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These Demand Response programs have been around at least since 2013. I used to work for a company called Opower, since acq. by Oracle, that worked on setting t

by bfung 5y ago

These Demand Response programs have been around at least since 2013. I used to work for a company called Opower, since acq. by Oracle, that worked on setting these temperatures with options/configurations on the user end. OhmConnect, Tendril, Simple Energy, were/are all in this same DR space. Now granted, residential thermostats usually doesn’t have humidity detection, but any company doing DR probably has other sources of data already to figure out an optimal temp/humidity setting to drive better DR adoption. At the time, Opower had housing and demographic data to predict and calculate how long to pre-cool/heat a home. Glad Texas is catching up, but the marketing and user education part seems to be lacking. Need to change behavior & hearts and minds or this type of backfire happens. If no one participated in DR, outages and brown outs could kill more people than cause an inconvenience of being too warm.

neon_electro 5y ago
Why is/should participation in a demand response program be the difference between killing people and inconvenience? Wouldn't fluctuations in grid supply and demand make much more of a difference as far as there being energy for folks' survival needs? Shouldn't grids be ensuring they have sufficient supply so that no one dies? Why would we want to design a system where lack of participation in a demand response program means people could be at risk of death?
- bagels 5y ago
  Why should we allow people to live in places they will die without air conditioning?
  - bob1029 5y ago
    Its not about dying. Its about quality of life. Most things are at this point in our civilization. What if your furnace fails and you live in Alaska? Some Houstonians would probably assume that is a death sentence. Someone in Alaska would probably be fine. Uncomfortable, yes. Dead? No. More broadly, I find it incredibly contradictory that a technology board would approve of intentionally-shitty quality of service because the engineering "is just too hard".
- bfung 5y ago
  Those are good questions without simple answers. I agree that grids should be built better, but they aren’t due to economics and catch-22s. Take the Texas power grid again as an example. It wasn’t winterized properly in Feb. 2021, freezing 100s to death. The cost of doing so is a ~$10/month bump for everyone there. The usual process for increases go through the PUC process and it’s hard to get large increases through, it’s usually $10/year increases and people complain that’s a lot. The gov., elected by the people, get to approve the price hikes. DR is a much cheaper solution $-wise and politically as well. Not saying that’s how things ideally should be, but welcome to reality, where optimizing for the individual doesn’t align with taking care of the community/city.

by bfung 5y ago

neon_electro 5y ago

Why is/should participation in a demand response program be the difference between killing people and inconvenience? Wouldn't fluctuations in grid supply and demand make much more of a difference as far as there being energy for folks' survival needs? Shouldn't grids be ensuring they have sufficient supply so that no one dies? Why would we want to design a system where lack of participation in a demand response program means people could be at risk of death?

bagels 5y ago
Why should we allow people to live in places they will die without air conditioning?
- bob1029 5y ago
  Its not about dying. Its about quality of life. Most things are at this point in our civilization. What if your furnace fails and you live in Alaska? Some Houstonians would probably assume that is a death sentence. Someone in Alaska would probably be fine. Uncomfortable, yes. Dead? No. More broadly, I find it incredibly contradictory that a technology board would approve of intentionally-shitty quality of service because the engineering "is just too hard".
bfung 5y ago
Those are good questions without simple answers. I agree that grids should be built better, but they aren’t due to economics and catch-22s. Take the Texas power grid again as an example. It wasn’t winterized properly in Feb. 2021, freezing 100s to death. The cost of doing so is a ~$10/month bump for everyone there. The usual process for increases go through the PUC process and it’s hard to get large increases through, it’s usually $10/year increases and people complain that’s a lot. The gov., elected by the people, get to approve the price hikes. DR is a much cheaper solution $-wise and politically as well. Not saying that’s how things ideally should be, but welcome to reality, where optimizing for the individual doesn’t align with taking care of the community/city.