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Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

>We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study

Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me.

The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.

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This is precisely what the linked article says. From the section "Charging Incentives":

“And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich.

The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as:

Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]

So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.

> Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...]

Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'.

By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.

It can incentivize rooftop solar which can supply the increased charging demand.

> This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs.

> So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures.

Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces. I was left parking my hybrid on the roof in a desert climate where my car would continually get covered with pollen.

Naturally, I did what they were trying to incentivize: I looked at EVs. I quickly discovered that the cheaper models have limited usecases; for instance, the road trips I go on would now be out of the picture. The more expensive ones are much more functional but come at a high price that I've never personally spent on a car.

There's also the fact that I didn't have anywhere to charge it except public spaces where I'd have to awkwardly wait for hours because I lived in an apartment. In order to get a 240v plug in my garage I would need to pay for it myself.

These policies, as they invade the workforce, need to be looked at from a lens that doesn't end up doing harm in the end.

> Speaking of incentive structures, one of my former employers installed EV chargers in all of the bottom floors of our parking garage while explicitly not allowing non-EVs to park in those spaces.

Sounds like it worked out great for them — people who could afford living in single detached houses (generally the richer ones, and therefore generally the management) now get reserved parking out of the pollen. The people who are inconvenienced (i.e. you) weren't the people involved in the decision anyway.

Did you look at plug-in hybrids? They can use the chargers.

The harm is polen on your car? It's harm, sure, but seems pretty minor at this point.

I have pretty bad allergies, the pollen messed with me quite a bit.

The real harm I think is giving too many perceived privileges to something that is currently a luxury.

Buy a small EV for everyday trips and rent another car for road trips. Nobody in our car culture, where people drive F150s just in case they need them; nobody is going to do that, but environmentally it'd be much preferable to everybody getting a big Tesla weighing several tons.

Financially it works out for a couple of road trips a year, not so much if you're doing it a couple of times a month.

Or get a plug in hybrid that results in the convenience of one car but most of the environmental/cost benefits.

Seems that commercial power costs less than residential. Sometimes the difference is negligible but other times it's significant. I know residential lines cost much more to maintain because of the distances but that doesn't apply to residential apartments buildings in cities and I believe there's a seperate charge for that.

Why?

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

I rent an office very near my house. The PG&E rate for peak time at the office is over 20c cheaper than at my house. Not very fair to residental usage.

That’s how we do it in Denmark. We have hourly prices on electricity, so for me it’s cheaper to start the dishwasher outside peak hours. In some areas they are experimenting with car chargers hooked up to this electricity price info, so it charges when it’s cheap.

Weirdly, the latest iPhone + iOS pops a dialog box saying it will do this.

// Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.

Can you give an example of this? I haven't seen it mentioned before.

I guess it’s this https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/12/ios-16-clean-energy-charging-...

LOL. This is classic “virtue signaling.” Your iPhone battery is not even a rounding error on your electricity consumption.

If all iPhones do this it will matter. Charging when energy is plentiful also means that electricity is more likely to come from renewables.

Steve Jobs famously once compared speeding up a boot process by 10 seconds to saving a dozen lives:

https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

> If all iPhones do this it will matter.

No it won't. An phone has around 5 watt hours. So: 5 watt hours / day * 150 million people * 365 days = 273GWh / year / 4,116 billion kilowatthours / year = 0.006651% of electrical usage.

Yah, it's virtue signaling, not anything real. And keep in mind 0.006651% is total electrical usage - this time shifting might save 10%, so actual savings are even less than that.

"150 million people"

There are over a billion iPhones in use worldwide. This technology is also being brought to MacBooks (100 million+), Watches (100 million+), and iPads (150 million+).

Your fundamental numbers are staggeringly inaccurate.

And, most crucially, representing it as a whole of the electric usage instead of peak hours intentionally misses the point of reducing peak hour usage. It's called "peak hour" for a reason.

They're using US numbers both for iPhone count (which they overestimate by ~40 million) and total electricity. That should bias their estimate against their point, as the US is particularly consumerist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think that measuring as a fraction of total usage would also bias their result upwards- x/avg(y) > x/max(y).

And the total worldwide use of electricity is 22,848 TWh/year, (according to the IEA [0]). So that would be 5Wh/day * 1 billion phones * 366 days = 1,830 TWh = 0.0008% of world electricity consumption.

Getting data about peak hour usage is much harder, but I would wager it's at most as much of that. So yes, completely insignificant at a large scale.

If anything, the biggest impact will come to individual consumers, if and when electricity prices start varying more widely across times of day.

[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-information-overview...

> Getting data about peak hour usage is much harder

That is the entire point of this exercise. My point is that OP fails to address that with data (as do you).

Do you have some data? Or some reason to believe that iPhones are a much larger part of peak hour consumption than they are of overall electricity consumption?

Based on the data we do have, there doesn't seem to be any reason to care about iPhone charging - so, if you don't come up with some data or rationale for why we should, then I still feel it's justified to say that this change has little chance of helping the world in all but the most minor of ways.

Recent price rises due to gas in Europe have exposed more people to the idea that the market price is set at the margin.

If 1W of gas fired power needs to be brought online in the middle of the night to charge your phone, then all the wind power gets the same price. That's why peaks have always been the most economical place to target investments.

It would be interesting to compare the charge rate of a Tesla Powerall * the number of them deployed. I can see iPhones alone winning that depending on some assumptions you make.

You'd then probably be able to find stats on what Tesla gets paid for providing that service to get some idea of scale.

> Do you have some data?

You are the one making claims with poor data and assumptions, not me.

Phones are rarely plugged in unless the battery is dead.

This strategy actually works with laptops though. I know that one company set up all their laptops to stop drawing power from mains and run from the battery at peak hours, even though it was still plugged in. This was for cost savings and not for environmental ones, but the same strategy would work.

> Phones are rarely plugged in unless the battery is dead.

???

Most people I can think of charge there phone as part of their nightly routine.

Helps further centralize/converge appliance control into the iPhone.

Good move.

"virtue signaling" is doing something useless in order to make yourself look good to a particular group.

Could it be that this isn't "virtue signaling", but rather people overestimating the impact of the action? In other words, an honest (if mistaken) attempt at doing a good thing rather than just wanting to be perceived as doing a good thing?

I think many virtue signalers are earnest and think that Tweeting #BLM or other useless actions are actually useful.

If someone is doing something because they think it makes a real difference, then it's not virtue signaling by definition.

Those are orthogonal. You can either think something helps or it doesn’t and virtue signal in either case.

It’s right in the name. When you “virtue signal”, you are signaling morals to a wider audience. It’s “virtue signaling” regardless of conviction.

I think you didn't read @JohnFen carefully enough.

If the reason I am doing something is that I believe it will create results independent of being seen to have done it, I am not virtue signalling. Which is what @JohnFen said.

Conversely, if the reason I am doing something is because of the signalling value I believe will be attached to the way others see my actions, I am virtue signalling. Which is what you said.

Virtue signalling is typically something easy with no real inconvenience to the person doing it.

So doing a #supportsoupkitchens on a twitter repost vs actually going and volunteering at one.

I think the OP just overestimated how much electricity charging their phone actually uses, and not intentionally trying to claim they're being useful by saving 1 cent of electricity.

More like product placement.

Very short sighted to think it's about "your" individual power consumption.

There are over a billion iPhones in use today. Assuming 10% of them get charged during peak times, each one shaving a watt off of its peak is 100000 kilowatts of load reduced from the energy grid.

Considering the number is probably a lot higher, and the load reduction a lot greater, my estimate is probably pretty conservative. And then further consider that this is being rolled out to iPads, Macbooks, and Apple Watches as well. It starts to add up!

It's still a rounding error, 100MW is 0.003% of the average global electricity generation. It's probably still worthwhile doing, especially if sets a trend for other categories of devices. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=100+megawatt%2F%2828500...

Nice. I’ve also wanted my phone to tread water and not add charge while I’m driving.

Dumb dumb to use a gasoline engine’s generator to charge it, but I don’t want it to go dead either.

Your car probably wastes more power heating all the wires on it than charging your phone.

The iPhone 13 pro max has a battery about 17Wh.

A typical car uses 330 Wh per mile.

Charging your phone from flat will cost you about 90 yards in range. At the most expensive electricity on the planet of about 70c per kWh it will cost you about 1c.

That’s probably what electricity costs in gasoline from a car’s alternator. I’d like to keep that 1c tyvm.

Engine > alternator > rectifier > wireless charger > battery isn’t particularly efficient so you could be looking at closer to 2c/charge depending on setup and gas prices. Still trivial compared to an iPhone.

An iPhone probably last about 1000 charges (once a day for 3 years), so even 5c/charge would be $50, less than 5% of the total cost.

Sure, though it is well worth it to replace the battery on an old iPhone.

For what it's worth, and since this thread started with Denmark, the hourly price I was paying for an hour earlier this evening was 7.71DKK = 0.93USD.

A few days ago the price was almost zero (plus tax) for several windy hours.

https://andelenergi.dk/kundeservice/aftaler-og-priser/timepr... (add 1.59DKK for the taxes.)

iPhones do it to help preserve battery health. Slower charging is better for the battery, as is being near the middle of its charging range.

This is different to optimized battery charging. As of iOS 16 (in an as yet unreleased point version) Apple plans to add support for clean energy charging, which will charge your iPhone when the grid has a cleaner mix of energy. I think this is US only to begin with.

my 2014 BMW i3 could be set to start charging when electricity was cheap (defined by me onscreen). it was a little buggy, as far as systems go, but it was the original model year (for north america, i think 2013 in europe).

A lot of newer charging stations in the US also have this built in, as well. You can hook them up to the internet, or do it manually. How mine works is pretty clever: you plug it in, and it asks you if you'd like to go to 100% now or wait until charging is cheaper. If you don't reply, it will fast charge your car to about 40%, and then wait.

that's EXACTLY the oversight in the 2013-2014 onboard firmware :

even though i didn't need a full charge at 8am, the car would realize it couldn't get to (the not important) full charge by 8am, which was the previous day time of departure, and would start charging while electricity was still expensive, because it decided maximal charge at previous day departure time was more important than cheap electricity.

Just an oversight...

Sounds like a software/firmware fix. Did they never adjust that logic? queue my hatred for automotive closed ecosystem abandonware

Nope, but perhaps in later model year software builds.

For me, it's $0.67/kWh in peak hours, and $0.12 during super off peak (12am to 4am). I will, obviously, continue to charge at night. All electric cars, that I'm aware of, and most charges, have scheduling built in.

I had a related epiphany regarding car traffic today. When thinking about how autonomous cars could increase efficiency of taking off from stop lights by doing it syncronously, I realised that to put it bluntly, nobody would actually give a shit. We drive cars for personal autonomy and a level of freedom and protection from the car centric cities we build. Making that efficient is nice, but no one is willing to sacrifice the core point of driving for the various minor efficiencies.

It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.

Glad you were able to make the connection. Too many folks passionate on reforming transport focus primarily on the moral/technical problem/solution Vs the actual "job to be done" for people of owning a personal car.

Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to.

If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive.

As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.

> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available

From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most.

They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.

time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety

Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can keep getting more expensive and less reliable without causing me grief.

>So I bought solar panels and batteries

...Mission accomplished?

"Profit"

Sortof? The chumps left behind have fewer people to help amortize fixed costs.

Hawaiian islands have struggled with this for a decade. Rich people put up solar cells with usage offsets and get grid scale reliability on the backs of those who can't put up solar cells due to being poor or living in an apartment.

I'm going a step further. No grid connection at all. Uptime isn't great anyway-about 87% in July in my neighborhood.

For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to flat rate to avoid these mental games.

My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.

Average US residential consumption is under 1MWh/mo so you are definitely not a typical customer.

What? My house used 4 MWh a year in 2020, with two people working from home and two kids. Of these about half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that justify a 10x difference??

My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our peak bill this year was ~3200kWh.

Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh.

I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool.

Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.

To be honest I wonder if those are good places for humans to live in, at all.

There's only a narrow band of land then where we would be able to live without expending large amounts of energy to stay warm or cool.

Colder places use just as much if not more energy in wintertime. They just don't often use it as kWh from their electricity provider so they don't normally compare it this way. Instead of electricity they burn natural gas or propane or fuel oil or even wood pellets to heat their homes. Many people in this chat which talk about having pretty low energy usage then acknowledge they heat with gas.

For many, changing to heat pumps would drastically increase their electric bills in the winter offsetting their gas bills. Just look at my comparison of energy usage of my heat pump cooling my home compared to the energy usage of other big usage areas. It's not even close.

Running a heat pump for 12 hours to keep the house warm would be a similar amount of energy usage. It's the same tech. Raising the inside temperature from 0F to 70F (70F degrees of difference) takes more energy than cooling from 100F to 70F (30F of difference). So a place that spends half the year around 100F but then is close to comfortable inside for the other half requires less energy than a place that gets down to 0F half the year and then is close to comfortable the other.

My gas usage is 1400 m3/year, corresponding to roughly 15 MWh/year. A condensing boiler would lower it to at most 10 MWh, even less for a heat pump. Add in the electricity, and that would still be roughly 1 MWh/month or a third of what the user above mentions.

It's rather hard to compare unless we know the spaces involved. My energy usage was significantly less when I was on the ground floor of a large apartment complex, using maybe 500kWh/mo at the highest. But I had less than half the space I do now, no private yard, no private garage. I couldn't install amateur radio antennas however I wish. I couldn't make changes to the unit however I wish. My family has grown and I now work from home significantly more than before.

I don't need to use as much energy as I do, I could go back to living in a much smaller space and not have all the private spaces and rights I have now. But I'd rather not raise a family in <900sqft when I can afford not to and I get a lot of enjoyment of the private spaces I have.

Sure, we could get everyone to use <500kWh/mo, even if we don't have to ask everyone to move to the narrow space that's close to room temperature year round. But that would mean massive changes in a lot of lifestyles, limiting a lot of people to far less space and property rights than they've been used to.

It's 90-100F from 9AM to 9PM (and sometimes longer than that) with 100% humidity 3600sqft mutli story house. 2 adults, 2 kids at home. 2 electric vehicles.

What are are you using that much power for? I can’t think of much that uses that much per that you can shift to time of day pricing, perhaps pottery kilns?

Even 2MWh per month is enough to drive 2 EV’s around 50,000 miles per year each. If you’re very flexible with time of day rooftop solar could probably save you quite a bit.

Just having my 4x3090 constantly running deep learning experiments consumes 1MWh/month. And that's GPUs only.

Except constantly running can’t benefit from time of day pricing. Essentially it needs to be some 15kWh load that only needs to run for 6 hours per day.

If the price changes are large enough, you can just buy an extra board and have them at the best half of the time.

I think you would be better off buying a 2 Tesla power wall to load shift the demand vs 4x as much computer equipment that’s quickly outdated.

Bitcoin miners?

Your average constant electrical load is 4.2-5.5 kW? That seems excessive, are you running crypto miners or a small manufacturing operation/welding shop out of your home or something?

I thought mine was high at about 1.6 MWh per month!

It does sound high too if that's any consolation! My electricity usage is 1.3 MWh per year, though heating is then a separate energy bill.

> My house uses around 3-4MW/mo.

This sounds.. astonishing. How can one consume so much in a house?

My average is around 500 kWh which results in a $200+ bill.

It's probably worse for poor people, that already deal with the extra cognitive load on every other pricing...

But it's also probably best for poor people, that will optimize their usage and get better deals out of it.

Poor people don't use/waste electricity in large volumes because they are poor and don't have money to waste.

Rich people can waste enormous amounts of electricity and not be financially affected. It benefits rich people to schedule running the two clothes washers and two clothes driers at off-peak rates. Poor people don't have energy fat like this to cut.

This is about moving usage around the clock, not cutting unnecessary usage.

Yes, poor people have less usage to move around in absolute values, but they have more relatively to their income.

If poor people don't have much to timeshift then it doesn't much benefit them. A single parent working 1.5 jobs and then juggling laundry hours may not be useful for that family nor for society. Maybe the first nnn kilowatt hours each month should be flat rate - like minimum wage sets a floor likewise exempt some small base of electricity usage from the pricing games.

it is, but that's the part that technology can actually help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes useful.

an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.

this just makes me think of the situation that resulted in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when everyone is operating on the same premise without some random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.

Saw the Slashdot effect reference after such a long time. Not sure what % of HNers were there in the heydays of /.

More than you think? =;-{)} Wo remembers the "Anonymous FTP Sites List"?

https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/

You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based organization system with a simple, no added overhead, parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same ways.

Yep that could certainly work if appliances and cars have an option to say "have my dishwasher finish or car charged by 9am tomorrow" and it knows how long a cycle takes and picks the best time.

For anything real time it wont work - here in Australia we had a discount for a box that you connect to your air conditioner which would throttle back its use during peak, and a lot of people ditched it due to impact on their comfort.

It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...

Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula.

People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.

Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing.

Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years.

But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi...

> The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period.

I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.

they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a good solution.

it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable

It’s not a good solution when you spend a ton of money to force people to pay the averaged out market prices per time segment and they still don’t care.

It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale.

It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming.

But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.

it depends on the capacity premium

for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out)

the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that.

but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too.

in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online)

and it varies regionally too

The pricing model isn't appropriate to make people care.

What they could do instead of time-of-use pricing is a sliding multiplier that multiplies your total bill based on the ratio of on-peak to off-peak use. Make the multiplier worse based on what the total usage is.

you'll win a Nobel prize in econ if you can prove "The pricing model isn't appropriate to make people care"

I wouldn't judge this framework on a few year time horizon, but the time horizon to migrate to 100% EV fleet for Ontario.

The problem with 100% EV fleet a regular grid will be overloaded and customer's will not be incentivized to care.

This framework future proofs the Ontario grid from such a "wall".

Now that the framework exists in Ontario, prices at certain times in the day can grow 10x, 100x, 1000x where appropriate and people will care and will change their behaviors.

If time of use had even a 10x premium, people in Ontario would simply switch to simple tiered pricing which is available as an alternative to time of use pricing. Each Ontario electricity company is required to show you which would be cheaper for you and allow you to switch to the cheaper tariff to obtain cost savings.

Got it, so then Ontario has good hardware and no incentives. Everywhere else has no hardware and no incentives. Still one step better for Ontario.

If/When the Ontario grid starts to feel the pressure of EVs, it is a choice between (No Electricity + Tiered Pricing) XOR (Electricity + 10x premium Time of Use Pricing).

I have a feeling everyone will complain but understand that the only option was to keep the grid running.

The point is that off-peak isn't necessarily the best option anymore.

In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries.

Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.

> Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high

teachable moment, all along you should have been using price

The price is the same at all these times, unless someone acts to make it different. The whole discussion is about how to adjust energy price to incentivize the health of the grid (which is a shared resource individual market actors don't care about).

> Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it.

It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.

Is hourly pricing the norm in Denmark?

There are apps that track the prices and can automatically "trigger" charging when it's cheaper.

Found these examples by quickly googling:

https://www.trueenergy.io/app/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sense.andr...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tibber.and...

EDIT: to answer the question: yes, these apps use something called "Nord Pool" which publishes hourly electricity prices (in Swedish): https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/

It's not like that in the States.

https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-...

All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.

If only there were a clean energy source that we could harness.. Hey what about nuclear!?

More expensive than alternatives, sorry.

Maybe not, if the alternative is installing enough battery to charge most people's electric cars at night.

My state's grid is over half nuclear, and our electric rates are not high.

Good news! The very article we're discussing explains why you don't have to install enough batteries to charge most people's electric cars at night.

Right, and all it will take is "major investments and changes in charging habits." Note those major investments are seldom accounted for when people talk about solar cost.

Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2]

South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2]

It's almost like solar is super cheap on the margins, but it's easier to make a cheap grid with lots of nuclear than lots of solar....nah, that can't be it.

[1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

[2] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/

[3] https://energy.sc.gov/node/3067

All the nuclear plants in S.C. are old. The most recently completed one came online in 1986. Power from old depreciated plant can indeed be cheap (although sometimes not cheap enough; TMI 1 was cash flow negative the last six years it was in operation). Trying to REPLACE those plants, or build new ones to provide additional power, is another matter entirely. Look at the sad experience at V. C. Summer, also in S.C.

A similar story is playing out in France, with Flamanville 3.

Where's the part where you have to install enough batteries to charge most electric cars at night? That was your scenario.

Good choice of states, though: I grew up in SC and live in California. California uses time-of-day rates to nudge people away from charging during the early evening peak.

> The solution is simple

Oh, so just solve the problem that people since Edison have been trying to solve.

So simple!

Came here to post a less eloquent version of this sentiment.

> Wrong according to what metric?

Have you read the study ? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7

> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself.

Never worked, never will, borderline sounds like a cult following, "The all mighty market will automagically fix it with no human intervention"

A very small amount of people really care about "grid impact" enough to change their behavior. They do care about "I can make my electricity cheaper" or "My electricity bill went up".

They don't care until their whole neighbourhood goes dark at 6PM everyday

People already charge at night because that is currently when power is cheaper. They'd switch if they can and it becomes cheaper.

We already see this to some extent, as people with free workplace charging often choose that over home charging when possible.

They still won't care to change. They will complain, yes, but change? No.

That seems fairly reasonable to me? Most people are just trying to get by. They have bigger problems on their plate like getting paid so they can pay their bills on time, and keep a roof over their head. Adding additional stuff on top of that is a cognitive load that most people would rightfully push back against, because they don't have the spare capacity.

I think this is a big part of why, to-date, the environmental movement is comprised of the relatively wealthy, and what I would characterize as "true believers" who don't have much, but are okay with that, and okay with living their lives in a way that minimizes their impact. The first group have the spare capacity to do something about their impact, and the second group take it on as a mandate that often (but not always) affects their ability to function in broader society (or: how do you hold down a decent job if you ride a pushbike everywhere?).

My personal belief is that any successful environmental movement needs to go hand-in-hand with a more equitable distribution of wealth in society, and focus on quality-of-life, so that the people in the middle have the spare capacity to give a shit. Otherwise, you're going to bump into the ugly reality of people's day-to-day, and your movement will be perceived as rich people -- who make up the bulk of consumption to begin with -- telling everybody else how to live their lives. Which is exactly what's happened. I don't think it's an accident that the countries farthest along the path to decarbonization also have some of the best income equality, and quality-of-life on the planet.

I'm not a hardcore free marketeer, but price signals work via human intervention.

At the lowest level it's people plugging things in at specific times to save pennies.

But people can build systems to do this automatically, like the ripple signal that's been used for half a century to turn on water storage heaters.

People can build entire business around building widgets that will help other businesses save money.

The (soylent) green energy market is people.

>> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself

We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles.

It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!"

Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.

I think you're conflating two separate markets; there can be as many subsidies or taxes added to buying an EV as you want, but the "what time do I charge my car" problem is an electricity market problem, not a car market problem.

For all the hype, that is less true than it appears. A lot of EV owners pay annual fees and also sales taxes on power. On top of that, the most popular EVs in the US aren't subsidized in every state.

My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".

> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.

This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year.

Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users

Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disa...

Set thresholds on your meter that notifies you when price rises to high and turns it off automatically? Maybe some household batteries or a small generator?

Where in Texas does the end-user get to install their own meter they can customize?

Texas electricity prices are capped at $9/kWh but are often reported in the wholesale $/MWh

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