14 ms·

This is the future. Using algorithms to optimize usage of renewable energy. Not only will it be lower carbon, it will be cheaper. What's interesting is they des

by 205guy 6y ago

This is the future. Using algorithms to optimize usage of renewable energy. Not only will it be lower carbon, it will be cheaper. What's interesting is they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was? Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and thus give better savings, but maybe it varied too much to reliably run the loads they want. Imagine when your fridge can do this: freeze extra cold when the sun is shining (or wind is blowing), don't run the compressor when it's not, only run the blower after you open the door to move that extra cold from the freezer, allow a slightly larger temperature range, and of course run as necessary to avoid spoilage. It's not a simple algorithm, it has to handle various timeframes, such as solar being a daily cycle except there's less in winter and can go for a week or more with very little (storm/overcast). Maybe it could also use a bit of "learning" like the Nest thermostats to also optimize predicted usage. I know of one commercial product that sort of does this: the Zappi electric car charger. If you have grid-tied solar, it measures the current being fed back to the grid and adjusts the charging current to match. So if a cloud goes over your house, or you turn on a big appliance, the charger reduces the power to the car by the same amount. This maximizes the use of your own solar energy and minimizes the use of grid energy. https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/ https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/

WalterBright 6y ago
> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally gaining some traction!
- maelito 6y ago
  > A great deal How much in % ?
- konschubert 6y ago
  This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?
  - mattygh 6y ago
    Not true, it would work with hourly pricing. Still requires smart meters but those are something like 60-70% of homes in the US now. Even without real time or time of use based pricing, load shifting can still be valued and paid for as a service. Look up Demand Response: >$1Bn market in the US. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response
  - beckingz 6y ago
    It works well if you can aggregate the distributed resources so they're large enough to bid at the wholesale level.
    - mattygh 6y ago
      The market is a little more dynamic than that, wholesale bidding into the ISOs is still the biggest option but many utilities run load shifting programs of various sizes as well. Still, the conclusion is like you said. There's basically no real-world scenario where it makes sense for a residential customer to go it alone, because they can make at most a couple hundred bucks a year. So makes sense for their device companies or someone else to figure it out with utility and pay thousands of homeowners to agree to participate. Ohmconnect has a cool service in California.
      - beckingz 6y ago
        Demand response programs are great because of their scale and ability to provide incentives and command and control without directly interacting with the markets. The real big thing is aggregating the aggregations. Distributed Energy Management Systems (DERMS) / Virtual Power Plant Management Systems are an active research topic.
    - 6y ago
- harikb 6y ago
  Fridge is typically placed inside a house, unless we are talking about some alternate kitchen style. If so, ambient temp inside an apartment/house that is already heated or cooled is somewhat constant I assume. If so, where is the savings? Also freezing it more in day doesn’t allow me to freeze less at night. If I don’t open the door at all, then the insulation is already taking care of this. What am I missing?
  - hansvm 6y ago
    There are a few things going on here. First we need to address the basic premise that could allow this to make sense at all in some house or environment -- that one can afford to freeze less during the day if they freeze it more at night (or vice versa). For a fridge this is hard because you're usually targeting a narrow temperature band (don't want to accidentally freeze your veggies), but for a freezer it usually doesn't matter if you get it 10-20 degrees too hot or too cold as long as everything remains frozen. In that case, your losses (whether they're through the insulation or an open lid) will be higher with a colder freezer, so even if you could get your freezer down to e.g. -200 it might not be cost advantageous to do so, but colder temperatures definitely buy you some extra time. E.g. if normally your freezer is at -5 and you instead cool it down to -10, there will be a nonzero amount of time before it heats back up to -5 again (and the amount of time can be large if your freezer is well insulated and has a high thermal mass). The "closed system" aspect of this is also interesting. The cheap answer is that not all houses are heated or cooled (mine isn't), so you can sometimes ignore that part of the equation. A better answer is that everything mostly works out the same even for closed systems. Suppose you have A/C that cools your home to a target temperature. When your freezer is running it moves heat into the living space, which then needs to be moved outside. As a system, you can pretend those two units are working together to move that same quantity of heat outside, and when the freezer is off you're just not operating that entire heat pumping system (assuming linear power demands and a host of other things to make the example tractable in a comment). While the freezer is off it will also assist in cooling the room down, further alleviating A/C power demands during peak hours (not alleviating them much, but helping nonetheless). If you're instead heating the room to a target temperature, everything works a bit in reverse. The freezer alleviates heating costs while it's running and exacerbates them while it's off (and critically, it exacerbates them more than if you assumed a constant, low power draw because we're intentionally decreasing it's temperature below a typical freezer level and thus increasing the rate at which heat will enter it from the apartment by some small amount). Assuming you were trying to run the freezer during low cost hours, that effect might be large enough to offset any gains. I doubt it, but that's just a hunch, and I haven't run any hard numbers yet.
- joeyo 6y ago
  People are hacking together some interesting things in this space: https://fridge0.branchable.com https://fridge0.branchable.com
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  How much of energy consumption even is by households though? I think people have a strong bias for thinking the things they see and touch during the day are environmentally important. But most "pollution"/energy use happen out of sight from our everyday lives. Or so I think. Happy to be disproven!
  - luhn 6y ago
    ~20% is residential—still significant. Plus ~30% transportation, which as we transition to EVs become more and more relevant to residential energy use. But even commercial and industrial could be optimized in the same manner. I've been thinking: If electricity is much cheaper during certain periods, would factories be built to only run during those times? https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/
    - omniscient_oce 6y ago
      This is already a thing in Australia
    - d4nt 6y ago
      This is already a thing, but it‘s only done at “enterprise scale”. Meaning account managers meet with energy purchasers at large manufacturing plants to negotiate “interruptible supply” contracts. The notice periods, levels and tariffs are all negotiated individually. “Pricing managers” on both sides of the negotiation spend a long time modelling the deals in Excel. If algorithms could replace the pricing managers that would save both sides some time and money though, not to mention making it available to the residential and SME market.
      - aembleton 6y ago
        If you're in the UK, then Octopus Agile tariff gives you a variable price and an API with IFTTT integration so that you can switch devices on and off depending upon the current price: https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/
- dx034 6y ago
  The problem is that with modern fridges energy consumption is already low enough that steering that through smart meters probably isn't worth the investment. Large companies could use that, esp with electric heating. But in residential areas, I think energy efficiency can still yield greater results.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    There should just be a common protocol for all electical devices - heaters, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, computers, TVs, toasters - everything. Some devices might ignore it, but they should still have the data port and the microcontroller responding with "power regulation not supported". The state should regulate that like it regulates normal power sockets, it's a net benefit for everybody and the cost is minimal. We can just add usb port to regular wall sockets and make a new power plug with that. Of course the socket should be backward compatible, but any new devices would require the full plug and responding to the protocol. Over 10 years we could have an effective grid-wide gigawatthour battery. And everybody would only pay for it like 5 USD every time they buy a new device :) The cost of a cheap microcontroller, power regulator and an usb plug is like <5 USD. And the possibilities of energy savings are huge. There are also big usability improvements (want to have lights learning your habits and pretending you're home when you're on vacations - someone will make that product). Want to make sure you switched off that iron when you went to a party? No problem - connect with a smarpthone and check (and switch it off if needed). There could be several categories of devices with different priorities and default power settings that you could change if you want to: - background, critical - background, optional - background, opportunistic - interactive, critical - interactive, optional - interactive, dangerous if left alone - bidirectional (like Tesla wall, or a car charger if you want to power your house from your car battery when there is a blackout) And the house could detect if you're home, and disable the iron if you're not and throttle the freezer and all heaters to optimize the power usage. Automated vacuum cleaners nad chargers could start by themselves when the energy is effectively free and stop for a moment when there's a shortage. This will get especially important when electric cars are more common - you don't want everybody to start charging them when they get back home.
    - 6y ago
- myself248 6y ago
  Dang, I can't find it right now, but there's a service out there that pays you to reduce your consumption on demand. Use their app to link up with your smart appliances and stuff, and the rest does itself. Basically they've plugged into the ISO as a "generation" resource, and when the price of power goes high enough, they say "okay we can produce that much power", and they have all their users reduce that much power, which has the same effect. They get paid for the power, and pass some of it along to their users.
golemiprague 6y ago
Isn't is something water heaters are doing for ages? They optimise for price, not for sun but that's what matter for most people.
lightgreen 6y ago
The future is nuclear power, and when companies buy hardware they use it at max performance around the clock because energy is cheap and does not depend on weather. There’s huge lie (by omission) about renewables: nobody explained how to convert the world to 100% renewable energy without coal backup.
- seanmcdirmid 6y ago
  Coal and nuclear are both inflexible power sources, they are either on or off, and they are hard to turn on and off. Nuclear does have the benefit of being cheap after very high initial capital costs. Natural gas is a much better backup to renewables however, since it can turned on and off at will. Dam hydroelectric also has that nice quality (send water through the generator when you need it, otherwise let it stay in the reservoir). Given nuclear’s inflexibility, doing untimely work when less electricity is needed for more timely needs is also a win.
  - lightgreen 6y ago
    “they are either on or off” This is not true about neither nuclear nor coal. Nuclear reaction can be slowed down, coal furnace can be used with lower amount of coal at lower temperature. Nuclear does not need to be turned on or off spontaneously. Nuclear power plant can increase or decrease power smoothly, and that’s practically enough because consumption patterns are easily predicted. The inflexibility you are describing is nonissue. High capital cost is. But the largest issue is irrational fears of voters. Edit: nuclear or coal are not on or off
    - berkes 6y ago
      They can be slowed down. True. But that takes minutes or hours to do. And on anything but 100% power, the fuel innefficiency is bad. That latter is mostly a problem with coal, but even nuclear is burning fuel and costing wear. Plants can be optimized to react really fast, or run efficient on lower capacity, or run efficient on max capacity. Choose one.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cm2187 6y ago
And stop the train when the wind is not blowing or it is cloudy.
- aembleton 6y ago
  The train can carry batteries that could also be charged through regenerative braking.
sgillen 6y ago
>> What's interesting is they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was? Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and thus give better savings The article says they are “shifting the timing of our compute tasks”, so if they think that there will be cheap electricity later in the day (because it’s going to be especially windy or something) it would make sense for them to schedule some of their heavy compute tasks at that time, rather than right now.
josinalvo 6y ago
Afaik, the speed with which a cold (or hot) body converges to room temperature is exponential. Maybe that limits the smart fridge idea?
- labawi 6y ago
  It limits the rate at which you can dump energy without excessive temperature excursions. If you have the space, you can put thermal mass (e.g. water) between the cooler and produce, acting as a cheap thermal battery dampening temperature oscillations. It's often done in off-grid situations.

by 205guy 6y ago

WalterBright 6y ago

> Imagine when your fridge can do this I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power. A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries. Glad to see this finally gaining some traction!

maelito 6y ago
> A great deal How much in % ?
konschubert 6y ago
This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters. Does this exist anywhere in the world?
- mattygh 6y ago
  Not true, it would work with hourly pricing. Still requires smart meters but those are something like 60-70% of homes in the US now. Even without real time or time of use based pricing, load shifting can still be valued and paid for as a service. Look up Demand Response: >$1Bn market in the US. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_response
- beckingz 6y ago
  It works well if you can aggregate the distributed resources so they're large enough to bid at the wholesale level.
  - mattygh 6y ago
    The market is a little more dynamic than that, wholesale bidding into the ISOs is still the biggest option but many utilities run load shifting programs of various sizes as well. Still, the conclusion is like you said. There's basically no real-world scenario where it makes sense for a residential customer to go it alone, because they can make at most a couple hundred bucks a year. So makes sense for their device companies or someone else to figure it out with utility and pay thousands of homeowners to agree to participate. Ohmconnect has a cool service in California.
    - beckingz 6y ago
      Demand response programs are great because of their scale and ability to provide incentives and command and control without directly interacting with the markets. The real big thing is aggregating the aggregations. Distributed Energy Management Systems (DERMS) / Virtual Power Plant Management Systems are an active research topic.
  - 6y ago
harikb 6y ago
Fridge is typically placed inside a house, unless we are talking about some alternate kitchen style. If so, ambient temp inside an apartment/house that is already heated or cooled is somewhat constant I assume. If so, where is the savings? Also freezing it more in day doesn’t allow me to freeze less at night. If I don’t open the door at all, then the insulation is already taking care of this. What am I missing?
- hansvm 6y ago
  There are a few things going on here. First we need to address the basic premise that could allow this to make sense at all in some house or environment -- that one can afford to freeze less during the day if they freeze it more at night (or vice versa). For a fridge this is hard because you're usually targeting a narrow temperature band (don't want to accidentally freeze your veggies), but for a freezer it usually doesn't matter if you get it 10-20 degrees too hot or too cold as long as everything remains frozen. In that case, your losses (whether they're through the insulation or an open lid) will be higher with a colder freezer, so even if you could get your freezer down to e.g. -200 it might not be cost advantageous to do so, but colder temperatures definitely buy you some extra time. E.g. if normally your freezer is at -5 and you instead cool it down to -10, there will be a nonzero amount of time before it heats back up to -5 again (and the amount of time can be large if your freezer is well insulated and has a high thermal mass). The "closed system" aspect of this is also interesting. The cheap answer is that not all houses are heated or cooled (mine isn't), so you can sometimes ignore that part of the equation. A better answer is that everything mostly works out the same even for closed systems. Suppose you have A/C that cools your home to a target temperature. When your freezer is running it moves heat into the living space, which then needs to be moved outside. As a system, you can pretend those two units are working together to move that same quantity of heat outside, and when the freezer is off you're just not operating that entire heat pumping system (assuming linear power demands and a host of other things to make the example tractable in a comment). While the freezer is off it will also assist in cooling the room down, further alleviating A/C power demands during peak hours (not alleviating them much, but helping nonetheless). If you're instead heating the room to a target temperature, everything works a bit in reverse. The freezer alleviates heating costs while it's running and exacerbates them while it's off (and critically, it exacerbates them more than if you assumed a constant, low power draw because we're intentionally decreasing it's temperature below a typical freezer level and thus increasing the rate at which heat will enter it from the apartment by some small amount). Assuming you were trying to run the freezer during low cost hours, that effect might be large enough to offset any gains. I doubt it, but that's just a hunch, and I haven't run any hard numbers yet.
joeyo 6y ago
People are hacking together some interesting things in this space: https://fridge0.branchable.com https://fridge0.branchable.com
BurningFrog 6y ago
How much of energy consumption even is by households though? I think people have a strong bias for thinking the things they see and touch during the day are environmentally important. But most "pollution"/energy use happen out of sight from our everyday lives. Or so I think. Happy to be disproven!
- luhn 6y ago
  ~20% is residential—still significant. Plus ~30% transportation, which as we transition to EVs become more and more relevant to residential energy use. But even commercial and industrial could be optimized in the same manner. I've been thinking: If electricity is much cheaper during certain periods, would factories be built to only run during those times? https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/
  - omniscient_oce 6y ago
    This is already a thing in Australia
  - d4nt 6y ago
    This is already a thing, but it‘s only done at “enterprise scale”. Meaning account managers meet with energy purchasers at large manufacturing plants to negotiate “interruptible supply” contracts. The notice periods, levels and tariffs are all negotiated individually. “Pricing managers” on both sides of the negotiation spend a long time modelling the deals in Excel. If algorithms could replace the pricing managers that would save both sides some time and money though, not to mention making it available to the residential and SME market.
    - aembleton 6y ago
      If you're in the UK, then Octopus Agile tariff gives you a variable price and an API with IFTTT integration so that you can switch devices on and off depending upon the current price: https://octopus.energy/agile/ https://octopus.energy/agile/
dx034 6y ago
The problem is that with modern fridges energy consumption is already low enough that steering that through smart meters probably isn't worth the investment. Large companies could use that, esp with electric heating. But in residential areas, I think energy efficiency can still yield greater results.
- ajuc 6y ago
  There should just be a common protocol for all electical devices - heaters, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, computers, TVs, toasters - everything. Some devices might ignore it, but they should still have the data port and the microcontroller responding with "power regulation not supported". The state should regulate that like it regulates normal power sockets, it's a net benefit for everybody and the cost is minimal. We can just add usb port to regular wall sockets and make a new power plug with that. Of course the socket should be backward compatible, but any new devices would require the full plug and responding to the protocol. Over 10 years we could have an effective grid-wide gigawatthour battery. And everybody would only pay for it like 5 USD every time they buy a new device :) The cost of a cheap microcontroller, power regulator and an usb plug is like <5 USD. And the possibilities of energy savings are huge. There are also big usability improvements (want to have lights learning your habits and pretending you're home when you're on vacations - someone will make that product). Want to make sure you switched off that iron when you went to a party? No problem - connect with a smarpthone and check (and switch it off if needed). There could be several categories of devices with different priorities and default power settings that you could change if you want to: - background, critical - background, optional - background, opportunistic - interactive, critical - interactive, optional - interactive, dangerous if left alone - bidirectional (like Tesla wall, or a car charger if you want to power your house from your car battery when there is a blackout) And the house could detect if you're home, and disable the iron if you're not and throttle the freezer and all heaters to optimize the power usage. Automated vacuum cleaners nad chargers could start by themselves when the energy is effectively free and stop for a moment when there's a shortage. This will get especially important when electric cars are more common - you don't want everybody to start charging them when they get back home.
  - 6y ago
myself248 6y ago
Dang, I can't find it right now, but there's a service out there that pays you to reduce your consumption on demand. Use their app to link up with your smart appliances and stuff, and the rest does itself. Basically they've plugged into the ISO as a "generation" resource, and when the price of power goes high enough, they say "okay we can produce that much power", and they have all their users reduce that much power, which has the same effect. They get paid for the power, and pass some of it along to their users.

golemiprague 6y ago

Isn't is something water heaters are doing for ages? They optimise for price, not for sun but that's what matter for most people.

lightgreen 6y ago

The future is nuclear power, and when companies buy hardware they use it at max performance around the clock because energy is cheap and does not depend on weather. There’s huge lie (by omission) about renewables: nobody explained how to convert the world to 100% renewable energy without coal backup.

seanmcdirmid 6y ago
Coal and nuclear are both inflexible power sources, they are either on or off, and they are hard to turn on and off. Nuclear does have the benefit of being cheap after very high initial capital costs. Natural gas is a much better backup to renewables however, since it can turned on and off at will. Dam hydroelectric also has that nice quality (send water through the generator when you need it, otherwise let it stay in the reservoir). Given nuclear’s inflexibility, doing untimely work when less electricity is needed for more timely needs is also a win.
- lightgreen 6y ago
  “they are either on or off” This is not true about neither nuclear nor coal. Nuclear reaction can be slowed down, coal furnace can be used with lower amount of coal at lower temperature. Nuclear does not need to be turned on or off spontaneously. Nuclear power plant can increase or decrease power smoothly, and that’s practically enough because consumption patterns are easily predicted. The inflexibility you are describing is nonissue. High capital cost is. But the largest issue is irrational fears of voters. Edit: nuclear or coal are not on or off
  - berkes 6y ago
    They can be slowed down. True. But that takes minutes or hours to do. And on anything but 100% power, the fuel innefficiency is bad. That latter is mostly a problem with coal, but even nuclear is burning fuel and costing wear. Plants can be optimized to react really fast, or run efficient on lower capacity, or run efficient on max capacity. Choose one.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cm2187 6y ago

And stop the train when the wind is not blowing or it is cloudy.

aembleton 6y ago
The train can carry batteries that could also be charged through regenerative braking.

sgillen 6y ago

>> What's interesting is they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was? Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and thus give better savings The article says they are “shifting the timing of our compute tasks”, so if they think that there will be cheap electricity later in the day (because it’s going to be especially windy or something) it would make sense for them to schedule some of their heavy compute tasks at that time, rather than right now.

josinalvo 6y ago

Afaik, the speed with which a cold (or hot) body converges to room temperature is exponential. Maybe that limits the smart fridge idea?

labawi 6y ago
It limits the rate at which you can dump energy without excessive temperature excursions. If you have the space, you can put thermal mass (e.g. water) between the cooler and produce, acting as a cheap thermal battery dampening temperature oscillations. It's often done in off-grid situations.