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Not quite what you mean, but a city in Australia is trialing "Smart Appliance Response Automation". The gist is that some appliances can utilize excess green po
by ehnto 6y ago
Not quite what you mean, but a city in Australia is trialing "Smart Appliance Response Automation". The gist is that some appliances can utilize excess green power during the day in order to not need that energy later at night when it would need to be provided by gas turbines.
The current trial is actually residential water heaters, by heating the water using excess green power during the day you effectively store that energy as heat and that water then gets used later that night or early morning for showers/baths/washing etc.
Another example is a more obvious one, which is electric cars and other large battery appliances. The ultimate goal is to get these appliances talking to the grid directly, so that they know when to draw power and when to idle.
https://www.energyrating.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-01/smart_appliance_decision_ris.pdf https://www.energyrating.gov.au/sites/default/files/2020-01/...
- bluGill 6y agoMy parents have had a smart water heater since 1988. It was interesting a few years back hearing a politician talk about how bad smart meters were - he had to make it clear that the smart meter 80% of the room had for 20 years were nothing like the smart meters he was talking about. (which is to say the ones he was against gave minute by minute reports with the privacy concerns, the ones everyone had just turned the water heater and AC units off/on - I'll let you decide if the issue was real or not)
- ehnto 6y agoI think the likelyhood of it being done in the "New Tech" fashion of bi-directional real-time data flows with high level languages is high, and the security of that will be low. So I'm not super pumped about the inevitable grid software exploits. Privacy aside, it's got other potential risks that are more important to address I think.