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As the grid goes renewable the “controllable loads” will be more important. Dryers, EV charging, electric hot water heating and heat pumps can all be connected

As the grid goes renewable the “controllable loads” will be more important. Dryers, EV charging, electric hot water heating and heat pumps can all be connected to optimize renewables minimizing the use of expensive batteries.

bruce511 3y ago
To some extent there are sufficient humans who care about money to "control the loads". All you need is variable pricing, real-time load measure, and a phone app. Also, I expect that night rates will end up being higher than day rates (if not already). Which is opposite to historical trends.
- applied_heat 3y ago
  The difference in the cost also needs to be enough for people to care. If it costs 25 cents more to get the laundry done now instead of later in a world where a head of lettuce is $4 I am just going to do the laundry when it is convenient for me. The major loads such as heating and cooling people Also want them immediately and not later.
mcbishop 3y ago
Jigar Shah, quoted in the article, once said: > Load flexibility is the giant issue nobody is talking about.
- 7thaccount 3y ago
  Interesting quote as it is the giant issue that practically everybody in the industry has been talking about since the beginning of the wholesale electricity markets. Economics 101 assumes some demand elasticity, but the wholesale markets are generally fully inelastic (maybe a tiny percentage point of that is elastic in many regions, while it's finally growing in others). These markets have to use administrative solutions to approximate the value to demand as they don't have a true aggregate demand curve built out of thousands of customers that are fully responsive to price. We're retiring our thermal fleet at a rapid pace and load curtailment will be the only option on a fully renewable grid once the renewables drop in output and the storage runs out. We are making strides in that direction. Maybe when he says "nobody" he's referring to the general public? I know this is an extremely common topic at the utility, ISO, FERC, academic, and so on level. As the comment points out, flexibility in demand allows for all kinds of neat tricks like pre-heating things when prices are cheap and supply is plentiful. The grid is so cool.
  - mcbishop 3y ago
    "Thermal fleet" ...I like that term. I think Jigar was referring specifically to behind-the-meter flexible-load control. Yes, pre-heating (and pre-cooling) turns the building and the hot-water tank into thermal energy storage (with no occupant impact, if done right).
    - 7thaccount 3y ago
      Yep. We use it to generally mean coal and natural gas although I suppose anything that deals with steam falls into that category like oil and even nuke. The thermal is retiring crazy fast. NERC is very alarmed and there have been many Senate and FERC hearings on this lately. Once it's gone, it's not easy to get setup again. A lot of plant maintenance lives in the skills of the workers, so once they've relocated it can be difficult to restart. I agree with the goals of a transition, but it needs to be managed carefully and orderly so we don't drastically increase our amounts of blackouts. At the same time, we'll need to make greater strides with flexible loads of course.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Exactly. Basically the energy market is changing very rapidly. One thing that is enabled by renewables and batteries is selling energy in much smaller units. It used to be that large energy companies would buy/sell energy at a price that was fixed for some amount of time like half an hour or even more. If you fire up a gas turbine, it's basically going to be producing until you shut it down. There's no point in trading in small chunks. However, with renewables, the length of those time slots has come down. So, instead of hours you can now buy energy in chunks of minutes at the same price. Eventually that comes down to seconds or even fractions of a second. All controlled by algorithms. So, you get energy companies that are able to adapt very rapidly to peaks and dips in energy production and demand. And that in turn incentivizes large consumers of energy to invest in batteries. Top them up when energy is cheap, sell off energy when it is expensive and electricity companies are buying. Use solar panels to get some free energy when it's available. Store any excess, and sell it when energy prices peak. Buy energy when you need to. That kind of is the game now. If you think about the insane amounts of batteries that are going to be produced in the next few decades to power ships, trucks, planes, cars, grid batteries, domestic batteries, etc. it becomes clear that managing the charge state of these batteries is an enormous opportunity. When do you charge? Can you sell energy back to the grid when its scarce? We are talking many twh of batteries produced per year accumulating to a sizable percentage of the world's energy production (around 25000 twh). Each of those batteries can be cycled thousands of times. It starts adding up. A few decades from now, we'll have tens to hundreds of twh of battery out there. Most of them at a high percentage of charge most of the time, mostly plugged in and ready to charge/discharge in milliseconds. That's a lot of energy just sitting there. Even a small percentage of that is a huge amount of power.
rstupek 3y ago
There's also the Span panel which can control everything in the house

bruce511 3y ago

To some extent there are sufficient humans who care about money to "control the loads". All you need is variable pricing, real-time load measure, and a phone app. Also, I expect that night rates will end up being higher than day rates (if not already). Which is opposite to historical trends.

applied_heat 3y ago
The difference in the cost also needs to be enough for people to care. If it costs 25 cents more to get the laundry done now instead of later in a world where a head of lettuce is $4 I am just going to do the laundry when it is convenient for me. The major loads such as heating and cooling people Also want them immediately and not later.

mcbishop 3y ago

Jigar Shah, quoted in the article, once said: > Load flexibility is the giant issue nobody is talking about.

7thaccount 3y ago
Interesting quote as it is the giant issue that practically everybody in the industry has been talking about since the beginning of the wholesale electricity markets. Economics 101 assumes some demand elasticity, but the wholesale markets are generally fully inelastic (maybe a tiny percentage point of that is elastic in many regions, while it's finally growing in others). These markets have to use administrative solutions to approximate the value to demand as they don't have a true aggregate demand curve built out of thousands of customers that are fully responsive to price. We're retiring our thermal fleet at a rapid pace and load curtailment will be the only option on a fully renewable grid once the renewables drop in output and the storage runs out. We are making strides in that direction. Maybe when he says "nobody" he's referring to the general public? I know this is an extremely common topic at the utility, ISO, FERC, academic, and so on level. As the comment points out, flexibility in demand allows for all kinds of neat tricks like pre-heating things when prices are cheap and supply is plentiful. The grid is so cool.
- mcbishop 3y ago
  "Thermal fleet" ...I like that term. I think Jigar was referring specifically to behind-the-meter flexible-load control. Yes, pre-heating (and pre-cooling) turns the building and the hot-water tank into thermal energy storage (with no occupant impact, if done right).
  - 7thaccount 3y ago
    Yep. We use it to generally mean coal and natural gas although I suppose anything that deals with steam falls into that category like oil and even nuke. The thermal is retiring crazy fast. NERC is very alarmed and there have been many Senate and FERC hearings on this lately. Once it's gone, it's not easy to get setup again. A lot of plant maintenance lives in the skills of the workers, so once they've relocated it can be difficult to restart. I agree with the goals of a transition, but it needs to be managed carefully and orderly so we don't drastically increase our amounts of blackouts. At the same time, we'll need to make greater strides with flexible loads of course.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

Exactly. Basically the energy market is changing very rapidly. One thing that is enabled by renewables and batteries is selling energy in much smaller units. It used to be that large energy companies would buy/sell energy at a price that was fixed for some amount of time like half an hour or even more. If you fire up a gas turbine, it's basically going to be producing until you shut it down. There's no point in trading in small chunks. However, with renewables, the length of those time slots has come down. So, instead of hours you can now buy energy in chunks of minutes at the same price. Eventually that comes down to seconds or even fractions of a second. All controlled by algorithms. So, you get energy companies that are able to adapt very rapidly to peaks and dips in energy production and demand. And that in turn incentivizes large consumers of energy to invest in batteries. Top them up when energy is cheap, sell off energy when it is expensive and electricity companies are buying. Use solar panels to get some free energy when it's available. Store any excess, and sell it when energy prices peak. Buy energy when you need to. That kind of is the game now. If you think about the insane amounts of batteries that are going to be produced in the next few decades to power ships, trucks, planes, cars, grid batteries, domestic batteries, etc. it becomes clear that managing the charge state of these batteries is an enormous opportunity. When do you charge? Can you sell energy back to the grid when its scarce? We are talking many twh of batteries produced per year accumulating to a sizable percentage of the world's energy production (around 25000 twh). Each of those batteries can be cycled thousands of times. It starts adding up. A few decades from now, we'll have tens to hundreds of twh of battery out there. Most of them at a high percentage of charge most of the time, mostly plugged in and ready to charge/discharge in milliseconds. That's a lot of energy just sitting there. Even a small percentage of that is a huge amount of power.

rstupek 3y ago

There's also the Span panel which can control everything in the house