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> the organization managing the national French power grid (Enedis) has been in the process of replacing the legacy “dumb” electricity meters by “smart” meters,

• 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  > Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Kinda antithetical to use more electricity to save but it’s true. It makes sense if you think of the thermal mass as a battery. Technology connections says he does that with his air conditioner, runs it hard overnight so it stays cold longer with less effort during the day
  • bcrosby95 2y ago
    It being cold also tends to help with better sleep. We set our AC to 76 during most of the day, 80 during on-peak pricing, and 72 overnight.
  • marcosdumay 2y ago
    > runs it hard overnight so it stays cold longer with less effort during the day Shouldn't it be the other way around? The days when electricity was cheaper at night are long gone.
    • formerly_proven 2y ago
      Heat pumps are more efficient the smaller the temperature gradient is.
      • bronson 2y ago
        Heat pumps use less energy when there's a small temperature gradient (assuming a good turndown ratio, cheap ones aren't so good), but they're more efficient when there's a large gradient. That's why they require careful modeling before being used for hydronic heating.
      • j45 2y ago
        Heat pumps are improving to work in wider temperature ranges.
    • rootusrootus 2y ago
      > The days when electricity was cheaper at night are long gone. That must be a regional thing. In the PNW, my power rate during most of the day is twice what it is at night, and during the evening peak it doubles again.
      • lotsofpulp 2y ago
        Also in PNW, and the price for my electricity does not change during a day.
    • Scoundreller 2y ago
      It’s still the case in Canada because our peak electricity usage is driven by summer daytime aircon and solar is a small percentage of generation. Heating is still primarily fossil fuel, for now. Night time loads are generally low with big baseload hydro and nuclear generation in the more populated states/provinces.
  • snthd 2y ago
    https://fridge0.branchable.com/thermal_mass/ https://fridge0.branchable.com/thermal_mass/
• goda90 2y ago
  Changing the temperature of a fridge based on electricity rates just feels like a bad idea. A lot of food can have its texture ruined by slow freezing (a common occurrence at the back of many fridges already) and waiting to get food down to the target temperature will just lead to bacterial growth.
  • minitoar 2y ago
    Most freezers already do a defrost cycle so could probably play with that. It’s only a few degrees oscillation so idk how much savings you could get there.
    • rootusrootus 2y ago
      A modern fridge only consumes around 350kW a year or so, so any savings are going to be modest. It would not be the first target if I wanted to cut my power usage, especially if the consequence was going to be more freezer burn.
      • minitoar 2y ago
        I think the consequence would be less freezer burn and more frost buildup.
  • Scoundreller 2y ago
    Seems like having an ultra-chill button for that function would help with that. Might want some phase-change materials to optimize the thermal banking. That’s easier for a freezer (very salty water bottles) than a fridge (need some carefully produced waxes), but fridge contents should be more tolerant of temperature variability. Would add that refrigeration is more efficient at night when ambient temperatures are generally cooler and/or heating needs are greater, so the “ultra-chill overnight and daytime backoff” might not increase consumption.
    • konfusinomicon 2y ago
      the fast chill button is a thing. it's in both my 8yr old GE and my newer samsung..I never use it though but it's made for putting still warm leftovers in and getting them cold fast
• saagarjha 2y ago
  My fridge (some LG models supposedly does this. I say “supposedly” because this requires connecting to Wi-Fi, which I don’t want to do, but in their the energy company sends it signals about how the grid is doing and the fridge goes into energy saver when appropriate.
  • tills13 2y ago
    A nice little vlan with only internet access would let you connect your fridge to your WiFi without worry. Most WiFi + router combos come with a Guest vlan which already does this out of the box.
  • konfusinomicon 2y ago
    hesitant to wifi connect my fridge too but my elec provider offers a decent discount for setting it up.
    • Scoundreller 2y ago
      Links? Didn’t think that was a thing for fridges, just hvac/water heaters.
      • konfusinomicon 2y ago
        ahh you are correct, I was conflating 2 things..however it's called a smart grid fridge and it pulls dynamic pricing from the elec provider and does the optimization on its own
• martinald 2y ago
  The real long term idea with smart metering isn't so much demand savings (though I think it was billed as that; and I agree the results are very underwhelming from everything I've seen), it's to start allowing dynamic energy tariffs and getting people incentivized to move load to cheaper times. We have some of them in the UK and you can see the price differences quite clearly: https://agileprices.co.uk/ https://agileprices.co.uk/ I think the idea of having one (or maybe a crude day/night) tariff is really antiquated now when wholesale prices swing so much because of renewables. We are getting to a place where electricity is going to be free/negative a lot of the time and very much more expensive for other time slots. However, I don't know how much consumers can do about this apart from buying batteries (which is a good thing). I don't think many people will start eating their dinner 3 hours earlier or later or do washing in the middle of the night to save a few dollars here and there. I suppose AC/heating would use enough that it would be worth turning it down at certain times of day. Really where all the money to be made here is being able to get cheap industrial processes that consumer a load of electricity that can be switched on and off, so only working 25% of the time. This is hard though because there is a lot of capex (and opex) to having equipment and people sitting around doing nothing when the price is too high. But I think the energy savings will be so great there will be something that comes along for this - potentially hydrogen electrolysis.
  • Scoundreller 2y ago
    > it's to start allowing dynamic energy tariffs and getting people incentivized to move load to cheaper times. That’s what they rolled out with them, but insufficient change to habits. > I suppose AC/heating would use enough that it would be worth turning it down at certain times of day. This is generally the big win, and why they’ve had to still create a program to subsidize smart thermostats and payments to enable the back off features. Mass installing smart meters to incentivize the public at large to buy+install smarter thermostats is a less effective and more expensive strategy than giving the thermostats away and writing users a guaranteed cheque in exchange for remotely controlling it. (There are other dynamics at play: electricity here is generally cheap and I pay more in fixed charges than consumption and the heating side is almost universally fossil fuel/wood but that’s achangin)
• marcosdumay 2y ago
  > Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Yeah... That requires a standard way to communicate the energy price to the fridge. You won't get that with municipal regulation. And without devices auto-adjusting their behavior, you won't get a lot of savings.
  • rootusrootus 2y ago
    It could just be telling it what your time-of-use rates and hours are. I think most places with variable rates at this point are on a schedule that does not often change, only a few places have completely dynamic pricing that would need real time information from the grid operator.
  • Scoundreller 2y ago
    Generally Time of Day electricity billing is just an average costing at fixed windows of time. 2-way (or really, just 1-way is actually necessary) comms not required. Not too common to have totally dynamic pricing. And even if you did, they have general trends.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Your fridge doesn't need to know energy prices. Fridges are for cooling, not computing your bills, and giving them access to too much data only encourages the usual IoT vendor abuse patterns. It should be enough for it to get a proxy signal. "Cheap tariff" / "expensive tariff". Or maybe continuous 0-1 control signal. Optimizing energy use for household or building already requires an external decision-making center anyway.
    • bronson 2y ago
      But it does need a warning. If the two wire suddenly tells it "expensive tariff," that's too late to cool down a little.
• szundi 2y ago
  Just buy a bit bigger one, and fill the unused space with water. Every open now exchanges less air and you can turn it off for hours or a day without any impact of the temperature inside - water is good capacitor of temperature.
  • deeth_starr_v 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • petre 2y ago
    We fill it up with food that otherwise doesn't need to be refrigerated but they keep better at low temperatures, like fruit jams, unopened cans or olive oil. One could fill it with kimchi, beer or bottled water though.
• infecto 2y ago
  > Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Kinda antithetical to use more electricity to save but it’s true. I don't believe there would be many if any cost savings from doing this. The engineering thought behind it would cost more than the actual savings. It would make a lot more sense to buy a chest fridge which I imagine uses half or less the energy of a typical standing fridge.
  • xnx 2y ago
    The only estimates I've seen say 10-25 percent more efficient.
    • infecto 2y ago
      Department of Energy / EnergyStar state 50% energy savings for freezers. Freezer/fridge might not translate perfectly but I imagine a fridge is getting opened more often during the day which would skew that even more towards the chest being more efficient. Not sure how you come to 10%
      • xnx 2y ago
        Wow. That is a surprising number: "An ENERGY STAR certified chest freezer uses about 215 kWh of electricity and costs about $30 per year to run, while an ENERGY STAR certified upright freezer uses about 395 kWh of electricity and costs about $60 per year to run." https://www.energystar.gov/products/freezers https://www.energystar.gov/products/freezers
        • bcrosby95 2y ago
          So save $30/year increase the price of repairs and the chance of it breaking.
          • infecto 2y ago
            How does a chest freezer/fridge have increased chances of repairs?
• rr808 2y ago
  My house moved to smart meters over a year ago. Still get the one total usage amount per month. Even if I log in online there is no way to see what I use even per day. I do think we need to have a price that changes during the day but I suspect most people wont tolerate it and the politicians wont allow it.
  • Symbiote 2y ago
    In Denmark, I can see my hour-by-hour usage if I log in online. There's also a chart showing the prices: https://andelenergi.dk/el/timepris/ https://andelenergi.dk/el/timepris/ and apps and so on.
    • rr808 2y ago
      Yeah my Dad has this too. I expected similar. Lots of rules in the USA makes it difficult to do anything different.
• happosai 2y ago
  In Finland people have started since 2022 adapting their electricity use to shift their peak demand. But we started installing smart meters almost 20 years ago. I think the key reason to install them was less about consumer demand response, and more about saving physical visits to read the meters. It takes some time to adapt (and also some quite extreme price fluctuation to motivate). Also good tools to automate demand response based on market prices were needed. Heat-pumps and EV chargers can now be configured to run on the cheapest hours etc.
  • Maxion 2y ago
    One quite unique thing in Finland is our spot electricty price. I think Sweden and Norway also has this? Basically consumers in these countries have access to the raw eletricity market, and can buy power in one hour increments at the market rate. This can be very beneficial for the consumer if you can adjust your consumption profile
    • robin_reala 2y ago
      Yep, I have this with Tibber[1] in Sweden. We haven’t hugely changed how we consume electricity for small stuff, but for bigger things like car charging or even things like pyrolytic cleaning of the oven it’s easy to pick times when the prices are low, especially at the moment when electricity often goes down to near-zero or even negative. [1] https://tibber.com/en https://tibber.com/en
    • gregoryl 2y ago
      Also available in Australia, https://www.amber.com.au https://www.amber.com.au
    • matsemann 2y ago
      Yup, and in Norway where 90% of new cars are electric and about 50 % of personal vehicles on the road now are electric, we're charging them a lot. Which most people now schedule to happen at nighttime to save money.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
• kkarakk 2y ago
  >Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Kinda antithetical to use more electricity to save but it’s true. you put a backup battery system in between your house and the power grid, switch power hungry appliances to battery during peak times. over a long enough period this should achieve what you're looking for and is the most likely solution to "force" people off the grid at peak times. it's just that right now where like you said - why bother when all you're saving is a couple hundred bucks? spending that mental energy on things that will earn you money is better.
• eldaisfish 2y ago
  Smart meters achieve lots of goals. The most marketable was time-of-use electricity pricing. My distribution company in Ontario makes it very clear when those times are and what the electricity prices are. On-peak is approx CAD 0.18 / kwh and off-peak is CAD 0.11 /kWh. That's over 50% difference. The problem in Ontario, QC, MB and BC is that electricity is cheap, relative to our standard of living. The incentive to be more efficient is weak because the savings are not worth the effort. The other reasons smart meters were installed is to speed up the meter reading process and to gather data on when exactly people are using electricity. The electricity distribution system is passive and the grid operator has little to no visibility on what is happening at various places and times. Smart meters are the foundational tech to enable a bunch of other initiatives and planning. Hydro-Québec, for example, allow you to see your live power draw. My meter (2011 model) can do this but my electricity distributor will not share the decryption key. Those meters may not do much to change electricity consumption habits but they are far from a loss. The investment is absolutely worth it.
  • mardifoufs 2y ago
    Wdym, electricity distributor? I thought hydro Québec handles 100% of the distribution too. Is this something new?
    • eldaisfish 2y ago
      Hydro-Québec is vertically integrated. I'm in Ontario where the situation is different. We have a quasi-deregulated market with local electricity distribution companies aka LDCs.
      • mardifoufs 2y ago
        Ahh makes sense! Is HQ a player in the Ontario market? A part from electricity export that is.
• shagie 2y ago
  > Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Kinda antithetical to use more electricity to save but it’s true. https://home.howstuffworks.com/green-living/ice-block-ac.htm https://home.howstuffworks.com/green-living/ice-block-ac.htm A company called Ice Energy manufactures the Ice Bear, a unit designed to work alongside a traditional air conditioner. Like the large system used by Credit Suisse, the Ice Bear is designed to run indoors and at night, when temperatures and energy costs are lower. Ice Bear creates a block of ice at night that cools the refrigerant during the day, rather than running the refrigerant through a condenser (at peak hours) that requires a lot of energy. Underneath the Jordan Quad Parking Lot at Stanford University, 360 miles of piping run through a four-million-gallon tank of water. At night, subzero ammonia -- a common refrigerant -- runs through the pipes, freezing the water into giant blocks of ice. The system, which is one of the largest of its kind in the United States, sends cold water from the melting ice throughout Stanford's campus, cooling buildings from noon to 6 p.m. When the facility was first built in the mid-1970s, it skipped the ice stage, instead directly cooling water that was piped through campus. A $22 million renovation -- completed in 1999 -- converted it to its present form, which saves the university a reported $500,000 a year on energy bills.
  • adrianN 2y ago
    More than forty years to amortize the renovation. Ouch.
    • asah 2y ago
      At any interest rate above 2.2%, they NEVER amortize the renovation!
      • the_sleaze_ 2y ago
        Only if their energy cost never increases and the figure is resistant to inflation - 500k in 1999 is now equal to $942,584.03. There's also something to be said for the carbon emissions and the fact that we can point to frozen water being a viable system.
• giantg2 2y ago
  In my mind, the smart grid would be most useful for distributed storage. Like if your car charger has a battery pack in it to quick charge your car. Or just a battery that could charge on off-hours to lessen peak load.
• bee_rider 2y ago
  There aren’t a ton of smart appliances because there aren’t a ton of smart grids. We need smart grids with, like, really significant demand based pricing before people are going to care about smart appliances. And of course there’s no reason to get smart appliances if you don’t have that kind of grid. Somebody has to go first. In the bright side it really is unambiguous whose job it is. Utility providers are often government subsidized or at least heavily regulated government-provided monopolies. They have the responsibility to act in the public good, and provide strong enough incentives to get people to come along with them.
  • vineyardmike 2y ago
    We’re close to this. California, which is not the world but is a major market, has pretty transparent grids with variable pricing. I don’t know if they’re “first” but they’re a big enough market to drive change. Electric Cars use a ton of electricity and have these sorts of features for a while now. Apple even built grid pricing info into their latest “Home” app for California users. I think there aren’t smart appliances because there is no demand for people to change their behavior. No one is going to put off cooking dinner for cheaper oven use. We see it with cars and smart thermostats because it’s largely set-and-forget with people.
    • bee_rider 2y ago
      We should slowly expand what “set and forget” means. Dishwashers and clothing washers for example, we could modify our behavior a little bit without any major inconvenience (load it up, put in the soap, and then let it schedule itself, you’ll get a notification when it runs). Ovens and stoves are, I think, an unusually bad case. Although, slow cooking should be shiftable, right? Maybe we’ll have to eat slow cooked ribs instead of hamburgers. You know, to save the planet or whatever.
      • CoffeeOnWrite 2y ago
        Or cooking with gas instead?
• bryanlarsen 2y ago
  Don't blame it on the smart meters, blame it on the governments that refuse to structure the plans to take advantage of it. I figured it would be a no brainer to switch to the time of use plan because we have an electric car we charge at night, but no, the standard non time of use plan is cheaper for us.
• lupusreal 2y ago
  > Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Kinda antithetical to use more electricity to save but it’s true. Maybe just use a freezer and put it on an old school outlet timer? Run it at night and treat it like an ice box during the day.
  • Marsymars 2y ago
    I think it would be too well insulated to function very well in a fully automated way; you'd have to manually open the door every morning.
• margalabargala 2y ago
  > found that people didn’t really shift their peak demand use much and it’s debatable if the amount spent was worth it. This depends on whether the goal was to reduce the amount of peak usage, or increase the amount of revenue that comes from peak usage. Putting smart meters in probably paid for itself via higher income.
• pcl 2y ago
  > wall warts are all SMPS now TIL about switched-mode power supplies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switched-mode_power_supply
• djao 2y ago
  I'm in Ontario. 90% of my electricity usage consists of charging my electric car. The ultra-low overnight rate of 2.8 cents per kWh, introduced during the past year, is a big win for EV owners. This rate is seven times cheaper than the cheapest rate mentioned in the article, and ten times cheaper than the peak rate in Ontario. It is very, very easy to schedule your car to charge during overnight hours if you have a home with a garage. You better believe that smart pricing has shifted when I charge my car! I think this kind of benefit will become more pronounced as more people shift to electric vehicles. People won't shift demand for small appliances, but when 90% of your usage is made up of one single thing that is easy to shift, you'll get some returns.
  • j45 2y ago
    Interesting. I sense night time use could extend well to charging an array of batteries until Solar is fully up and provide some options.
  • eldaisfish 2y ago
    there are some big assumptions here. that you own a garage, that your electric bill is in your name, that your driving distance makes this worth it, that your other electric consumption is small and so on. It works for you, that's great but something you didn't mention is the higher on-peak rate. If you have electric heating or need to charge your EV during the day, the increased rate there can easily offset your overnight rate savings.
    • djao 2y ago
      These assumptions are not at all unreasonable. We are not talking about a tiny minority. More than half of Americans have a garage. Utilities aren't concerned about individual households; they're concerned about average behavior. I'm just guessing here, but my guess is that if even (say) 20% of households do what I do, that alone probably makes it worth it. I drive about 15000 km per year, almost exactly the Canadian average. There are a lot of potential households fitting this profile. (If you're needing to charge your EV during the day, then the higher daytime home electricity rate is irrelevant. My EV has a 300 mile range, which is typical. I cannot think of any scenario where I simultaneously 1) drive 300 miles in a single day, and 2) somehow also remain close enough to home to charge at home, so that the daytime home electricity rate matters, and 3) can't wait until the night to charge.)
• Beretta_Vexee 2y ago
  The savings made on meter readings, the reduction in meter breakdowns, the detection of illegal connections and other factors alone justify the renewal of electricity meters. The linky meter can also be remotely controlled to reduce the maximum power delivery for bad debtors (it's very rare in France for electricity to be completely cut off).
• OptionOfT 2y ago
  I have a GE fridge and I have a time of use plan. Except the times are wrong. And I cannot adjust them through their app.
• cogman10 2y ago
  > Still can’t find a “smart fridge” that runs in ultra-chill mode when rates are cheap and backs off when they’re high. Kinda antithetical to use more electricity to save but it’s true. If you are a bit technical, you could convert your fridge into a smart fridge that does exactly that. Throw a temp sensor into the fridge, set the fridge temp to as cold as it will go, then plug your fridge into a smart plug. From there, you can monitor the interior temp and turn on the fridge based on when you want to super chill. Dead simple to do something like this with home assistant.
• tlavoie 2y ago
  I'm in BC, with BC Hydro. The smart meter means that everyone can see their own daily usage and trends. I'm sure most won't look, though I do. What I found more useful is the paired device from Rainforest Automation, e.g. https://www.rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z114-eagle-200-2/ https://www.rainforestautomation.com/rfa-z114-eagle-200-2/. I had to buy this, but it's paired to my specific meter. Basically it gives me a means to see my overall usage in real time, so that I know how whatever we are doing, affects the usage. BC Hydro has had programs such as a voluntary one, where you get an email about a 3-hour period the next day. They'd like you to drop your usage for that period by 20%, and you get a few dollars per successful drop at the end of the season. With our heat pump for heat, we just switch it off for that time, and skip using the clothes dryer then. At the end of the season, we got maybe $50 off our bill in credits. They have proposed a time-based plan, with discounts for night-time. I have not elected to try that out, because it also came with penalties for daytime usage.