Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

LOL base load is definitely not a myth. What's actually a myth is "supply and demand" in electricity, as if it's a commodities market. In reality it's more like homeostasis--you have to carefully match generation and load and if you don't match it within a few % shit goes extremely sideways.

View on HN

Load shifting is definitely a thing, and it could become much more of a thing if we rolled out smart appliances and power meters that could automatically react to grid conditions in real time. You do have to carefully match generation and load, but that doesn't always have to be on the generation side, it can be on the load side.

I don’t want to live in a world where my appliances turn off at unexpected times to manage load.

I also don’t want every appliance in my house connected to the cloud and collecting usage data.

I sincerely doubt I’m in the minority on the former, and I hope I’m not in the minority on the latter.

That’s fine. You will be allowed to pay for peak time energy. Everyone else will get a better insulated fridge and allow their washing machine to start when the price for the next hour is low.

Or you could just build some damn nuclear plants so you don’t have to turn people’s A/C’s off on days when the wind isn’t blowing.

I use GA power, so I'm building these 'damn nukes'... But I also allow GA power to automatically turn off my water heater, and GA power lets me sell my solar during peak load, and GA power lets me pay $0.01/kWh overnight to charge up batteries...

So, I guess my point is, why are you reducing a panacea of mutually beneficial options down to a binary decision?

I don't think load shifting can have much of an effect. I would be surprised if more than 10% of the load could be shifted more than an hour.

Air conditioning is a large load in summer and can be shifted many hours with thermal storage. This can be as simple as precooling a building before a predicted price spike, exploiting the building's mass as a thermal store.

Seems like local power generation for local air conditioning would lessen the grid load and operational reduce costs. The government should invest in no/low interest loans for homes and businesses to install enough solar to power their A/Cs.

Most home electric vehicle charging can be shifted by more than an hour.

That's 1% of the load we'd still need find another 9 to even get to 10%.

Yep, electric cars aren't becoming more popular, no way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com