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Is there a reason why time-of-use systems can’t have a customer-defined price limit, beyond which they opt into a blackout? The sense I got from the stories of

• londons_explore 6y ago
  Laws generally prevent this (generally a customer's supply can only be cut off with a long and precise legal procedure). It's possible it might be doable with a user override.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    I think you have this backwards. This isn't the power company shutting off your power. This is telling your agent (in this case Griddy) to stop buying power under some conditions that you define.
    • londons_explore 6y ago
      I understand... But in the eyes of the law, Griddy is your power company, and their equipment shutting off your supply might break a lot of laws about disconnecting people without giving the requisite notice, legal procedure, etc. Where do you draw the line? "Griddy, please turn my power off if the price goes above $1/kwh"... "Griddy, please turn the power off if I forget to pay the bill.", "Griddy, I'll take a $10/month discount if the power gets turned off when my bill is paid late?", "Griddy, I want to use non-ripoff plan, so I'm happy for you to turn my power off the minute I pay late". See how it isn't really feasible to stop power companies forcibly illegally disconnecting debtors if you allow a debtor to agree to be disconnected voluntarily?
      • nybble41 6y ago
        If the property owner has a button to override the cut-off and turn the power back on then that should satisfy any legal requirements related to unilateral disconnection of power. The disconnect should happen on the customer's side anyway. The power company just needs to provide accurate information about the current price in a form that can be used by an automated switch. Important circuits could be placed on a separate panel with a higher cut-off point.
  • tshaddox 6y ago
    My impression is that laws also generally prevent extreme increases in the cost of electricity without a great deal of advanced warning.
• londons_explore 6y ago
  Adding a 100+ amp contactor and two way communication to every existing meter will add a lot to the cost of the equipment required at a user site.
  • Spivak 6y ago
    Why do you have to do this on the meter side? Cant your power company shut off your power from their end?
    • wmf 6y ago
      The same equipment would be required regardless of what end it's on. The pole transformer feeding your house and your neighbor's house is basically passive AFAIK; it's not remotely controllable.
    • tshaddox 6y ago
      No, I suspect power companies cannot generally shut off your power from their end. There's not a separate cable from the power plant to each individual home. There are really big cables that go most of the way from the power plant, then at each neighbhorhood or block they split off into smaller cables for individual homes. That's where the meter for each home is installed, and that's where the power company can turn off your electricity. Traditionally they sent a technician out to read each meter and turn off the electricity if necessary, but there are newer "smart meters" that communicate your usage to the power company (although I'm not sure if those can also be remotely triggered to turn off your power, I would suspect not). Where I grew up in a small town in the Midwestern US in the 1990s, the meters were usually installed on an external wall at the back of the house. My part of town had underground power lines (good during thunderstorms, bad during road/building construction) and I suspect the meter was right where the buried cable came into the house. Every month a uniformed person from the power company would walk through everyone's backyards taking the reading from each meter. Fun fact: most utilities and similar services have historically worked this way. I think the cable television company would just send someone to the cable box on the back of your house and flip switches to enable the channels you were paying for. There was always some kid who claimed to get HBO for free because his older cousin worked for the cable company. Now that I think about it, I recently got a car that's new enough to have Sirius XM satellite radio built in, and I've been wondering how their access control works. Surely the satellite doesn't beam down everyone's subscription status and make their receiver hardware respect that, right? Is my car using the built-in cell phone to check whether I'm subscribed to the satellite radio? Either way, where are the bootlegged satellite radio receivers?
• xur17 6y ago
  Or, is there a way for these customer facing companies to hedge against this risk via options, and utilize this to set a price cap (passing on a small monthly fee to the customer)?
  • astanway 6y ago
    Yep - this is what 99% of electricity retailers do.
    • xur17 6y ago
      But most electricity retailers just set a fixed price for electricity completely disconnected from the actual costs. I'm specifically wondering if it's possible to allow for wholesale purchasing, but set a cap at something like $10 or $100/kwhr - still crazy high, but keeping obscene rates away. Maybe let the customer choose what level of cap they want.
      • tedunangst 6y ago
        Why would anyone agree to sell you power at cost, unless the cost goes too high, and then sell it below cost?
        • xur17 6y ago
          Because in addition to receiving their at cost payment, they'd also receive a fixed monthly fee. The power supplier would essentially sell call options to the electricity retailer.
        • nawitus 6y ago
          By selling an insurance.
      • SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
        Texas's rates were capped at $9/kwhr, so "$10 or $100/kwhr" certainly wouldn't keep the obscene rates away.
    • 6y ago
• sokoloff 6y ago
  There's no fundamental technical reason. It costs money to install the smart meters. It would cost more money to install control systems and automatic transfer switches, but even the smallest generator-backed (or multi-feed) datacenter has all the equipment technically needed to implement what you describe. Many large UPS units have everything as well. It's probably an additional $3-6K on top of the smart meter to build in such switching (an ATS and a control system to understand the current/projected rate and switch based on it). For this event, going down to your main panel and flipping the main breaker for a few days would have accomplished the same thing for no cost. I suspect the same people who bought Griddy's save money almost all the time plan are not the ones likely to install $5K of extra switching equipment at their house to protect themselves from a multi-day deep freeze event in Texas. Certainly no landlord is going to install that where they bear the costs and maintenance so their tenants can buy cheaper electricity.
  • cpwright 6y ago
    The smart meter can already be disabled remotely. I have one in NY that will alternate between its reading and "CLOSED" meaning that the circuit is connected. As a parent poster pointed out, the power company, however, cannot disconnect you without proper notice.
  • ArkanExplorer 6y ago
    Every second appliance has Wifi nowadays - but we need an industry standard that allows consumers to control usage based on price, perhaps by assigning specific appliances in your house to your energy retailer web account, and then allowing the retailer/grid operator to control when they are turned off and on (or to adjust their energy intensity) in return for a monthly discount. For example just by heating and cooling houses a few hours before people get home, we can shift a lot of demand towards the middle of the day when solar power is abundant, and away from evening peaks. We're definitely going to need something like this for widespread EV usage, where cars can potentially upload power to the grid. Government has a role here in setting standards. They are the ones who get blamed for high energy prices or outages, anyway.
    • 6y ago
• twoodfin 6y ago
  I can't speak for Texas, but in many states a contract that allowed a utility provider to shut off service without adequate notification and other paperwork would be illegal. You're on to an idea that the article doesn't cover: If you want consumers to constrain their utilization during periods of high demand without using price shifts, you might require they install suitably "smart" thermostats and appliances along with their smart meter. These could allow the utility to forcibly curtail power use without rolling blackouts. Some utilities already offer a softer version of this, with your Nest offering to tweak your schedule to marginally lower your bill. Of course that kind of invasive control would likely not go over much better than $16,000 power bills.
• pxeboot 6y ago
  On the other hand, a lot of people would have been happy to have a 5 figure electric bill instead of having their pipes freeze from an involuntary blackout.
  • filoleg 6y ago
    Which is why the parent comment says "can have a limit", not "must require a limit". That way, those who would rather get through a blackout without paying insane bills can have an option to do so, while those who care about their pipes freezing can pay to keep the electricity.
    • hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
      I still think this is totally unfeasible. Then all the news stories would just be "Fine print in electric contract shut off power for many, now facing thousands in water damage bills."
      • filoleg 6y ago
        Totally agreed with you, it is probably completely unfeasible. I was just assuming we were talking about this in terms of ideal wants.
  • HeavenFox 6y ago
    ...except the latter will (likely) be covered by insurance, whereas you are on your own for the former.
  • spamizbad 6y ago
    For thousands in Texas they're getting both.
• xoa 6y ago
  It's an avenue that should be pursued if a state truly wants to have market-based pricing. For that to work there definitely needs to be transparency and ways for customers to easily automatically adjust in response to pricing signals. Though it could be pricy, there is plenty of promising tech approaches and it could definitely be part of an overall more efficient grid. For example, Tesla Powerwalls (disclaimer: I've got a few) already allow custom time-based controls precisely for the purpose of saving money when on a utility plan that is split into peak/shoulder/off-peak pricing. That's one of the ways they can offer some direct financial return (benefits from generator replacement and on-site production aside). That's not granular enough or automated enough to react to a situation like this one, but on the face of it doesn't seem like any reason it couldn't be. If Tesla had an API that someone like Griddy could talk to, an interface in the app for something like "price-based control" seems like it'd be doable and an interesting value-add and a relatively low lift. Powerwalls already have remote control functionality for grid-operator/customer deals. And it'd give a lot more buffer. However those of course are $6.5k a pop right now. Long term it might be more fruitful for many people to lean on future electric vehicles for this. Those have humongous batteries and alternate ROI so a lot of people may ultimately have them anyway, vs being a dedicated expense. Hopefully the next decade, along with more fundamental grid investment period, will also see the natural spread of more and smarter buffering options.
• Faaak 6y ago
  France's Linky has a built-in relay that the TSO can use to shed some power in the event of an emergency. I suppose that it could be used by a novel energy supplier to pay less in power reserve and they could shut off willing consumers in the event of a near blackout.
• everybodyknows 6y ago
  There’s a less drastic compromise: Power company sends a text one day ahead of expected stress, with news that tomorrow’s price will be 3x normal. Enough to focus customer attention, but without threat of financial ruin. SDG&E, in California, offers such a plan (layered on top of conventional TOU terms).
• zbrozek 6y ago
  There's another post that used a term I'm going to appropriate for other conversations: homo economicus. We aren't that species. We don't have perfect information. We don't have infinite capacity or attention span to continuously micro-optimize everything. It's why people buy products and services rather than vertically integrate everything in their lives. I don't want to live Texan Power Simulator any more than I want to be mining my own bauxite or replacing my driveway. Buying a product or service is granting the supplier a profit in exchange for them worrying about and executing the business. But you don't buy power any more. You buy access to a dynamic marketplace in which you probably didn't really want to participate. What if there were real time pricing per byte coming down from your ISP and you had to sit and stare at your screen waiting for an affordable moment to check your email? Or what if you had to stop mid-shower to avoid spending five figures to rinse the soap off? I can't imagine being happy in those cases, I don't know why I should be happy about it for electricity.
• curryst 6y ago
  They can always pull the main at the breaker. Unfortunately, that's a terrible option too. The cold is survivable with some gear, but your pipes will freeze and burst unless you drain them (which I have no idea how to do, if it can be done). We also had several deaths due to people using gas heaters indoors. I think it releases carbon monoxide? Not entirely sure, but those outdoor heaters are meant to be outdoors.