8 ms·

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are

The real fix here is to have more residential customers either knowing the minute by minute pricing This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"?

londons_explore 6y ago
People make similar choices all the time... Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead." Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.
- joosters 6y ago
  You're comparing filling up the car to literally freezing. Find some humanity!
  - namibj 6y ago
    The alternative to heating that much is wearing outside clothes inside, while heating only enough to prevent frost damage (and ideally not requiring gloves).
  - mypalmike 6y ago
    Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious intent you want it to.
    - joosters 6y ago
      There's imperfect analogies, and then there's completely unrelated 'analogies'. It was the OP chose this analogy in particular, it kind of implies that they consider the situations to be similar.
      - perl4ever 6y ago
        I just read some people in Texas are camping out in their cars to keep warm.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second granularity. Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.
  - baq 6y ago
    in before "but this is freedom to make rational decisions!" rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.
Scoundreller 6y ago
At some level, consumers do pay that minute-by-minute rate, it just gets averaged out. No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash, another group of people jacked up theirs up. Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of those 68s are going to get changed to 80. If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot more will be set 68.
- joosters 6y ago
  If anything, the poorer people will be the ones going to 68. So your grand plan is to let the poor freeze while the rich stay warm?
  - austincheney 6y ago
    We normally operate our thermostat at 67 during the winter but have put it down to 60 given the power crisis. If people are crying about going way down to 68 I have no sympathy.
    - joosters 6y ago
      68 = they deserve the pain, 67 = all ok? It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why is there so little empathy on here?
      - jodrellblank 6y ago
        Because there’s a difference between - the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty - we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die? - the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years
        joosters 6y ago
        Why are you assuming that the poor are demanding t-shirt and shorts temperatures? Please stop making up strawmen. And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.
londons_explore 6y ago
Devices can offer functionality to take the decisionmaking burden from the user. For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.
- baq 6y ago
  don't know about you but my dishwasher's shortest program is ~30 minutes - if price of electricity changed every minute, i just wouldn't care because it'd be pointless.
  - jusssi 6y ago
    Most of the energy a wash cycle uses is for heating the water it just took in. The part where it splashes the water around uses next to nothing. Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.
    - genewitch 6y ago
      > from: GE to: end user > Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled > > Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled. > In order to save money, please send us money. > P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak. > thank you for your consideration. > > Mike at GE
sjwright 6y ago
I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme. Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)
- joosters 6y ago
  Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging? Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the one single entity? If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)
  - sjwright 6y ago
    You make it sound like an economics problem when it's ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you can't rely entirely on supply side solutions else you are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme demand, a cost that's inevitably passed onto consumers. This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable. Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year. It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.
  - freetime2 6y ago
    There is a large cost to building out excess capacity to handle peak demands. That cost gets passed on to customers, and everyone ends up paying more for electricity. There’s also an environmental cost, as “peaker” plants typically burn fossil fuels. Even building grid-scale storage solutions would have a fairly large environmental impact (assuming that’s even feasible at all on the scale necessary). It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.
nicoburns 6y ago
They could have automated systems to react to prices. Or they could be simpler (like on a fixed daily schedule).
nindalf 6y ago
They might not need to now, when most energy is generated by systems that run around the clock. But as we generate more solar, it'd be great if people could run more of their high energy activities like say, car charging during the day. I don't know of any way to incentivise this behaviour other than pricing. Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug it in this afternoon instead of right now".
eitland 6y ago
> This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"? Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day. I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api. I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things: - turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do this are available in the $150 - $350 price range - scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary - showering to low demand times - maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications to the construction - or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC) - not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to allow their vehicles to be used as power banks. It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current price hike, API access and real time price information helped me to make the jump however. Conclusion: Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems like a good idea for companies that are in a position to provide it.
- manyes 6y ago
  Batteries don't work all that well at these lower temperatures. I suppose if your Tesla is in a garage that would work, though.
  - hedora 6y ago
    Teslas regulate their battery heat for this reason. https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips
- brianwawok 6y ago
  Sadly Tesla doesn’t have the tech in their car to pump power out fast. You need their home battery product power wall. It’s actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during peak demand.
djrobstep 6y ago
Here in Australia, I'm on a power plan that charges you the actual current wholesale price (plus an admin fee). I have an app where I can check the price, and set up alerts for when there are price spikes and such. I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into changing your behavior gradually.
markvdb 6y ago
Giving electricity consumers the opportunity to set their consumption preferences is actually super logical. It's an obvious way to shave peaks off the total demand for electricity. Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.
brianwawok 6y ago
If you have a Tesla power wall, I believe you can set it up to do this. Basically go power wall (house battery) to house during expensive times of electricity. And then charge the battery back up during cheap electric times. I think even 10% of the grid with such a system would do a lot to take the edge off peak demand, as all of those goes guys go to 0% usage.
kasey_junk 6y ago
I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the current energy price displayed on a screen in our kitchen. This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.
- bombcar 6y ago
  This is amusingly interesting to me. I’d love to know more about your setup and the results make sense (I’ve considered installing a second dishwasher to be able to handle an entire days worth of dishes overnight) but it also seems somehow slightly dystopian. I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.
  - kasey_junk 6y ago
    The screen in my kitchen is a dakboard (https://dakboard.com/site https://dakboard.com/site) we largely use it as a digital picture frame and calendar but it supports querying/parsing json out of the box. So to get the price on it I have it hit my providers json api https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/ https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/. For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/ https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle). Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.
    - mitfahrener 6y ago
      Very cool

londons_explore 6y ago

People make similar choices all the time... Eg. "Oh, there's a queue at the gas station today. I'll drive on and get gas tomorrow instead." Thats them observing that the cost (to their time) of getting gas is high today, and that they can purchase later for a lower time cost.

joosters 6y ago
You're comparing filling up the car to literally freezing. Find some humanity!
- namibj 6y ago
  The alternative to heating that much is wearing outside clothes inside, while heating only enough to prevent frost damage (and ideally not requiring gloves).
- mypalmike 6y ago
  Imperfect economic analogy is imperfect. It doesn't mean it's unreasonable, and it doesn't imply the malicious intent you want it to.
  - joosters 6y ago
    There's imperfect analogies, and then there's completely unrelated 'analogies'. It was the OP chose this analogy in particular, it kind of implies that they consider the situations to be similar.
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      I just read some people in Texas are camping out in their cars to keep warm.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
TeMPOraL 6y ago
That's on a per-day granularity. Not on a per second granularity. Imagine yourself standing at the pump and observing the gasoline price ticker, manually PWMing the pump trigger to only feed the gas when its price is below some threshold.
- baq 6y ago
  in before "but this is freedom to make rational decisions!" rational decisions require concentration and that isn't free. at some point the cost of making these decisions outweighs any potential benefits. don't forget your externalities, folks.

Scoundreller 6y ago

At some level, consumers do pay that minute-by-minute rate, it just gets averaged out. No doubt, today, while some people heeded the advice to turn their thermostats down to 68 to avoid a grid crash, another group of people jacked up theirs up. Now that rolling blackouts have started, I'm sure some of those 68s are going to get changed to 80. If consumers were paying the $1-$2/kwh+, I'm sure a lot more will be set 68.

joosters 6y ago
If anything, the poorer people will be the ones going to 68. So your grand plan is to let the poor freeze while the rich stay warm?
- austincheney 6y ago
  We normally operate our thermostat at 67 during the winter but have put it down to 60 given the power crisis. If people are crying about going way down to 68 I have no sympathy.
  - joosters 6y ago
    68 = they deserve the pain, 67 = all ok? It's not about the absolute numbers, they were presumably just picked out of a hat. It's the general concept. Why is there so little empathy on here?
    - jodrellblank 6y ago
      Because there’s a difference between - the poor are freezing to death while the rich have plenty - we have you over a barrel, how much is it worth not to die? - the poor might have to run their dishwasher at a different time if they want t-shirt and shorts temperature indoors in the coldest winter in 40 years
      - joosters 6y ago
        Why are you assuming that the poor are demanding t-shirt and shorts temperatures? Please stop making up strawmen. And when did dishwashers come into this? Are you really expecting that poor people should be buying brand new 'smart' dishwashers that will pick the right time to run to save some cents? I'm sure they've got the cash for that purchase just sitting around in the bank.

londons_explore 6y ago

Devices can offer functionality to take the decisionmaking burden from the user. For example a dishwasher could have a setting where you tell it what time the washing must be done by, and it schedules the wash cycle to be when it thinks electricity will be cheapest.

baq 6y ago
don't know about you but my dishwasher's shortest program is ~30 minutes - if price of electricity changed every minute, i just wouldn't care because it'd be pointless.
- jusssi 6y ago
  Most of the energy a wash cycle uses is for heating the water it just took in. The part where it splashes the water around uses next to nothing. Waiting a bit to start heating that water if there's a high consumption peak right now is hard to transfer to any significant benefit for the consumer, because electricity is just that cheap. But it might make sense from the grid point of view to have higher demand elasticity.
  - genewitch 6y ago
    > from: GE to: end user > Subject: Missed payment on warranty program, features disabled > > Hello <name> due to missing your yearly warranty payment, your GE dishwasher's peak pricing avoidance has been disabled. > In order to save money, please send us money. > P.S. if you haven't paid up within a month, your dishwasher will only heat water when the cost of electricity is higher than the 24 hour rolling average peak. > thank you for your consideration. > > Mike at GE

sjwright 6y ago

I do this today. My energy provider bills me based on live fluctuating rates. It’s no big deal, on most days prices fluctuate less than they would on a regular peak/off peak pricing scheme. Some days there are short periods of high demand that cause price spikes, I’m given ample warning and can choose whether to adjust my behaviour during that spike. That might mean being more gentle with AC during a heatwave, or pre-cooling the house before the spike hits. (Price spikes can be 10x or even 100x typical rates.)

joosters 6y ago
Why does this make sense to do on an individual level? If there is ample warning of price spikes, shouldn't we be expecting the power companies to do the energy hedging? Why make thousands of people do the job instead of the one single entity? If we are trying to make the energy system smart, shouldn't the power companies be the ones trying to add smarts to the system? (e.g. better energy storage for peak usage, etc)
- sjwright 6y ago
  You make it sound like an economics problem when it's ultimately an engineering problem. Energy companies already do many things to keep the grid stable, but you can't rely entirely on supply side solutions else you are forced to over-engineer the grid to handle extreme demand, a cost that's inevitably passed onto consumers. This is going to become more important as electric cars become mainstream—without some incentive for consumers to delay charging their vehicles during extreme peaks, we're going to be paying for some fairly hefty upgrades to keep electric grids stable. Focusing on demand saves everyone money, because it means we can do more with existing infrastructure. In my case, if I'm willing to react to price spikes, I can reduce my annual energy cost by literally hundreds of dollars. For me, it just means occasionally delaying use of the dishwasher or dryer by an hour or so. And by occasionally I mean a handful of times every year. It's far less onerous than the regular peak/off peak pricing I've dealt with in prior decades.
- freetime2 6y ago
  There is a large cost to building out excess capacity to handle peak demands. That cost gets passed on to customers, and everyone ends up paying more for electricity. There’s also an environmental cost, as “peaker” plants typically burn fossil fuels. Even building grid-scale storage solutions would have a fairly large environmental impact (assuming that’s even feasible at all on the scale necessary). It makes sense to target both the supply and demand sides of energy consumption.

nicoburns 6y ago

They could have automated systems to react to prices. Or they could be simpler (like on a fixed daily schedule).

nindalf 6y ago

They might not need to now, when most energy is generated by systems that run around the clock. But as we generate more solar, it'd be great if people could run more of their high energy activities like say, car charging during the day. I don't know of any way to incentivise this behaviour other than pricing. Of course it's unreasonable to expect people to monitor prices on a minute-by-minute basis. But the future probably looks like "oh, car is low right now. I'll plug it in this afternoon instead of right now".

eitland 6y ago

> This is insane. Do you really believe that individuals are going to be monitoring the energy prices like a rabid day-trader, making 'rational' decisions between "oh good, power is cheap now" and "power is expensive, I guess I'll just freeze"? Pricing here in Norway already changes through the day. I changed my supplier yesterday to one that has an api. I'll use the current prices as an excuse to fix a few things: - turning down heat at night, heating fast before demand peaks, lower heating during peak etc. Boxes that can do this are available in the $150 - $350 price range - scheduling washing and drying and - if necessary - showering to low demand times - maybe install a fireplace (chimney was mandatory when tje house was built so I'll just pay for the actual fireplace and installation, not extensive modifications to the construction - or a air-air heat pump (also works as AC) - not relevant to me at tjr moment but EV owners (of which there are plenty around here) can save a lot by scheduling charging to avoid peaks. Further down the lane I think I've heard about someone (Tesla?) planning to allow their vehicles to be used as power banks. It is probably the main selling point for Tibber here in Norway, prices were slightly lower than my previous supplier, but not enough to make me switch. The current price hike, API access and real time price information helped me to make the jump however. Conclusion: Providing pricing information and APIs to end users seems like a good idea for companies that are in a position to provide it.

manyes 6y ago
Batteries don't work all that well at these lower temperatures. I suppose if your Tesla is in a garage that would work, though.
- hedora 6y ago
  Teslas regulate their battery heat for this reason. https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips https://www.tesla.com/support/winter-driving-tips
brianwawok 6y ago
Sadly Tesla doesn’t have the tech in their car to pump power out fast. You need their home battery product power wall. It’s actually very sad, I have a great 75 kWh battery in my garage. Would be happy to power my home with it during peak demand.

djrobstep 6y ago

Here in Australia, I'm on a power plan that charges you the actual current wholesale price (plus an admin fee). I have an app where I can check the price, and set up alerts for when there are price spikes and such. I don't rabidly monitor it, but it does nudge you into changing your behavior gradually.

markvdb 6y ago

Giving electricity consumers the opportunity to set their consumption preferences is actually super logical. It's an obvious way to shave peaks off the total demand for electricity. Consumers obviously shouldn't have to monitoring this themselves all the time though. Ideally, a device would do that for them. But even without that, quite a few people in Latvia buy their electricity at spot market prices and adjust their behavior to price changes. Working poor trying to penny pinch do so manually. More affluent eco minded people use intelligent devices.

brianwawok 6y ago

If you have a Tesla power wall, I believe you can set it up to do this. Basically go power wall (house battery) to house during expensive times of electricity. And then charge the battery back up during cheap electric times. I think even 10% of the grid with such a system would do a lot to take the edge off peak demand, as all of those goes guys go to 0% usage.

kasey_junk 6y ago

I have 2 charts running in my office all day. One is energy load and one is energy pricing. I also have the current energy price displayed on a screen in our kitchen. This has worked to change our habits pretty well. For instance we now consider it “expensive” to run the dishwasher during the day. We’ll do it if necessary but there is now a mental barrier to doing so.

bombcar 6y ago
This is amusingly interesting to me. I’d love to know more about your setup and the results make sense (I’ve considered installing a second dishwasher to be able to handle an entire days worth of dishes overnight) but it also seems somehow slightly dystopian. I agree with the note later in the thread that the solution is powerwall like things for demand smoothing / moving.
- kasey_junk 6y ago
  The screen in my kitchen is a dakboard (https://dakboard.com/site https://dakboard.com/site) we largely use it as a digital picture frame and calendar but it supports querying/parsing json out of the box. So to get the price on it I have it hit my providers json api https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/ https://hourlypricing.comed.com/hp-api/. For the charts in my office I have a Prometheus/Grafana setup at home for a variety of things and built a bridge to the comed data for Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter https://github.com/kklipsch/comed_exporter). For usage data I have a neat gadget called a Rainforest Automation Eagle (https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/ https://www.rainforestautomation.com/compare-emu-and-eagle/) that reads my smart meters radio signal. It exposes an xml api and I wrote a bridge to Prometheus (https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle https://github.com/kklipsch/reagle). Once it’s all in Prometheus the Grafana dashboards are pretty straight forward affairs.
  - mitfahrener 6y ago
    Very cool