3 ms·

We can also use real time price mechanism to match demand with supply intra day, energy intensive loads like water/home heating and ev charging can cheaply (v

We can also use real time price mechanism to match demand with supply intra day, energy intensive loads like water/home heating and ev charging can cheaply (vs cost of batteries connected to grid) buffer many hours without issue.

xyzzyz 5y ago
In cold and hot places, you cannot easily buffer heating and AC for hours.
- fulafel 5y ago
  You can if you have decent insulation (which at least cold climates do). In fact people historically have taken advantage of cheaper night time electricity prices to shift heating to night time. Better insulation will become a more attractive investment than in the past.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > In fact people historically have taken advantage of cheaper night time electricity prices to shift heating to night time. Night time is usually when heating is most needed. Shifting AC to night time in hot regions would be more impressive.
    - fulafel 5y ago
      > Night time is usually when heating is most needed. If we are still talking about cold climates where houses are well insulated, it's a more convenient timing but not really needed. If you cut heating for half the night or even more, indoor temp won't drop too much even if outdoor temp is notably lower than day time. It might drop a few degrees as you are sleeping warmly tucked in, but that's not dangerous, and you can still heat your bedroom if you want to avoid even that slight adjustment.
criley2 5y ago
A well insulated modern construction can hold a temperature for a long time. Heating and cooling during energy availability and using your insulated building as a thermal battery of sorts is a real thing, and should be I think considered part of the solution here.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Yes, it should. But this drives up the cost of new housing when we’re already struggling to produce enough housing of any quality. As always, these things come with trade offs. (For the record my house is very well insulated because I agree with you emphatically, but I also recognize that I have the material means to afford that insulation/construction cost that not everyone else is able to)
ashtonkem 5y ago
An observation of Griddy during the Texas disaster shows that we should be very careful in designing a real time price mechanism that’s applied to consumers. In the worst case this can take the form of passing all the risk and cost onto consumers who cannot handle this. This is particularly pernicious for HVAC, because during outages this puts consumers in the un-enviable position of deciding between their savings and not freezing/boiling to death. Some loads can be moved, such as ev charging, but others cannot. The issue is that a lot of consumer load is less shiftable than you suppose. House heating (presumably we’d electrify this, because global warming) cannot be deferred for too long, and most households go through a hot water tank a day. These loads can be deferred for short periods of time, but proposing that people go without hot water or temperature control for even moderate periods of time is a political non starter. From an infrastructure standpoint it’s also worth mentioning how many people die and how many buildings get ruined by even a few days without power during severe weather events, which is often exactly when prices would rise. A holistic view of the situation shows that while there is some smart grid stuff we can do, we still need to provide a guaranteed minimum worth of power generation no matter what. Ideally this would come from grid level storage so that we can run everything off renewables, but we’re just not there yet. The reality is that until we get there, the choice is between nuclear power and some other form of fossil fuel, typically natural gas. I think on the whole we’d be well served to commission one last set of nuclear power plants to get us through this crisis, and plan on decommissioning them in 2050 or so once grid level storage makes them obsolete.
- fulafel 5y ago
  The disaster scenario "no matter what" power can come from regulated backup turbines and emergency (fossil) fuel reserves I think. It's a separate/saparable subproblem. Just make the normal power companies pay a lot for tapping it, so there is disincentive to purpousefully use it.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    That plan only works if we still have a functioning oil extraction and refinement system, which is something we’re obviously trying to get away from. Given how hard petroleum products are to store, these “just in case” power generation systems would require an entirely redundant but ready to operate fuel production process in the case renewables failed. It’s doable, but the cost would be absurd. Probably easier to leave a bunch of nuclear power plants in standby, actually.

xyzzyz 5y ago

In cold and hot places, you cannot easily buffer heating and AC for hours.

fulafel 5y ago
You can if you have decent insulation (which at least cold climates do). In fact people historically have taken advantage of cheaper night time electricity prices to shift heating to night time. Better insulation will become a more attractive investment than in the past.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > In fact people historically have taken advantage of cheaper night time electricity prices to shift heating to night time. Night time is usually when heating is most needed. Shifting AC to night time in hot regions would be more impressive.
  - fulafel 5y ago
    > Night time is usually when heating is most needed. If we are still talking about cold climates where houses are well insulated, it's a more convenient timing but not really needed. If you cut heating for half the night or even more, indoor temp won't drop too much even if outdoor temp is notably lower than day time. It might drop a few degrees as you are sleeping warmly tucked in, but that's not dangerous, and you can still heat your bedroom if you want to avoid even that slight adjustment.

criley2 5y ago

A well insulated modern construction can hold a temperature for a long time. Heating and cooling during energy availability and using your insulated building as a thermal battery of sorts is a real thing, and should be I think considered part of the solution here.

ashtonkem 5y ago
Yes, it should. But this drives up the cost of new housing when we’re already struggling to produce enough housing of any quality. As always, these things come with trade offs. (For the record my house is very well insulated because I agree with you emphatically, but I also recognize that I have the material means to afford that insulation/construction cost that not everyone else is able to)

ashtonkem 5y ago

An observation of Griddy during the Texas disaster shows that we should be very careful in designing a real time price mechanism that’s applied to consumers. In the worst case this can take the form of passing all the risk and cost onto consumers who cannot handle this. This is particularly pernicious for HVAC, because during outages this puts consumers in the un-enviable position of deciding between their savings and not freezing/boiling to death. Some loads can be moved, such as ev charging, but others cannot. The issue is that a lot of consumer load is less shiftable than you suppose. House heating (presumably we’d electrify this, because global warming) cannot be deferred for too long, and most households go through a hot water tank a day. These loads can be deferred for short periods of time, but proposing that people go without hot water or temperature control for even moderate periods of time is a political non starter. From an infrastructure standpoint it’s also worth mentioning how many people die and how many buildings get ruined by even a few days without power during severe weather events, which is often exactly when prices would rise. A holistic view of the situation shows that while there is some smart grid stuff we can do, we still need to provide a guaranteed minimum worth of power generation no matter what. Ideally this would come from grid level storage so that we can run everything off renewables, but we’re just not there yet. The reality is that until we get there, the choice is between nuclear power and some other form of fossil fuel, typically natural gas. I think on the whole we’d be well served to commission one last set of nuclear power plants to get us through this crisis, and plan on decommissioning them in 2050 or so once grid level storage makes them obsolete.

fulafel 5y ago
The disaster scenario "no matter what" power can come from regulated backup turbines and emergency (fossil) fuel reserves I think. It's a separate/saparable subproblem. Just make the normal power companies pay a lot for tapping it, so there is disincentive to purpousefully use it.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  That plan only works if we still have a functioning oil extraction and refinement system, which is something we’re obviously trying to get away from. Given how hard petroleum products are to store, these “just in case” power generation systems would require an entirely redundant but ready to operate fuel production process in the case renewables failed. It’s doable, but the cost would be absurd. Probably easier to leave a bunch of nuclear power plants in standby, actually.