12 ms·

>We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up

by alexb_ 4y ago

>We're doing it wrong, according to a new Stanford study Wrong according to what metric? Cost? Raw efficiency? A lot of people are more than willing to give up efficiency so that they don't have to actually worry about finding a station during the day. To say that something is just outright "wrong" based on their personal preference of priorities comes off as unhelpful to me. The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper.

Grimburger 4y ago
> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most. They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
  time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can keep getting more expensive and less reliable without causing me grief.
    - alexb_ 4y ago
      >So I bought solar panels and batteries ...Mission accomplished?
      - sulam 4y ago
        "Profit"
      - zbrozek 4y ago
        Sortof? The chumps left behind have fewer people to help amortize fixed costs.
        landemva 4y ago
        Hawaiian islands have struggled with this for a decade. Rich people put up solar cells with usage offsets and get grid scale reliability on the backs of those who can't put up solar cells due to being poor or living in an apartment.
        zbrozek 4y ago
        I'm going a step further. No grid connection at all. Uptime isn't great anyway-about 87% in July in my neighborhood.
  - landemva 4y ago
    For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to flat rate to avoid these mental games.
    - shiftpgdn 4y ago
      My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.
      - khuey 4y ago
        Average US residential consumption is under 1MWh/mo so you are definitely not a typical customer.
      - bonzini 4y ago
        What? My house used 4 MWh a year in 2020, with two people working from home and two kids. Of these about half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that justify a 10x difference??
        vel0city 4y ago
        My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our peak bill this year was ~3200kWh. Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh. I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool. Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
  - notatoad 4y ago
    it is, but that's the part that technology can actually help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes useful. an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
    - AceyMan 4y ago
      this just makes me think of the situation that resulted in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when everyone is operating on the same premise without some random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.
      - mirchiseth 4y ago
        Saw the Slashdot effect reference after such a long time. Not sure what % of HNers were there in the heydays of /.
        jeffreygoesto 4y ago
        More than you think? =;-{)} Wo remembers the "Anonymous FTP Sites List"?
        fsckboy 4y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based organization system with a simple, no added overhead, parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same ways.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...
- wcoenen 4y ago
  Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula. People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing. Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years. But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bills-ontario-time-of-use-pricing-1.3862462 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi... > The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period. I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
  - pas 4y ago
    they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a good solution. it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
    - Scoundreller 4y ago
      It’s not a good solution when you spend a ton of money to force people to pay the averaged out market prices per time segment and they still don’t care. It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale. It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming. But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
      - pas 4y ago
        it depends on the capacity premium for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out) the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that. but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too. in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online) and it varies regionally too
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  The point is that off-peak isn't necessarily the best option anymore. In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries. Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    > Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high teachable moment, all along you should have been using price
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      The price is the same at all these times, unless someone acts to make it different. The whole discussion is about how to adjust energy price to incentivize the health of the grid (which is a shared resource individual market actors don't care about).
lm28469 4y ago
> Wrong according to what metric? Have you read the study ? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7 > you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Never worked, never will, borderline sounds like a cult following, "The all mighty market will automagically fix it with no human intervention"
- alexb_ 4y ago
  A very small amount of people really care about "grid impact" enough to change their behavior. They do care about "I can make my electricity cheaper" or "My electricity bill went up".
  - lm28469 4y ago
    They don't care until their whole neighbourhood goes dark at 6PM everyday
    - _ea1k 4y ago
      People already charge at night because that is currently when power is cheaper. They'd switch if they can and it becomes cheaper. We already see this to some extent, as people with free workplace charging often choose that over home charging when possible.
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      They still won't care to change. They will complain, yes, but change? No.
      - coderenegade 4y ago
        That seems fairly reasonable to me? Most people are just trying to get by. They have bigger problems on their plate like getting paid so they can pay their bills on time, and keep a roof over their head. Adding additional stuff on top of that is a cognitive load that most people would rightfully push back against, because they don't have the spare capacity. I think this is a big part of why, to-date, the environmental movement is comprised of the relatively wealthy, and what I would characterize as "true believers" who don't have much, but are okay with that, and okay with living their lives in a way that minimizes their impact. The first group have the spare capacity to do something about their impact, and the second group take it on as a mandate that often (but not always) affects their ability to function in broader society (or: how do you hold down a decent job if you ride a pushbike everywhere?). My personal belief is that any successful environmental movement needs to go hand-in-hand with a more equitable distribution of wealth in society, and focus on quality-of-life, so that the people in the middle have the spare capacity to give a shit. Otherwise, you're going to bump into the ugly reality of people's day-to-day, and your movement will be perceived as rich people -- who make up the bulk of consumption to begin with -- telling everybody else how to live their lives. Which is exactly what's happened. I don't think it's an accident that the countries farthest along the path to decarbonization also have some of the best income equality, and quality-of-life on the planet.
saidajigumi 4y ago
This is precisely what the linked article says. From the section "Charging Incentives": “And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich. The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as: Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...] So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- to11mtm 4y ago
  > Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...] Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'. By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.
  - hakcermani 4y ago
    It can incentivize rooftop solar which can supply the increased charging demand.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
>> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles. It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!" Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.
- NickM 4y ago
  I think you're conflating two separate markets; there can be as many subsidies or taxes added to buying an EV as you want, but the "what time do I charge my car" problem is an electricity market problem, not a car market problem.
- _ea1k 4y ago
  For all the hype, that is less true than it appears. A lot of EV owners pay annual fees and also sales taxes on power. On top of that, the most popular EVs in the US aren't subsidized in every state. My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".
dybber 4y ago
That’s how we do it in Denmark. We have hourly prices on electricity, so for me it’s cheaper to start the dishwasher outside peak hours. In some areas they are experimenting with car chargers hooked up to this electricity price info, so it charges when it’s cheap.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Weirdly, the latest iPhone + iOS pops a dialog box saying it will do this. // Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.
  - zaptrem 4y ago
    Can you give an example of this? I haven't seen it mentioned before.
    - dybber 4y ago
      I guess it’s this https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/12/ios-16-clean-energy-charging-details/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/12/ios-16-clean-energy-charging-...
  - spoonjim 4y ago
    LOL. This is classic “virtue signaling.” Your iPhone battery is not even a rounding error on your electricity consumption.
    - dybber 4y ago
      If all iPhones do this it will matter. Charging when energy is plentiful also means that electricity is more likely to come from renewables.
      - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
        Steve Jobs famously once compared speeding up a boot process by 10 seconds to saving a dozen lives: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt
Overtonwindow 4y ago
If only there were a clean energy source that we could harness.. Hey what about nuclear!?
- pfdietz 4y ago
  More expensive than alternatives, sorry.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Maybe not, if the alternative is installing enough battery to charge most people's electric cars at night. My state's grid is over half nuclear, and our electric rates are not high.
    - wumpus 4y ago
      Good news! The very article we're discussing explains why you don't have to install enough batteries to charge most people's electric cars at night.
      - DennisP 4y ago
        Right, and all it will take is "major investments and changes in charging habits." Note those major investments are seldom accounted for when people talk about solar cost. Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2] South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2] It's almost like solar is super cheap on the margins, but it's easier to make a cheap grid with lots of nuclear than lots of solar....nah, that can't be it. [1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... [2] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ [3] https://energy.sc.gov/node/3067 https://energy.sc.gov/node/3067
        4y ago
tomohawk 4y ago
> The solution is simple Oh, so just solve the problem that people since Edison have been trying to solve. So simple!
mattwilsonn888 4y ago
Came here to post a less eloquent version of this sentiment.
cgb223 4y ago
> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper. This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year. Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disasters/539334-texas-deep-freeze-causes-electricity-prices-to/ https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disa...
- collinmcnulty 4y ago
  Texas electricity prices are capped at $9/kWh but are often reported in the wholesale $/MWh
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- concordDance 4y ago
  Set thresholds on your meter that notifies you when price rises to high and turns it off automatically? Maybe some household batteries or a small generator?
  - sidewndr46 4y ago
    Where in Texas does the end-user get to install their own meter they can customize?
ehnto 4y ago
I had a related epiphany regarding car traffic today. When thinking about how autonomous cars could increase efficiency of taking off from stop lights by doing it syncronously, I realised that to put it bluntly, nobody would actually give a shit. We drive cars for personal autonomy and a level of freedom and protection from the car centric cities we build. Making that efficient is nice, but no one is willing to sacrifice the core point of driving for the various minor efficiencies. It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.
- sfifs 4y ago
  Glad you were able to make the connection. Too many folks passionate on reforming transport focus primarily on the moral/technical problem/solution Vs the actual "job to be done" for people of owning a personal car. Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to. If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive. As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.
wodenokoto 4y ago
> Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.
- vanviegen 4y ago
  Is hourly pricing the norm in Denmark?
  - brabel 4y ago
    There are apps that track the prices and can automatically "trigger" charging when it's cheaper. Found these examples by quickly googling: https://www.trueenergy.io/app/ https://www.trueenergy.io/app/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sense.androidclient https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sense.andr... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tibber.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tibber.and... EDIT: to answer the question: yes, these apps use something called "Nord Pool" which publishes hourly electricity prices (in Swedish): https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/ https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  It's not like that in the States. https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-the-us/ https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-... All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.

by alexb_ 4y ago

Grimburger 4y ago

> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available From the parts of the world I come from the majority of people are vehemently opposed to time of use pricing. Because that's when they use it most. They and their political representatives would much prefer to keep taking from those who consume in off-peak rather than fix the underlying mechanism.

GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
time-of-use is also cognitive load that can cause anxiety
- zbrozek 4y ago
  Yeah it is. I hate having to have a process in my brain thinking about optimizing everything. So I bought solar panels and batteries. Now I no longer care. The grid can keep getting more expensive and less reliable without causing me grief.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    >So I bought solar panels and batteries ...Mission accomplished?
    - sulam 4y ago
      "Profit"
    - zbrozek 4y ago
      Sortof? The chumps left behind have fewer people to help amortize fixed costs.
      - landemva 4y ago
        Hawaiian islands have struggled with this for a decade. Rich people put up solar cells with usage offsets and get grid scale reliability on the backs of those who can't put up solar cells due to being poor or living in an apartment.
        zbrozek 4y ago
        I'm going a step further. No grid connection at all. Uptime isn't great anyway-about 87% in July in my neighborhood.
- landemva 4y ago
  For the small amount I consume, tiny potential savings are not worth the mental hassles. I switched a residence to flat rate to avoid these mental games.
  - shiftpgdn 4y ago
    My house uses around 3-4MW/mo. I hyper optimized when I had true spot pricing before Griddy energy was disbanded by the state. My bill was extremely low compared to what I pay now.
    - khuey 4y ago
      Average US residential consumption is under 1MWh/mo so you are definitely not a typical customer.
    - bonzini 4y ago
      What? My house used 4 MWh a year in 2020, with two people working from home and two kids. Of these about half (IIRC) is self-produced solar. Stove and heating are gas and I do not have a tumble dryer, but does that justify a 10x difference??
      - vel0city 4y ago
        My home uses over 2MWh/mo over the summer, I think our peak bill this year was ~3200kWh. Average highs these last few months has been around 100F or so and very sunny, with at least one month >100F for the high every day. Its finally "cooling off" around here, with our highs being in the upper 90s most days. Cooling >2000sqft of space, even with some decent insulation and keeping the AC to 78F in the day, uses a lot of energy. It uses ~30A @ 240V, so ~7.2kW. If it had to run 12 hours in a day, that's 86.4kWh in just a single day. Doing that for a month straight, that's 2,592kWh. I was going to write up the math on how much my pool pump uses, but honestly it kind of turned into peanuts compared to the amount our AC usage is. The pump is 3/4HP. Running ~600W on the schedule of 8 hours a day + 12 hour once a week shock it really only worked out to 172.8kWh/mo of usage. Still though, that's 52% of your entire usage for just my pool. Last year we probably used ~3,000kWh charging the EV. That's on average 250kWh/mo.
- notatoad 4y ago
  it is, but that's the part that technology can actually help us with. all the internet-connected smart home stuff that companies have been trying to sell us is a bit silly when electricity is sold at a flat rate, but if my car charger, my clothes dryer, or my or my dishwasher could sit idle until electricity prices drop into the cheap zone and then turn themselves on, that internet connection becomes useful. an attitude of "i don't want to deal with the stress of thinking about the electricity i use" is absolutely the sort of luxury that you should pay extra for, the people willing to schedule their power usage to reduce peak demand should be paying less than the people who aren't willing to do that.
  - AceyMan 4y ago
    this just makes me think of the situation that resulted in Global TCP Synchronization flapping problem; when everyone is operating on the same premise without some random delay or other way to 'shard' the load it seems like a Slashdot effect is bound to happen.
    - mirchiseth 4y ago
      Saw the Slashdot effect reference after such a long time. Not sure what % of HNers were there in the heydays of /.
      - jeffreygoesto 4y ago
        More than you think? =;-{)} Wo remembers the "Anonymous FTP Sites List"?
        fsckboy 4y ago
        https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/ https://old.reddit.com/r/opendirectories/
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      You are comparing a complex, out of band, auction-based organization system with a simple, no added overhead, parameter-guessing system. Those don't fail on the same ways.
dehrmann 4y ago
It's probably not "taking from those who consume in off-peak." The utility knows when people who use flat-rate power use it, so they can bake that into the flat rate. But if it makes consumers feel better about the price...
wcoenen 4y ago
Power companies can offer more than one pricing formula. People who want to minimize their power bill can choose to pick the time of use pricing and shift some of their consumption off peak. Others can choose to pay more for the convenience of not having to worry about all that stuff. How much more, that can be determined by market forces.
Scoundreller 4y ago
Ontario Canada did a mass $2b implementation of smart meters for time of day pricing. Unfortunately most people don’t care (or the technology to take advantage of it just isn’t there), and demand shifted less than 1% over several years. But it’s hard to find this info, because it doesn’t fit the (expensive to implement) narrative of “let them pay market price and people will respond to incentives”. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bills-ontario-time-of-use-pricing-1.3862462 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/smart-meters-hydro-bi... > The Environmental Commissioner of Ontario's 2015-16 Energy Conservation Progress Report found "a 0.7 per cent reduction in peak demand among residential customers" attributed to time-of-use pricing over a four-year period. I mean, people keep their foot on the gas when the light ahead is red and sometimes even speed up to get ahead of you only to slam on their brakes.
- pas 4y ago
  they can afford not to care. this doesn't mean it's not a good solution. it's no surprise the general population in one of the richest regions on Earth doesn't immediately change their consumption habits when a small fraction of their monthly bill gets variable
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    It’s not a good solution when you spend a ton of money to force people to pay the averaged out market prices per time segment and they still don’t care. It’s like making me spend $$$ to measure and charge me for how much co2 I exhale. It’s technically correct: that co2 does contribute to global warming. But it’s going to cost more to meter it than I could possibly save in conservation through this newfound incentive.
    - pas 4y ago
      it depends on the capacity premium for example bandwidth used to be 95th percentile priced, but Netflix quickly run into problems because its peers did not want to upgrade linecards, switches, etc. (and as some of those peers were also in the media disturbution business they explicitly wanted to keep those ports maxed out) the point is that if the network provides a close to constant capacity, then of course it makes no sense to try to price on that. but with more and more variable supply it seems prudent to prepare the demand side too. in Norway currently electricity prices fluctuate like crazy, and the supplier sends an email each day about the prices for the next day (though I'm not sure how guaranteed those are, of course the current price is also online) and it varies regionally too
SoftTalker 4y ago
The point is that off-peak isn't necessarily the best option anymore. In areas that are going all-in on solar, there is power during the day, but at night it would have to be generated or come from storage batteries. Off-peak traditionally means when demand is low. Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  > Now you have to change your thinking to be when supply is high teachable moment, all along you should have been using price
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    The price is the same at all these times, unless someone acts to make it different. The whole discussion is about how to adjust energy price to incentivize the health of the grid (which is a shared resource individual market actors don't care about).

lm28469 4y ago

> Wrong according to what metric? Have you read the study ? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-022-01105-7 > you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Never worked, never will, borderline sounds like a cult following, "The all mighty market will automagically fix it with no human intervention"

alexb_ 4y ago
A very small amount of people really care about "grid impact" enough to change their behavior. They do care about "I can make my electricity cheaper" or "My electricity bill went up".
- lm28469 4y ago
  They don't care until their whole neighbourhood goes dark at 6PM everyday
  - _ea1k 4y ago
    People already charge at night because that is currently when power is cheaper. They'd switch if they can and it becomes cheaper. We already see this to some extent, as people with free workplace charging often choose that over home charging when possible.
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    They still won't care to change. They will complain, yes, but change? No.
    - coderenegade 4y ago
      That seems fairly reasonable to me? Most people are just trying to get by. They have bigger problems on their plate like getting paid so they can pay their bills on time, and keep a roof over their head. Adding additional stuff on top of that is a cognitive load that most people would rightfully push back against, because they don't have the spare capacity. I think this is a big part of why, to-date, the environmental movement is comprised of the relatively wealthy, and what I would characterize as "true believers" who don't have much, but are okay with that, and okay with living their lives in a way that minimizes their impact. The first group have the spare capacity to do something about their impact, and the second group take it on as a mandate that often (but not always) affects their ability to function in broader society (or: how do you hold down a decent job if you ride a pushbike everywhere?). My personal belief is that any successful environmental movement needs to go hand-in-hand with a more equitable distribution of wealth in society, and focus on quality-of-life, so that the people in the middle have the spare capacity to give a shit. Otherwise, you're going to bump into the ugly reality of people's day-to-day, and your movement will be perceived as rich people -- who make up the bulk of consumption to begin with -- telling everybody else how to live their lives. Which is exactly what's happened. I don't think it's an accident that the countries farthest along the path to decarbonization also have some of the best income equality, and quality-of-life on the planet.

saidajigumi 4y ago

This is precisely what the linked article says. From the section "Charging Incentives": “And it’s not just California and Western states. All states may need to rethink electricity pricing structures as their EV charging needs increase and their grid changes,” added Powell, who recently took a postdoctoral research position at ETH Zurich. The article also includes other interesting and more nuanced policy details than just "change pricing structure", such as: Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...] So yes, there are weird red herrings in this thread from people who want a technology first and a solution second (or never) and/or who don't understand design of incentive structures. But this work doesn't appear suffer from those problems.

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to11mtm 4y ago
> Another issue with electricity pricing design is charging commercial and industrial customers big fees based on their peak electricity use. This can disincentivize employers from installing chargers, especially once half or more of their employees have EVs. [...] Well, I don't know what to say aside from we would need a lot of work to have it 'both ways'. By that I mean, if we expect everyone to charge their cars during the day, especially 'peak hours' in a given industrial area, there's a chance that the line and/or station capacity would have to be increased. A large part of the allure of 'night charging' is that it avoids requiring major grid upgrades, and also possibly opens up better uses around certain energy sources quirks. Nuclear, water power, geothermal, all three to some extent have 'consistent load' properties where either it takes time to adjust power output, or power output can be consistent both day and night with minimal incremental cost, vs the need to install additional capacity for extra day load.
- hakcermani 4y ago
  It can incentivize rooftop solar which can supply the increased charging demand.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

>> you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself We're talking about electric vehicles here. There has already been massive interference in the market forces through both push and pull mechanisms - push would be things like outlawing internal combustion engines going forward, pull would be huge subsidies for electric vehicles. It's pretty late in the game to say, "Hey! let's just use natural market forces! Problem solved!" Natural market forces would be a tax on carbon equal to the cost of removing it from the atmosphere when it is burned and then let people buy whatever kind of car they want and can afford. There is no popular support whatsoever on either left or right for those kind of natural market forces.

NickM 4y ago
I think you're conflating two separate markets; there can be as many subsidies or taxes added to buying an EV as you want, but the "what time do I charge my car" problem is an electricity market problem, not a car market problem.
_ea1k 4y ago
For all the hype, that is less true than it appears. A lot of EV owners pay annual fees and also sales taxes on power. On top of that, the most popular EVs in the US aren't subsidized in every state. My comment is US-centric, but in the US the adoption isn't really regulatory driven. The regulations are following reality while the politicians try to position themselves as "leaders".

dybber 4y ago

That’s how we do it in Denmark. We have hourly prices on electricity, so for me it’s cheaper to start the dishwasher outside peak hours. In some areas they are experimenting with car chargers hooked up to this electricity price info, so it charges when it’s cheap.

Terretta 4y ago
Weirdly, the latest iPhone + iOS pops a dialog box saying it will do this. // Weird given tiny amount of energy for your iPhone. But perhaps reasonable in aggregate.
- zaptrem 4y ago
  Can you give an example of this? I haven't seen it mentioned before.
  - dybber 4y ago
    I guess it’s this https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/12/ios-16-clean-energy-charging-details/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/12/ios-16-clean-energy-charging-...
- spoonjim 4y ago
  LOL. This is classic “virtue signaling.” Your iPhone battery is not even a rounding error on your electricity consumption.
  - dybber 4y ago
    If all iPhones do this it will matter. Charging when energy is plentiful also means that electricity is more likely to come from renewables.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Steve Jobs famously once compared speeding up a boot process by 10 seconds to saving a dozen lives: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt

Overtonwindow 4y ago

If only there were a clean energy source that we could harness.. Hey what about nuclear!?

pfdietz 4y ago
More expensive than alternatives, sorry.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Maybe not, if the alternative is installing enough battery to charge most people's electric cars at night. My state's grid is over half nuclear, and our electric rates are not high.
  - wumpus 4y ago
    Good news! The very article we're discussing explains why you don't have to install enough batteries to charge most people's electric cars at night.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Right, and all it will take is "major investments and changes in charging habits." Note those major investments are seldom accounted for when people talk about solar cost. Speaking of which, California is 17% solar, 8% wind, and 7% hydro[1], and their retail electricity costs 19.9 cents/kWh.[2] South Carolina is 58% nuclear, 0.1% solar, no wind, and 2% hydro,[3] and their retail electricity costs 12.9 cents/kWh.[2] It's almost like solar is super cheap on the margins, but it's easier to make a cheap grid with lots of nuclear than lots of solar....nah, that can't be it. [1] https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/california-electricity-data/2021-total-system-electric-generation https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo... [2] https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/ [3] https://energy.sc.gov/node/3067 https://energy.sc.gov/node/3067
      - 4y ago

tomohawk 4y ago

> The solution is simple Oh, so just solve the problem that people since Edison have been trying to solve. So simple!

mattwilsonn888 4y ago

Came here to post a less eloquent version of this sentiment.

cgb223 4y ago

> The solution is simple. Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. You don't need any complex "AI" like people in this thread are saying, you just use natural market forces and the problem fixes itself. Too much energy being used at night - price increases. It's not complicated, and it's what we're doing already. People don't need a Stanford study to convince them to get their energy for cheaper. This is exactly what they were doing in Texas right up until the moment the Blizzard hit last year. Suddenly electricity became unavailable (because you know, giant blizzard), and consequently it was something like $6000 a kw/hr[1] for some users Your market force solution for electricity pricing almost bankrupted me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [1] https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disasters/539334-texas-deep-freeze-causes-electricity-prices-to/ https://thehill.com/changing-america/resilience/natural-disa...

collinmcnulty 4y ago
Texas electricity prices are capped at $9/kWh but are often reported in the wholesale $/MWh
- deleted 4y ago
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concordDance 4y ago
Set thresholds on your meter that notifies you when price rises to high and turns it off automatically? Maybe some household batteries or a small generator?
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  Where in Texas does the end-user get to install their own meter they can customize?

ehnto 4y ago

I had a related epiphany regarding car traffic today. When thinking about how autonomous cars could increase efficiency of taking off from stop lights by doing it syncronously, I realised that to put it bluntly, nobody would actually give a shit. We drive cars for personal autonomy and a level of freedom and protection from the car centric cities we build. Making that efficient is nice, but no one is willing to sacrifice the core point of driving for the various minor efficiencies. It was an epiphany I had in relation to my staunch pro-bike/public transport internal discourse. It occurred to me that we need to focus on the main motivations for driving and public transport in order to make them both better. Road networks should focus on freedom and personal autonomy, and public transport should focus on throughput efficiency. Making PT better at throughput by expanding the networks would give people more freedom on the road network too by reducing traffic.

sfifs 4y ago
Glad you were able to make the connection. Too many folks passionate on reforming transport focus primarily on the moral/technical problem/solution Vs the actual "job to be done" for people of owning a personal car. Where I live, I don't own a car largely because the "jobs" for which having access to a car is critical is handled by a reliable, efficient and safe cab/taxi on demand system (you need to get somewhere quickly, carry a lot of stuff, take your family/friends to A&E at night etc). So then I can rely on the very good Public Transit system for the bulk of my regular commute needs confident that I can get a cab when I need to. If the reliable cab/taxi on demand didn't exist (which was indeed the situation before Uber and it's ilk), I would buy a car irrespective of how good the public transport system was (it was good even then) and irrespective of taxation dis-incentives. Once you own a car, for many use cases it becomes a lot more convenient and has low incremental cost to just drive. As you may note, these "jobs to be done" vary by geography, lifestage and income - so while general principles can be drawn up, they need to be locally customized.

wodenokoto 4y ago

> Make electricity cheaper when it's more available, and people will use it. It’s _not_ like that in the states? In Denmark people are sharing spreadsheet that can tell you when to run the washing machine to save on electricity since the energy crisis following Russias invasion of Ukraine has pushed prices enough that these optimizations become valuable to regular consumers.

vanviegen 4y ago
Is hourly pricing the norm in Denmark?
- brabel 4y ago
  There are apps that track the prices and can automatically "trigger" charging when it's cheaper. Found these examples by quickly googling: https://www.trueenergy.io/app/ https://www.trueenergy.io/app/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sense.androidclient https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sense.andr... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tibber.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tibber.and... EDIT: to answer the question: yes, these apps use something called "Nord Pool" which publishes hourly electricity prices (in Swedish): https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/ https://elavtal24.com/blogg/tibber-greenely/
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
It's not like that in the States. https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-the-us/ https://fsr.eui.eu/time-of-use-and-dynamic-pricing-rates-in-... All the usual communist elements (Jimmy Carter, California) have been slowly making progress on introducing it since the 1970s, but mysteriously a lot of lies sprung up about how it would harm the poor. And the USA is really caring about the poor not using as much fossil fuels as they possibly can so it got kind of squashed.