5 ms·
Is there any workload that can be deferred at will, without harming businesses or people?
by toenail 2y ago
Is there any workload that can be deferred at will, without harming businesses or people?
- bastawhiz 2y agoIt depends on what you mean by "harming". But to answer your question, yeah, most of them. I've been preparing my home to switch to time of use energy pricing, where power is less expensive at night when there's lower demand. It's pretty painless to put things on timers or set schedules in configuration. The trivial cost of setting this up will pay for itself within about two months. Deferring workloads for when it's sunny is almost the exact opposite: using more power during the day rather than at night. That's probably better for most consumers, since people tend to use more power when they're awake by default.
- bee_rider 2y agoWe can definitely defer our air conditioners for times when it is sunny, haha.
- bastawhiz 2y agoThat's one thing that's maybe an inconvenience for me now! I'll have to run my heat pumps in the early morning to lower (or raise) the temperature of the house before the cost of power goes up. Though maybe also more efficient in the summer, since I suspect it's less energy intensive to cool the house when it's cooler outside.
- megaman821 2y agoBitcoin mining can, with little notice and any time of day. Solar is pretty predictable and there are a lot of workloads that can follow solar output. Vehicle charging, water heating, water chilling/freezing, and industrial heat batteries. Depending on the capital cost of the plant, desalination and hydrogen splitting make sense too.
- bee_rider 2y agoI don’t like Bitcoins, they seem like a ridiculous way of burning extra electricity. That said, because they can consume energy on tap, they do seem like a funny way of providing a return on extra renewable energy, promoting the over-building of renewables, which would mean that we have to turn on the wasteful peaking generators less often. Have to give them credit here.
- otherme123 2y agoFor example water heating can be done and stored for 12 hours. In some houses, this is the main energy consumption for a family. The night hours are tipically cheaper due to low demand, so water heaters are programmed to work at night. But if solar panels are the energy source, you can move the heating to the middle of the day. Same goes to electric cars, but in that case there are batteries storing, so I'm not sure it counts.
- bee_rider 2y agoWhat do you mean by harm? Appliances could be made smarter—think fridges, water heaters, pool pumps, air conditioners, dishwashers—the grid just needs to communicate price info, and the electricity needs to be priced in line with production capacity. It would be extremely easy but there’s no incentive to do it. I mean, flip it around. Those of us who can plan ahead are being harmed by the fact that we’re paying for a system that caters to those who can’t.
- pfdietz 2y agoHeating and/or cooling can be shifted by hours, depending on the thermal time constant of the building. The better the insulation, the longer it can be shifted. Texas had a problem because so many older buildings there are very poorly insulated. Thermal energy in general is very cheap to store. This is also true industrially, where thermal storage has long been used for regenerative recovery of waste heat, for example in various places in steelmaking. Thermal storage of heat derived from electrical power is now being proposed as a way to soak up zero or negative price electricity. There's a company based on work at MIT that's doing this, using moderately electrically conductive refractory ceramic bricks as combined storage and heating elements.