3 ms·

The cheapest "energy storage" is bandwidth and demand based billing. The required battery storage cost to guarantee my 3 KW electric clothes dryer could theore

by VLM 5y ago

The cheapest "energy storage" is bandwidth and demand based billing. The required battery storage cost to guarantee my 3 KW electric clothes dryer could theoretically operate 24x7 when needed after three weeks of cloudy windless weather at midnight is staggering. The alternative is demand based billing and program my dryer to never accept a KWh that costs more than say, seven cents. On a minute by minute basis I don't care if my "hour" dryer cycle takes 65 minutes because a cloud passed overhead and it slept for five minutes. Its also worth considering that "in theory" people who design for max theoretical load MUST assume my clothes dryer will run for 24 hours a day 7 days a week, when in practice I have never done more than five hour long loads of laundry in a row, and that was after traveling out of country for two weeks (after zero electrical demand for 14 days) Even data centers can do stuff like vmware vmotion running virtual hosts off a cloudy cloud data center to a sunny cloud data center with no user interruption. The idea that the wall outlet is an infinite source of energy is going away, or if its demanded for a hospital operating room or nuclear power plant or something, those KWh are going to cost like $5 or something similar and that's just how its going to be. Its not going to be that much suffering; right now my multi KW airconditioner instantly starts up when the thermostat says go, and in a decade maybe the electric company contract says it's guaranteed to start within the next ten minutes 99% of the time, and that sounds like a nice deal if it cuts my bill in half and eliminates CO2 output.

ephbit 5y ago
Problem is: how are you going to convince great numbers of people to alter their daily routine that might also be quite synchronized across a country's population? Like tea time in the UK where apparently millions of people turn on their kettles (2 kilowatts each) in synchrony to get some hot water. What if they also like to cook something with their stove (another 2 KW) to get a nice dinner, around the same time?
- nullc 5y ago
  He told you: Dynamic rates and appliances that let you adjust their behavior based on rates. Have people pay based on the demand and the most able to alter their usage will do so. I'm skeptical-- but probably for different reasons that you. W/ PG&E and MCE the utility can't even manage to tell me my current rate-- determining from my bills requires solving a linear system in three unknowns, requiring three bills. And the rates change quarterly, so I can only determine the rates at the moment they no longer apply. The rate scheme also has various non-linearities such that my total rate depends on my overall usage over the year and as a result my true marginal rate is unknowable at any given time. I dunno how rates are supposed to incentivize behavior when they're so opaque. So I like to imagine a future with smart electrical panels and appliances where their behavior can be rate shaped in realtime, ... but then I encounter the actual behavior of the PUC and utilities and a future with demand shaped by economics seems distant indeed.

by VLM 5y ago

ephbit 5y ago

Problem is: how are you going to convince great numbers of people to alter their daily routine that might also be quite synchronized across a country's population? Like tea time in the UK where apparently millions of people turn on their kettles (2 kilowatts each) in synchrony to get some hot water. What if they also like to cook something with their stove (another 2 KW) to get a nice dinner, around the same time?

nullc 5y ago
He told you: Dynamic rates and appliances that let you adjust their behavior based on rates. Have people pay based on the demand and the most able to alter their usage will do so. I'm skeptical-- but probably for different reasons that you. W/ PG&E and MCE the utility can't even manage to tell me my current rate-- determining from my bills requires solving a linear system in three unknowns, requiring three bills. And the rates change quarterly, so I can only determine the rates at the moment they no longer apply. The rate scheme also has various non-linearities such that my total rate depends on my overall usage over the year and as a result my true marginal rate is unknowable at any given time. I dunno how rates are supposed to incentivize behavior when they're so opaque. So I like to imagine a future with smart electrical panels and appliances where their behavior can be rate shaped in realtime, ... but then I encounter the actual behavior of the PUC and utilities and a future with demand shaped by economics seems distant indeed.