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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The US is very different from Europe in this sense. My house uses a small fraction of an equivalent family home in the United States. On the coldest days in winter I might go through 10 KWh of electricity and 15 cubic meters of natural gas. During a summer day gas usage will be < 0.5 cubic meters (mostly for shower water) and electricity will be 60 KWh or more returned to the grid.

Someone with smaller service won't be able to create as much variability in load as someone with a much more beefy hookup.

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>Someone with smaller service won't be able to create as much variability in load as someone with a much more beefy hookup.

I think we are in dangerous waters when we are are basing public policy on "ability" to have impact opposed to "actual impact. I think it is a genuinely interesting question if and how much this variability contributes to the grid capacity requirements.

You can basically think of individual variability as noise on an analog signal. Does single user variability average out, and if so, on what scale?

How does this variability compare to other amplitude changes, like aggregate or seasonal daily use patterns?

I think it is entirely possible that this noise could be negligible at most scales, but obviously dont have the data.

However, someone with the actual data could easily do an ANOVA evaluation, and see what the actual numbers are.

It's simple physics, actual impact follows ability. In other words: you don't ask for a hookup larger than the one that you intend to use because you already pay more per month for that larger hookup.

Except that it doesn't, necessarily.

You could have some unusually heavy usage during off-peak hours and that doesn't require any additional grid infrastructure because there is already plenty of capacity during off-peak hours. Whereas if you want to use the same amount of power during peak hours, that would require more grid capacity, but in general the way to handle that is by charging a higher price per kWh during peak hours, giving everyone the incentive to use less then (and charging them appropriately if they don't/can't).

Impact does not follow ability, it is the exact opposite when we are talking about variability.

Total demand for power increases linearly with the number of users. Percent variability of demand decreases with the number of users and approaches a limit of zero.

If we are talking with sizing power infrastructure, capacity required increases with the number of users, but safety factor required decreases with the number of users.

At the margin, infrastructure cost scales with per capita power usage, not with individual variability. The variability cancels out.

Not California, but in general terms this is not accurate. My local grid connection provider (the largest in the country), does not differentiate between 1x25A and 3x63A in cost. It's the same price.

That's a pretty big difference in available power for the same price. (5.8~43.5 kW)

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