of smart thermostats has been flat for several years, at 13% of US internet households, despite owners reporting savings that meet or exceed their expectations.
So are they even talking about smart thermostats? It's not clear.
> Evidence showed that residents remain confused about how to operate their thermostats and are often unable to program it, the authors said.
That says 'thermostats' and basically described the problem that smart thermostats were designed to solve, since they don't need "programming".
Hmm, the related story at the bottom is another bullshit take by the same author. Does Cornell have a fake sustainability centre that just published FUD about renewables?
No, the academic involved seems to actually believe that networked heat pumps working in concert is actually a good thing, but must somehow feel that warning about the danger if we don't do <his research area> is more newsworthy than saying, hey we can save money if we do <his research area>.
https://www.engineering.cornell.edu/faculty-directory/k-max-...
> They explore the potential for aggregating a large number of controllable heat pumps for providing high-quality power-system services to manage peak load and integrate renewable energy, while maintaining thermal comfort.
I'm not sure I like Cornell spreading what amounts to misinformation. There's a dubious quote from the person who funds their sustainability school which suggests the main aim was to find things that were bad for the planet, but that weren't agriculture (since the funding came from rich farmers).